The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

Matt Taibbi – 2008

“The rhetoric of both political parties is mostly a fraud, and the true business of both is to hand out favors in the form of policies and contracts to their campaign contributors, who happen to be substantially the same people on both sides.  They’ve been able to get away with this largely because the public is so overwhelmingly focused on the daily exchange of insults tossed back and forth on television; sold to us in the hope that we’ll be mesmerized long enough to ignore what actually goes on in Washington.”

  

Hunter S. Thompson may not have an heir in this generation, nor need one, but if he does, I don’t know who it would be if not Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who has mastered Thompson’s combination of vitriol and despondency at the gleeful ignorance of American citizens about their nation’s failure to live up to its own ideals.  Like Thompson, Taibbi gravitates between the worlds of sports and politics, but whereas Thompson would drunkenly pay attention to only the details that interested him, Taibbi does his homework with an obsessive conscientiousness, eternally prepared for any challenge to his arguments and citations.  The Great Derangement takes place at the beginning of the decline of the Bush era in the United States; in the wake of the Democrat’s recovery of Congress in 2006 on the strength of strong anti-war sentiment among voters.  The book alternates between Taibbi’s experiences in two arenas; the national political landscape and fundamentalist religion in the South.  Undercover, he infiltrates John Hagee’s Cornerstone megachurch in Texas, focusing not on its hierarchy or finances but on the front lines with the membership, starting with a weekend retreat and moving on to seminars, cell group meetings, proselyting and finally baptism.  Interspersed with that story are isolated observations based on Taibbi’s research in Washington about how Congress actually works, how bills are passed, and how a well-oiled process of obfuscation keeps the American people from ever getting what they need while career politicians work tirelessly to please their corporate masters.  Time is also spent with the antiwar and 9/11-Truth movements, portrayed by Taibbi as the Christian fundamentalists’ equally hysterical counterparts on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.  The theme that links the groups is a willful refusal to deal with reality.  As the Christians blame everything bad in the country on gays, communists and Satan himself, the directionless leftist activists happily indulge any conspiracy about murderous government agencies and plots that would strain credibility even in a Hollywood movie.  It is Taibbi’s theory that things have gotten this extreme because the scam of lazy mainstream politics has become too transparent, and people are rebelling (with good cause), but have been so conditioned to distrust anything and everything that they can only hole up in tiny groups or alone on the internet to express how helpless they feel.  The roots of the Ron Paul, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns, the Occupy movement and the Tea Party are all here; impulsive eruptions of outrage over the realization on voters’ parts that no matter who wins elections, things rarely seem to improve.  If the two major parties and their media spokespeople can keep us squabbling over abortions and immigrants, we won’t notice the real conspiracies that play out in the halls of power; the mission of elected officials to do what they have been sent there to do by the people with the most money.  Ideology doesn’t matter.  The entities who can afford it will schmooze Democrats and Republicans alike, who make decisions in closed-door committees late at night after the tourists have been dismissed from the Congressional observatory.  Taibbi laments all of this, of course, and while he attempts to interpret voter disaffection as a hopeful sign for the future, it doesn’t entirely ring true.  I felt that deep down he knows, as we do, that Americans aren’t likely to figure out how to change the political state of affairs any time soon.  And sure enough, ten years later, things are stranger than ever.