Book Review: Matt Taibbi's "The Great Derangement"
Sun May 04, 2008 at 01:00:10 PM PDT
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
By Matt Taibbi
Spiegel & