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

by Matt Taibbi

“God bless, welcome to John Hagee Ministries prayer line, this is Carol!”

  “Yes, hi, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Yes,” I say, “my name is Matt. I’m a member of the church. I went away to the Encounter Weekend, and I recently went through the Discover the Difference program. And I’m very happy, I feel blessed and all that, but I’m having trouble praying in tongues. You know, they tried to teach us that, but when I try to pray in tongues, it comes out sounding like a squirrel!”

  “Gosh! Mmm-hmm,” comes the response.

  “When I’m praying, you know, it just doesn’t sound natural,” I go on. “I just don’t know what’s wrong. I guess I’m just looking for some advice on what to do.”

  “Okay,” the woman says. “Hold on one second, would you?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Weirdly, abruptly, she puts me on hold. The Giants guy, totally oblivious, is typing away next to me. Suddenly we hear the announcement over the loudspeaker; Miami has picked, Houston is on the clock. NFL chief Roger Goodell trots up to the lectern.

  “Here it comes,” says Giants Guy.

  “With the ninth pick in the 2007 NFL draft,” the commissioner says, “the Miami Dolphins select Ted Ginn, wide receiver, Ohio State University.”

  Pandemonium!

  “Noooo!” come the shouts from the crowd.

  “Booo!”

  “Dolphins suck! Dolphins suck!”

  Giants Guy shakes his head. “Didn’t see that coming,” he says.

  “Neither did I,” I say. “Shit, Quinn could fall all the way to the second round now. He’s fucked.”

  “Look, they’ve got a camera on him!”

  We look up at the monitor; close-up on jilted Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn’s harried face. With his curly Laguna Beach locks and his square jaw, Quinn is supposed to be some kind of sports sex symbol, the Hunkback of Notre Dame, but to me he looks like every smug public school bully who ever dumped my books in junior high. Now he doesn’t look so tough, though; in fact he looks like he could burst out crying any minute, and ESPN, it goes without saying, wouldn’t miss that for anything. Extreme close-up now, the whole hall staring at him. Meanwhile, on the phone, the woman’s voice returns.

  “Okay, I’m back, I’m sorry about that,” she says. “For your problem, I can give you some scriptures.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Like, Ephesians chapter six, verse eighteen. ‘And pray in the spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.’”

  “Okay. Ephesians six-eighteen.”

  “Okay?” she says. “And Acts chapter one, verse eight. ‘Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost will come unto you,’ and then it goes on and on…”

  “You see, that’s what I mean,” I say. “I feel like I’m not receiving power.”

  “Well,” the lady says, “sometimes you have to do it on faith.”

  “Right, on faith,” I say. Whatever that means.

  “And eventually it comes,” she says.

  “Right,” I say, still watching the screen. Quinn not crying yet.

  “And then there’s Acts chapter one, verse five,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “And, um…Acts chapter two, verse four.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s a real good one,” she says, brightening. “Acts two-four is a real good scripture.”

  “What does that one say?”

  “It says, um, ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the spirit gave them other utterance.’”

  “Hmm.”

  “You know, the only thing I can say is, you have to do it by faith.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “It’s just like salvation. When you gave your heart to God and accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. You had to do it on faith.”

  I look around at the crowd, then down a few rows ahead of me. Adrian Peterson, the star Oklahoma running back just picked by Minnesota, is making his way through the press section with his entourage. A spindlylegged, middle-aged white fan with his pimply kid staggers forward and hounds Peterson to take a picture. The old creep puts his arm around the poor tie-clad new black millionaire, smiles, and, amazingly, gets his little son to take the picture. Peterson, too late, realizes he’s not stopping for the sake of the kid, but for this creepy grownup suburban white clown in a Packers jersey. What the hell, you can see him thinking, I guess this is what I’m going to get all that money for. He smiles weakly as the little boy snaps the flash photos. I lean into the phone.

  “Look,” I say, “I feel like I’m trying as hard as I can to pray in tongues, but you know there are other people in my family, it just seems to pour right out of them—blada bladada bladada, you know—but I’m just standing there watching out of the corner of my eye like a jerk. And then I just make these squirrel sounds. And they all seem to be so filled with the spirit, and here I am with these little squeaky sounds. It’s embarrassing, you know what I mean?”

  Silence on the other end of the line. Houston was on the clock. Giants Guy gives me a look, as if to say, Who do you like? I cup my hand over the phone and whisper, Okoye.

  “Well,” the woman on the phone says finally, after a pause, “maybe on a one-to-one basis with a minister, you could work this all out.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll meet with a minister.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Well, good luck and God bless.”

  “God bless you, too.”

  I put the phone down, feeling dirty. For a moment I was almost overcome by a powerful sensation of living in a sick world. I wasn’t sure whose fault that feeling was—mine at least in part to be sure, but there is also this crowd, this scene, that bored volunteer housewife on the phone hawking cheap dial-a-scriptures to crazed strangers in the void. Here, take this fucked-up prerecorded advice, just don’t get too close…Wait, you’re with Adrian Peterson? For real? Can you get me his autograph?

  I’m still thinking about all of this when I get a nudge from Giants Guy. I look up. Goodell is walking to the lectern. “With the tenth pick in the 2007 NFL draft,” he says, “the Houston Texans select Amobi Okoye, defensive tackle, Louisville.”

  “Nice call,” says Giants Guy.

  “It had to be him,” I say. “Peterson was gone already. The only other option was a corner.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “You’re right.”

  I reach down and grab another cookie.

  EPILOGUE

  Winter Park, Florida, early afternoon, August 2007

  MITT ROMNEY is in town making a campaign appearance, and I’m stuck out here covering him. As it is for all campaign reporters, this early stage of the election process is the hardest for me—you sit there at these dreary events in half-filled halls all over the country, listening to computerized speeches and doing the awful math. We all have such a limited time on earth, and here I am, spending another year in places like this, listening to the same drivel, day after miserable day. No matter which candidate you cover, it’s almost always the same flag-and-slogan backdrop behind the lectern, the same canned question-and-answer exchanges, the same pundit-generated opinions bouncing back at you in the “man-on-the-street” interviews on the way out.

  In this case, the Mormon ex-governor’s “Ask Mitt Anything” town halls are not, of course, designed to allow people to Ask Mitt Anything; like all such meetings, the potential questioners are at least semi-screened, in this case by a trio of breasty young things the candidate has cleverly sent weaving through the crowd in search of folks with “good” questions. I’ve been to a million of these events, and it’s always the same; the Democratic screeners always manage to find people desperate to know how we’re going to stop that awful George Bush, while at Republican events like this one, the questions always seem to end up being about how we’re going to keep Hillary out of the White House. Batting practice for candidates, ba
sically.

  But in this case one of the Romney spokesmodels screwed up and picked out a portly gentleman in a T-shirt in the back row who had a question about Canadian prescription medication. As “John Originally from New York” rambled through his inquiry, it became clear to all the good Republican central Floridians in the crowd that John was mentally disabled—I mean clinically so; he could barely get his question out, and, at the end, no one really knew what he was asking. You could feel the impatience in this stern conservative audience—like they were all thinking, “Who let the retard get the mic?” Romney, unnerved for just a second by his questioner’s stammering, recovered quickly and spouted out some bullshit response about safety concerns. Meanwhile, the crowd glared angrily at the spokeschick for puncturing the veneer of Romney’s would-be Stepford audience. At that moment I decided that John Originally from New York was the only person in the room worth interviewing. Maybe this was a way to do the whole campaign, I thought.

  The meeting broke up, and I went outside the building to wait for the crowd to file out. While waiting, I glanced at a Romney poster. It read:

  ROMNEY

  The Strength for America’s Future

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to have the balls to put the phrase “The Strength for America’s Future” under ten million posters with my name on it. Who are these guys who run for president in this country? These constantly lying, blow-dried egomaniacs must all come from a common source somewhere. But where?

  Just then John Originally from New York lumbered outside. He was huge and round and grimacing; he looked like a bouncer at a minor-league hockey event. I introduced myself and asked him what he thought of the governor.

  He looked into my camera as if something were hidden in there. Satisfied finally that nothing was, he spoke.

  “The thing, the thing, the thing about medicine from Canada is, it’s okay, but the American guv’ment can’t be responsible for it,” he said. “If something goes wrong with it, you’ve got to go to Canada to fight it out. You can’t do it over here, you know.”

  Made sense. But what about the governor?

  “I don’t think Canada will do anything to poison the American, though,” he answered. “Because they need the business.”

  True again.

  And what did he think of the slogan “The Strength for America’s Future”? What did he think that meant?

  “That just means about the Space Center, you know. When we have the Space Center, it makes the United States a superpower, and—”

  “Uh,” I said, trying to follow him.

  “And that just means that with the benefits, we don’t need to have the draft anymore.”

  I nodded. “That’s what that slogan means to you, that we don’t need to have a draft anymore?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Okay, great, thanks a lot,” I said, giving him my card. He took it and walked away, cradling the card in his hand.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER I broke down and interviewed some ostensibly mentally healthy Republicans. One couple was very pleased with Romney’s performance. Hubby was almost beaming.

  “I had been considering Giuliani,” he said, “but now I have to say that I’m going with Romney.”

  “Yes, me too,” said Wife.

  I wrote that down. “I see,” I said. “And what is it about Romney that is different from Giuliani?”

  Hubby’s smile vanished.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “He just is,” added Wife.

  “He talks good,” chimed in Hubby.

  “Okay,” I said, writing. “‘Talks good,’ got it. Thanks a lot, folks.”

  They stood there, still staring at me.

  “Okay,” I said, repeating myself. “Thanks a lot!” Dismissed!

  Slowly, they walked away.

