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

by Matt Taibbi

  It turns out that we’ve been split up and atomized for so long that real grassroots politics isn’t really possible; we don’t respond to problems as communities but as demographics. In the same way that we shop for cars and choose television programs, we pick our means of political protest. We scan the media landscape for the thing that appeals to us and we buy into it. That it is the same media landscape these new dissidents often reject as a false and misleading tableau dominated by corrupt interests turns out not to be problematic for many. In some cases, like that of those Christians I spent time with in San Antonio, the trusted new figure, a preacher named John Hagee, turns out to be every bit the establishment Washington insider these would-be religious revolutionaries think they’re fleeing from. In other cases, like that of the 9/11 Truthers, the radical canonical revolutionary tracts end up including thoroughly commerical mainstream entertainments like V for Vendetta and The Matrix (at different times I would hear both radical conservatives and liberals describe their political awakenings using the phrase “taking the red pill”).

  In short, what sounds on the surface like radical politics turns out to be just another fracturing of the media picture, one that ultimately will result in new groups of captive audiences that, if experience is any guide, will ultimately be assimilated and electorally coddled by a political mainstream in reality bent on ignoring both sides. For now, however, the situation going into the 2008 election looks something like this: we have a population more disgusted than ever with our political system, one inclined to distrust the result no matter who wins the White House—and should the national election end up being a contest between a pair of full-of-shit establishment conservatives like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, it will only confirm the worst fears of both sides and result in an even further bonkerization of the population.

  Gone will be the good old days of neat blue-state/red-state hatred—a nicely symmetrical storyline that has always appealed to the Crossfire/ American Gladiators sports-coverage mentality of the commercial media. In its place, at least temporarily, will be a chaos of lunatic enthusiasms and dead-end political movements to nowhere, with calls for invasions of Babylon and, on the other side, congressional investigations into nonexistent conspiracies. Meanwhile, Boeing, General Motors, and Ford will officially become Chinese companies, and OPEC will begin trading in the euro after American garrisons in Baghdad and Kabul fall to invaders armed with nineteenth-century weapons.

  That’s one possible future, anyway, suggested by the lunatic present. Of course, the thing about America is that you never know. We have a history of rising to the occasion, but the theory of this book is that history eventually stops repeating itself, and what better time for that to happen than after a massive, nationally televised attack that most of an entire country apparently missed the point of? When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes; real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible.

  The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and has instead turned into a problem of information. Are the right messages reaching our collective brain? Are the halves of that brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? It’s a hell of a problem for a nuclear power.

  THERE IS ONE SCENE in this book that is a little different from all the rest. One morning in Baghdad, a group of earnest, positive, patriotic young soldiers prepares for a day at work. Enjoying the presence of a reporter, they put on a cheerful, Up with People–esque show for the cameras, with each grunt wittily introducing himself, giving his nickname and characterizing his place in the group. There’s a scene like this in every American war movie, in fact every group-adventure-type film: one by one you meet the gritty crew of Ripley’s ship in Alien, or the disparate teenage cast of the latest Friday the 13th film: where one’s the tough guy, another’s the clown, a third is the brooding dissident. “I’m the token African guy,” says Jaleel Ibrahim, a black kid from New York, in his turn in front of the mic. “And I’m Sergeant Russell,” says the next soldier. “I am soft-spoken and wholesome, but also offended easily.”

  They’re good kids, all of them, despite the self-conscious act. You see, this part, the part where they talk to the war reporter, they have a frame of reference for that. They understand it, they know what it’s all about. So they’re comfortable and funny in front of the camera, and they even find a way to be civil and friendly to the antiwar reporter, who despite it all is also a character they know.

  But a few hours later we’re visiting a police station in an unfriendly section of Baghdad, and somewhere nearby there’s a huge explosion. None of the Iraqi police are going out to investigate, they’re too scared. And these kids, who are supposed to be there directing the Iraqis, are sitting there in the station, with bombs going off nearby, and small-arms fire too, and they have no idea what the fuck is going on. They don’t know why they’re there and they don’t know who it is who’s blowing shit up a hundred yards away. They know what they know, and they don’t know what they don’t know, and what they don’t know is turning out to be the important thing.

  That moment to me is what this book is about. Inside the bubble we’re fine, we make sense. It’s what’s outside the bubble that we have trouble with.

  I would have liked to have gotten more of that, found some better and more forceful ways of describing the amazing weirdness of our almost totally insular existence. But for much of this book I end up playing a traditional and much-loathed role, that of the establishment media spy sent on assignment to denigrate and laugh at the cultural fringes. I was bothered by that problem throughout the project and have no real answer for anyone who wants to throw that charge my way. The only thing I can think to say is that by the end I was no longer sure that what I was dealing with were really fringe movements. The 9/11 Truth Movement in particular I first thought was a small, scattered group of nutcases, but by the end I realized they really were, just as they claim to be, almost everyone you meet. And in Texas, when I hit the pavement to find converts for my crazy church, I expected to be laughed at—but instead found myself embraced and eagerly listened to by almost everybody I approached, an experience I had never had as my actual, secular self.

  And that was really the point of one of the last scenes in the book, the one where I crank-call my old church from the safety of my real home, the depraved universe of empty-hearted media creatures, in this case the NFL draft in New York. For as crazy as some of the people in these movements are, they at least believe in something, they have some kind of instinct or urge toward truth or justice or something. For the really sad part is that nobody from my neighborhood is offering them shit, apart from a depressing selection of greed fantasies and a kind of slick, smug nihilism with which to pass the time. On that particular day part of me actually missed being in Texas, but the scene eventually finds me back where I started, a bloated smart-ass covered in cookie crumbs enjoying a modern-day slave auction via the one concrete perk of his professional existence, good seats.

  If there’s a villain in the book, I might offer some of the congressional representatives in the Washington chapters, or John Hagee maybe, but really the best selection might actually be me. And I have no idea exactly what that means, but it’s probably not good.

  ONE

  BORN AGAIN

  IT’S A THURSDAY AFTERNOON in San Antonio and I’m in a rented room—creaky floorboards, peeling wallpaper, month to month, no lease, space heater only, the ultimate temporary lifestyle—and I can’t find the right channel on the television. I rented this place, it seems, without making sure that it had ESPN. This realization throws the poverty of the room into relief for the first time.

  Shit, it’s cold in here, I think, aware of a draft all of a sudden. When I look back at the TV, it’s on a gospel channel. A video preacher straight out of central casting is pointing a finger right
at the screen—right at me—admonishing me to surrender to God. He’s got swept-back white hair, gold wire-rimmed glasses, and a booming hellfire voice that makes the name “A-BRA-HAAM!” come spilling out of his mouth like a brand-new Mustang V-8 turning over for the first time.

  “When you give up more than you deserve,” he shouts, “God will give you more than you dreamed!” He pauses, letting the words settle in for effect. “I want you to write that down somewhere!”

  I shrug and reach for a notebook.

  “Write it down: When you give up more than you deserve,” the preacher repeats, “God will give you more than you dreamed!”

  I nod and write it down in block letters. Why not? I have no idea what the hell it means, but I didn’t come to Texas to argue with people. But what exactly do I deserve?

  The preacher continues on; his sermon is from Genesis 12, the story about Abraham coming to Egypt and instructing his beautiful wife, Sarah, to say that she’s his sister, which in turn allows Abraham not only to avoid being killed but to trade her to Pharaoh in exchange for a mother lode of slaves, asses, and camels. But, as things like this always do in the Old Testament, this unlawful union brings a plague on Pharaoh, and when Pharaoh finds out the reason, he is pissed, screaming to Abraham, “Why saidst thou, ‘She is my sister?’…Therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way.”

  At which point Abraham and his people leave, and a few chapters later he gets to go into the tent of his wife’s handmaiden Hagar and make a baby with her. This seems like a great deal for Abraham—avoid execution, get a great trade-in deal for your wife, then bang her handmaiden—but I’m not sure I see where the lesson about deserving and dreaming is here. No such problem for Pastor John Hagee.

  “You see, it happened to A-BRA-HAAM, it can happen to you!” he shouts. “Nothing is impossible to those who have faith!”

  Down at the bottom of the screen there’s a notation. “PRAYER LINE: (210) 490–5100.” I write that down, too, marking it with a smiley face.

  The show ends shortly after that and another, less talented preacher—his Carrot Top–esque shtick is preaching seated at a desk—comes on and starts babbling about the Christian children in the Sudan being kidnapped at birth and forced to convert to Islam. Here in South Texas everyone for five hundred miles in every direction is a Christian, but they’re constantly finding ways to think of themselves as a besieged minority. You hear a lot about our oppressed brothers and sisters in Africa, India, the Middle East. They’re ideal objects of sympathy because they’re helpless, they’re poor, and it would take them at least twenty years to reach San Antonio even if they started swimming today.

  Anyway, I hit the mute button, lean back in my chair, look around at my shitty room, and sigh.

  IT’S DECEMBER 2006 and I’m now on hiatus, after spending the whole fall covering the midterm elections for my depraved liberal magazine, Rolling Stone. I’m here in Texas to work out the answer to a question that has been germinating in my mind for some time, and which came to a head after the elections.

  Back in the East Coast media world where I come from—an ugly place where nothing grows but scum, lichens, and Jonathan Franzen—the sweeping electoral victory by the Democrats was greeted with a tremendous sigh of relief, as if it were a sign that our endlessly self-correcting, essentially centrist American polity had finally come to its senses. In that world, there was optimism because the people had finally derailed that nutty Bush revolution, because the country had apparently seen the light about a pointlessly bloody and outrageously expensive war in Iraq, and because the cautious yuppieism of the Democratic Party had been triumphantly rehabilitated, at least temporarily quelling the potentially internationally embarrassing specter of terminal one-party rule. The pendulum was swinging back, yin was morphing back into yang. American politics moved in cycles, and the latest conservative cycle had finally ended.

  The election results were being sold, in other words, as a triumph of the American system, of American democracy. Just like the producers for Monday Night Football, the counry’s political elite likes things best when the teams are evenly matched. As far as the press was concerned, the best thing about the Democratic bounce-back in the midterms was that it set up a great 2008. Even odds, or maybe Dems-1, to reach the White House. American politics had never been in better shape.

  I knew better. I had been all around the country in the last year and I knew that the last thing these elections represented was a vote of confidence in the American system. Out There, in states both blue and red, the People were boarding the mothership, preparing to leave this planet for good. The media had long ignored the implications of polls that showed that half the country believed in angels and the inerrancy of the Bible, or of the fact that the Left Behind series of books had sold in the tens of millions. But on the ground the political consequences of magical thinking were becoming clearer. The religious right increasingly saw satanic influences and signs of the upcoming apocalypse. Meanwhile, on the left, a different sort of fantasy was gaining traction, as an increasing number—up to a third of the country according to some polls—saw the “Bush crime family” in league with Al-Qaeda, masterminding 9/11. Media outlets largely ignored poll results that they felt could not possibly be true—like a CBS News survey that showed that only 16 percent believed that the Bush administration was telling the truth about 9/11, with 53 percent believing the government was “hiding something” and another 28 percent believing that it was “mostly lying.” Then there was a stunning Zogby poll taken just in advance of the 2004 Republican convention that showed that nearly half of New York City residents—49.3 percent—believed that the government knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks were coming and purposely failed to act.

  Not only did voters distrust the government’s words and actions; by 2007 they also had very serious doubts about their government’s legitimacy. Successive election cycles foundering on voting-machine scandals had left both sides deeply suspicious of election results. A poll in Florida taken in 2004 suggested that some 25 percent of voters worried that their votes were not being counted—a 20 percent jump from the pre-2000 numbers. More damningly, a Zogby poll conducted in 2006 showed that only 45 percent of Americans were “very confident” that George Bush won the 2004 election “fair and square.”

  The most surprising thing about that last poll was the degree to which the distrust was spread wide across the demographic spectrum. That 71 percent of African Americans distrusted the 2004 results was perhaps not a surprise, given that black voters in America have been victims of organized disenfranchisement throughout this country’s history.

  But 28 percent of NASCAR fans? Twenty-five percent of born-again Christians? Thirty-two percent of currently serving members of the armed forces? These are astonishing numbers for a country that even in its lowest times—after Watergate, say, or during Reconstruction—never doubted the legitimacy of their leaders to such a degree.

  And if distrust of the government was at an all-time high, that was still nothing compared to what the public thought of the national media. Both the left and the right had developed parallel theories about the co-opting of the corporate press, imagining it to be controlled by powerful unseen enemies, and increasingly turned to grassroots Internet sources for news and information. In the BBC/Reuters/Media Center’s annual Trust in the Media survey in 2006, the United States was one of just two countries surveyed—Britain being the other—where respondents trusted their government (67 percent) more than they trusted national news reporters (59 percent). A Harris poll that same year showed that some 68 percent of Americans now felt that the news media were “too powerful.”

  The country, in other words, was losing its shit. Our national politics was doomed because voters were no longer debating one another using a commonly accepted set of facts. There was no commonly accepted set of facts, except in the imagination of a hopelessly daft political and media elite that had long ago lost touch with the general public. What we had ins
tead was a nation of reality shoppers, all shutting the blinds on the loathsome old common landscape to tinker with their own self-tailored and in some cases highly paranoid recipes for salvation and/or revolution. They voted in huge numbers, but they were voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody. The elections had basically become a forum for organizing the hatreds of the population.

  And the worst thing was that the political parties at some level were complicit in this and understood what was going on perfectly—which is why together they spent $160 million on negative advertising in this cycle, as opposed to just $17 million on positive ads. There were no longer any viable principles in play. Just hate. And distrust. The system had nothing left to offer the People, so the People were leaving the reservation. But where were they going?

  That was what I’d come here to find out. While Washington was still basking in the glow of the Big Win and starting its revolting 2008 party way too early (headline on the Washington Post opinion page today: “An Iowan You Should Know,” about candidate Tom Vilsack. I should know now? In December of 2006! Are these people insane?), I decided to pick a spot on the map, go there, and get retarded. If the country was going to flip out, I didn’t want to be left behind.

  THE MUTE BUTTON was still on, but I gathered that the deskbound TV preacher was still blathering about Sudan. They kept alternating close-ups of his face with shots of balloon-headed Sudanese kids meekly waving the flies out of their eyes. I looked down at my notebook and saw my own handwriting jump back at me: PRAYER LINE (210) 490–5100.