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

by Matt Taibbi

  The minutes raced by. Wayne Williams was now fully prostrate, held up only by a trio of coaches, each of whom took part of his writhing body and propped it up. Another bald man in the front of the chapel was now freaking out in Linda Blair fashion, roaring and making horrific demon noises.

  “Rum-balakasha-oom!” shouted Fortenberry in tongues, waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man. “Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ I cast out the demon of philosophy!”

  Philosophy?

  Up in front of me and to the right several rows ahead, I saw Aaron looking around sadly. I wondered for a moment if he had seen me “puking” into my bag, and I felt awful suddenly at the possibility that he had—I had deceived him. He looked seriously distressed by the proceedings, which clearly were not working the way he’d wanted.

  As for the rest of the crowd, it was obvious that virtually everyone was play-acting to some degree or another. I was reminded of the Tolstoy story Kreutzer Sonata, when the male narrator described marriage as being like the bearded-lady tent in a French circus he’d seen. You pay a few francs to go in, and when you come out, and the carnival barker shouts at you, “Was that not the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen, monsieur?”—well, you’re too ashamed to admit that you’ve been had, and so you nod your head and agree: Oui, monsieur, it was really something! That’s how people come to say marriage is a blessing, and that’s how you can get fifty-odd high school graduates puking demons into three-cent paper bags for a Deliverance.

  The whole thing—the demonic expulsions, the trading of miraculous wives’ tales, the crazy End Times theology based on dire predictions that come and go uneventfully once a year or so—it’s all a con that is done with the consent of the conned. Which is what gives it strength. If everybody agrees to believe, it is real.

  The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem, and intellectual discipline on the face of the earth. He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and John Updike novels. At least four of the men and about six of the women writhed and screamed and fussed themselves into sheer physical exhaustion, collapsing in chairs by the time it was over. Several of the coaches actually had to bring Wayne Williams and the other young black man behind the chapel to subdue their demons. By then most of us men were just sitting there mute, looking around absentmindedly, waiting for it to end. I was sitting there, clutching my demon vomit bag—perhaps the single greatest souvenir of my journalistic career—when I made the mistake of closing my mouth. A coach rushed over to me.

  “Matthew!” he snapped. “Keep your mouth open! Let the demons out!”

  “Oh, right!” I said. I straightened up and opened my mouth in the shape of a letter O.

  Meanwhile, Fortenberry was tiring.

  “I cast out…uh…In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of pornography. I cast out, in the name of Jesus, the demon of disconnect.”

  Fortenberry shook his head as though trying to revive himself. He had been at this for a long time. His stamina really was astounding, a testament to his military training.

  When it was done, I ran up to Aaron.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I actually don’t feel all that different.”

  “Well, that’s okay,” I said. “Neither do I.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  He frowned and walked away, looking more upset than he had when he’d arrived.

  Laurie ran over.

  “How’d you do, honey?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I only lost about a half-pounder. You?”

  “A half-pounder. You’re cute. I feel so relaxed, I feel great,” she said. “But I have to say, I was watching you, and I felt like—I felt like you were holding back a little.”

  I gulped hard. “Really? I mean, I coughed into the bag and everything.”

  “No, you were holding back. Maybe you’re not ready for this yet,” she said.

  “It’s not that,” I protested.

  A frightening thought shot through my head. It occurred to me that over the last decades any number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting to Middle America an understanding of their personal relationships with God. But whereas once these conversions were humble things—Billy Graham whispering and putting his hand on W’s shoulder in Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a flash of recognition while watching a televangelist program—the modern version might very easily be this completely batshit holy-vomitus/ demon-exorcism deal. The thought that any politician could claim this kind of experience and not be immediately disqualified from public service seemed utterly terrifying.

  We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us with oil, hold our heads, and speak to us in tongues. Fortenberry instructed us to “just let it out. Just let it out and it’ll come out.”

  He didn’t come right out and say, Just act like you’re speaking in tongues. But it was damned close. Once again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a story about how he’d once been at a service where folks were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it had just flown right out of him—and now it just shoots right out of him, almost on command.

  I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:

  “Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha…Come on, Matthew, let it out.”

  American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you’re holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford’s heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!

  But I didn’t think of this at the time and just went another route.

  “Let it out, Matthew,” the coach repeated, clutching my forehead. “Just open your mouth.”

  I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song “What Is Autumn?” by the Russian rock band DDT:

  What is autumn? It’s the sky

  The crying sky below your feet.

  Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds.

  Autumn I’ve not been with you for so long!

  It’s actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded demonic enough.

  “Hmm, very good,” my coach said. “Good job, Matthew.”

  I kept going, on to the next verse. “What is autumn? It’s a stone…”

  “Okay, that’s good,” the coach said, annoyed, moving to the next guy.

  “Uh,” said the next man, a small, bent, elderly fellow who had come here with his much larger, bottle-blond wife.

  “Let it out!” the coach barked.

  “Phhhhh-shhhhaka…?” the old man pleaded.

  “Let it out!”

  “Ra-ka-ka-shhhhh…Pork-manka!”

  “It’s important that you practice,” said Pastor Fortenberry. “It sounds silly, but when you’re at home, when you have a little time, just try to let it out. You’ll get used to it, and soon you’ll be speaking in tongues like nobody’s business!”

  He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and fully qualified now to cast out demons.

  He held up his hands in triumph.

  “Hallelujah!” he shouted.

  The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.

  “Hallelujah!”

  He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him. And we repeated after him again.

  Arms in th
e air. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

  I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I threw my arms up over and over again.

  We had graduated.

  AT THE END of the weekend we were gathered in the chapel one last time. We were told that they were going to play a very important recording for us.

  The recording, it turned out, was the Voice of God. A female life coach cranked up the volume, and a Don Pardo–style radio voice, only lower a few octaves and with a tone of terrible otherwordly conviction, boomed out over a CD player:

  “My child,” it began. Then it continued:

  You may not know me

  But I know everything about you.

  I know when you sit down and when you rise up.

  I am familiar with all of your ways.

  Even the very hairs on your head are numbered…

  Christians are fond of repeating this biblical maxim (Matthew 10:29) about God knowing the number of hairs on our heads. In the crowd now there was much nodding and even a little bit of weeping as this crudely altered recording boomed out over the dimmed light of the chapel area—many members of the flock were clearly very affected by the idea that some unknown voice actor knew the number of hairs on their heads. The recording continued:

  I offer you more than your earthly father ever could.

  For I am the perfect Father.

  Every good gift that you receive comes from my hand.

  My thoughts toward you are as countless as the sands on the seashore.

  It went on like this for a while. By the time the recording was over, there was much sniffling and crying. After all this talk of wounds and this cathartic confession about our parents, hearing this crazy Mr. Clean voice assert himself as our eternal dad was too much for some of the people in the room—particularly when it ended like this:

  My question is…Will you be my child? I am waiting for you.

  Love, your dad.

  Almighty God.

  Some time later, we were dismissed. Back at the barracks, I found Dennis lying in a fetal position on his bunk, eyes shut. I stopped in front of him, thought about waking him, then thought the better of it, grabbed my stuff, and rushed out, not saying good-bye. Jose shook my hand warmly on the way out, then hurried away. Aaron I later saw walking with a blank look on his face back toward the barracks, but I never got a chance to speak with him again.

  In the main building I saw big Maria, who had grown progressively cheerier throughout the weekend, laughing joyfully and embracing several women who presumably had been in her group. Earlier in the weekend I’d made it a point to wave to her whenever I passed and sit near her at meals when she was alone, but now she looked enraptured with new friendships and scarcely recognized me when I waved good-bye.

  I hitched a ride home with Laurie and Janine, who had driven to the ranch in Janine’s car. “Wasn’t that recording wonderful?” Laurie said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Janine. “You never heard that before?”

  “No,” said Laurie.

  “Neither have I,” I said.

  Janine turned on some Christian tunes; I fell asleep in the backseat, mentally and physically exhausted. At the beginning of the weekend I’d been fairly bursting out of my skin from the stress of having to play this difficult role, plainly freaked out by the whole scene, but that was a distant memory now. I closed my eyes to the gentle acoustic strumming of Janine’s CD and slept a deep mannequin sleep.

  BY THE END of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq war or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this—once you’ve gone this far—you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.

  By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.

  FOUR

  Baghdad Interlude,

  or

  The Derangement at War

  I’D BEEN IN IRAQ for close to two months, as part of an ongoing assignment for Rolling Stone. After a stint with the grunts at the Rustamiyah base, I was with a new unit, the Bloodhounds of the 615th MP, a police transition team with responsibility for a somewhat quiet sector of western Baghdad.

  Being embedded, I divided my time along much the same lines as the soldiers’ time was divided. I spent the vast majority of my day cozily consuming Baskin-Robbins ice cream sundaes, Whopper Juniors, and full-blast air-conditioning behind the high, high walls of whatever base I happened to be on at the moment. But then a short stretch of most every day I spent out on patrol with this or that MP unit, driving around hot sections of Baghdad or Mosul or Tal Afar or whatever city we happened to be in at the time. We were visiting police stations and ostensibly providing “support” to local cops, although it was abundantly clear to most all the soldiers I spent time with that the real mission was to drive around in circles so as to provide the enemy with a target once daily.

  Over time I started to feel in my bones that this weird walled-off archipelago was itself a profound metaphor for American domestic reality. The high walls around the forward operating bases, or FOBs—at places like Camp Liberty they appeared to be upward of twenty or thirty feet tall in parts, lined with knots of barbed wire and gun turrets—were supposedly there to keep insurgents out of the American compounds. But the more I looked at them, the more they reminded me of the freaky-tall bulwarks on King Kong’s Skull Island: masterpieces of architectural overkill, the panic visible in each extra foot of protection, walls designed to keep something in, not out. In America we live in a bubble and the rest of the world is a dangerous mystery, about which many legends may be spread by those cunning and unscrupulous enough to bother. The outside world has become scary enough that most of our people have decided not even to bother trying to figure it out—which is how you end up with such lunacies like They hate us for our freedom and 9/11 was an inside job. If you’re confined to the territory of the bubble in your search for explanations for an event like 9/11, those are the kinds of explanations you’ll come up with.

  A key aspect of the derangement is this cutting off of the people from outside reality. We are like a person slipping into paranoid psychosis for whom hallucinations and imagined conversations increasingly take the place of real object relations in the outside world. A paranoiac can handle those imaginary conversations just fine—but shake him by the shoulders and force him to focus, and he might very well stare back at you in terror, not knowing who you are or what you want. In that one panicked moment before he can think of some new fantasy that explains what’s happening before his eyes, you’ll see the whole sorry deal laid bare.

  In Iraq, where those occasional clashes with the outside are of the rudest possible variety, I saw those moments over and over again. These Bloodhounds in Baghdad were about to drag me to one more.

  THE BLOODHOUNDS are an active-duty unit normally based in Germany—a close-knit, professional, idealistic group of young kids so cheerful and hardworking it was almost off-put
ting. In my getting-to-know-u first day with the squad—an early-morning meeting in a Camp Liberty parking lot that had been arranged by army press officers—the Blood-hounds had done a zany around-the-campfire-type group introduction (in which each soldier gave a nutty capsule description of himself) that was like something out of Up with People.

  “My name is Josh Billingsley, and I have an abnormally large head,” said one, who really did have a big head. Everyone laughed.

  “I’m Jaleel Ibrahim,” said the next soldier. “I’m the token African guy.”

  More laughs.

  “And I’m Sergeant Russell,” said the third. “I am soft-spoken and wholesome, but also offended easily.”

  Jesus, I thought. Is this war, or a boy-band audition? At first I’d found the happy-go-lucky attitude of the Bloodhounds horrifying; in the middle of all this twisted violence and unreasonableness, spending time with this cheery group was like having to look at a happily panting golden retriever in the front seat while handcuffed in the back of some serial killer’s car. But over time I came to understand that it wasn’t a put-on at all, that these kids really loved and cared for one another. A lot of them came from tough backgrounds, and this unit was the best family they had.

  THERE IS a lot about the army that’s bullshit and a crock—just watch any USO show—but the teamwork and the camaraderie, the way a bunch of lost teenagers are molded into proud men and women, all of that stuff is very real. Watching it in action can be very moving. The army, in some ways anyway, is unquestionably good for young people.

  Such ruminations get to the heart of why the embed process is so dangerous and insidious. A journalist who slips into the habit of rooting for a bunch of nice kids like this in a place like Iraq might easily find himself missing the overall point of his assignment. This, certainly, had happened to me. It wasn’t until my tour in Iraq was just about over that I realized I’d been conned, that I was spending far too much time watching these kids interact with one another and not nearly enough time wondering what the hell we were all doing here. But that’s the story you get when you can’t really look behind the wall for twenty-three hours out of every day. And even in that one hour, your insight is limited to turning your head on a swivel in the back seat of a Humvee somewhere, watching for pieces of trash on the road.