  THE KIND OF PEOPLE who come out to support a carefully scripted corporate frontman like Mitt Romney or even Hillary Clinton are either outright cynics—and I’ve met some of those, grinning upper-class folk who see through the candidates’ spiels, but vote for them anyway because they want their taxes slashed or less regulation of their Wall Street businesses—or actual believers in the dreck the candidates are selling. And if they believe, it’s usually because they tune in to political shows on TV or radio and believe everything they hear, right down to the commercials. So when election season comes around, they choose their candidates on the basis of what appears to be an almost completely random neurological process—all of those mainstream media opinions bounce around in their heads for a while, and then when the merry-go-round stops on Election Day, they look to see which ones stuck and vote accordingly. When your voter-on-the-street is a John Originally from New York, you get a vivid picture of that Random Opinion Generator at work. But sometimes it’s just as obvious with your run-of-the-mill, ostensibly freethinking Republican or Democrat. Why do you like this candidate? I just do. No, seriously, why? Uh, I don’t know. Because he’s tough on terrorism? And he’s for “change”! And so on.

  Mitt Romney is your prototypical full-of-shit presidential candidate. He represents nothing so much as the system itself, which builds up politicians who look the part, frown with import at the appropriate cues, heave with concern about Our Children (“There are twenty-nine thousand registered sex offenders on MySpace!” Romney crowed at today’s event), and have a stern word or two or ten for the Terrorists who want to wreck Our Way of Life, whatever the hell that is.

  This system used to work just fine. The Republicans were once masters at appropriating public unhappiness for their own ends, telling people who’d been put out of jobs by the exported manufacturing economy that their lives now sucked not because they were unemployed, but because Sean Penn was a little communist weasel who didn’t believe in God besides. And because people now went mostly to movies instead of union meetings, they ate it up. The image of the spoiled, traitorous rich most people saw on television was not a CEO who played golf in Scotland with congressmen while slaves in the Marianas replaced his American workers. It was a Hollywood actor with a half-assed liberal arts education who wrecked Porsches, snorted coke off the asses of strippers, and visited Hugo Chavez in between movie shoots.

  It was a nice little setup for bullshit artists like Romney, who could then go into sad little towns like this one and blast Hollywood values, saying, as he did today, “We have to clean up the water our kids are swimming in.” Not the actual water, of course, which might be polluted (or disappearing, as it is here in Orlando, where homeowning decent folk like those in Romney’s audience use 75 percent of their water irrigating high-maintenance St. Augustine lawn grass; experts expect a crisis by 2013), but the cultural water, the water where actors who don’t even believe in Jesus aren’t satisfied with the money they make, and then speak out of turn. And if not actors, gays or professors or someone else with too many ideas. For a long time, those monsters were villain enough to keep the conservative vote captive.

  On the other side, voter manipulation turned into a similarly easy proposition. Vilified unfairly for the wrongs of the nation, wounded and defensive American liberals focused exclusively on unseating the horned Republican beast. They gave Democratic candidates their vote almost without a thought, supporting “winners” over candidates with something to say. A burgeoning third-party movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader disappeared into almost total irrelevance after Nader’s 2000 run ended up being perceived as the crucial factor in electing George Bush. Things got so bad that for a brief time former General Wesley Clark, a man who in the 1960s and 1970s traveled the world giving speeches in support of the Vietnam War effort, became the darling of American liberalism, a segment of society whose modern roots lay in the development of a movement to oppose that same Vietnam War.

  The next little thing about this vote-for-the-lesser-evil trick, of course—and this is no secret to anyone anymore—is that it drives all the “serious” candidates toward what is commonly referred to as the “modera
te center,” even if these serious candidates aren’t, in fact, moderate or centrist in any meaningful sense and the so-called center moves further to the right with each election cycle. For nearly two decades now this process has been steadily advancing on the Democratic side, as liberals are trained to accept the idea that the national majority will never accept a true labor party, or any candidate perceived as “soft” on defense.

  In What’s the Matter with Kansas? Tom Frank wrote mostly about conservatives when he described a process by which Middle America was trained to vote on social issues while ignoring its own economic situation. But, in fact, the same exact thing happened to liberals.

  At the tail end of the Reagan years the Democratic Party, with the aid of Clinton/Gore–led groups like the Democratic Leadership Council, presented us with a new kind of “business-friendly” Democrat, one who voted the right way on choice and minority rights but was “willing to work with business” on such matters as free trade, deregulation, privatization, government spending, and personal debt. Such a Democrat, we were told, could win: we’d be giving up a thing or two in terms of workers’ rights and other matters, but at least Roe v. Wade would be safe for now.

  That led to the absurdity of the late 1990s and the early years of this century, a time when a massive empire that dominated the world economy chose its leaders almost exclusively according to their stances on such matters as abortion rights and gay marriage. On the substantive economic issues the main candidates were very nearly identical, resulting in the outrageous comedy of 2000, an election in a 250-million-plus population that ended in an exact statistical tie. This was a situation so absurd that it even made a comedian out of reviled lefty oracle/MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who remarked that this was the result you would expect if Americans were asked to choose the president not of their own country, but of Mars.

  But the joke passed almost unnoticed among most of the population and the commercial media, setting up a near-repeat of the same situation in 2004. The key battleground state this time around was not Florida but Ohio, and once again almost no one noticed that neither of the main candidates was interested in discussing his stance on the key issues that actually affected voters in that state.