Free The Jerusalem Syndrome by Marc Maron Page A

knowingly.
    “You might have pushed yourself out too far this time. Are you on something, or are you nuts, Marc?” Jim said. I scream-whispered.
    “Bush is a Freemason! That’s why Dukakis didn’t win. He’s not in on it! You should know that. It all funnels through Washington, Jim! The atomic bomb, the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination, the CIA, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra, have shattered the people’s belief in any truth when it comes to their part in the political process. That’s part of the grand plan: All truth becomes manifest when there’s nothing anyone can do about it. How clear does it have to be?” I yelled. “This city is the momentum’s mystical switchboard for the hundred-year period of darkness, and I think you’ve seen the controls. Have you? Own it, man. Tell me I’m lying.”
    I’m out of breath. I’m not even sure what I’ve just said. People are staring. Jim just looks at me and says, “Marc, listen to me. People here just aren’t that organized.”
    There was a moment of stillness, entropy. I had been hit with an arrow of truth that I just couldn’t deny. I took in what he said. “They aren’t?” I asked, unsure.
    “No, of course not. The system works. It’s the best government on the planet. There are some bad people, but it just isn’t one big evil plan. Democracy doesn’t allow the bad people to hang around too long. They are found out and brought down by the Senate, by the Congress, by the people. Sorry, Marc.” Jim patted me on the back.
    Of course, he was right. How could they possibly be that organized? It was a ridiculous idea. I felt like I had been shaken awake from a dream. It deflated my entire cosmology. My all-encompassing, spiritual, mystical, symbolic system of evil was laid to wreckage in the rotunda of the Capitol. I didn’t really know anything. I had nothing. I was lost. I was in exile. It was sad. Who was I? What channel was I on? I said good-bye to Jim and I slouched back to Boston to be reborn.

9
    T HE momentum had pummeled me. I was caught in the undertow. When I got back to Boston, I took all the diagrams off the wall and gave my books to a guy down the hall who I didn’t like. Then I sat in my blue room and smoked cigarettes for two years. That’s really all I did. Smoked, did comedy, and waited for some kind of sign. I had gotten off the path somehow. I was out of the mystical groove. The doors had all slammed shut.
    I started to realize that my relationship with God was tenuous at best, but my relationship with the Philip Morris company and Marlboro cigarettes was very deep, had been for years. I started to believe that was really the core of my spirituality, American spirituality,
brand loyalty.
It requires an almost religious faith. You don’t realize how strong that faith is or how deep it runs until it is tested.
    My faith was tested in a convoluted way. I woke up one morning, coughed my guts out, and screamed, “What am I, an idiot?” and decided that I had to quit smoking. I believed that the only way I could quit smoking would be to go to the Philip Morris plant in Richmond, Virginia, where I would stand before the corporate machinery that went into giving me cancer. I would be moved to horror and shout in a powerful, condemning way, “This is evil! This is bad! I’m done with it.” There was even the outside chance, given my power at that time, that I would actually stop the machinery with my will and lead the workers out of the factory.
    I called my friend Jim, who I hadn’t spoken to since the Washington episode the year before and said, “Jimmy, it’s Marc. I need to quit smoking. We need to go to Virginia now.”
    Jim said, “Alright, man, swing by.” He was in Boston at that time.
    We got on the road and drove nine hours, straight from Boston to Richmond. We pulled into the parking lot of the Philip Morris plant and I have to be honest with you, it’s a beautiful building. I mean really nice.
    We walked into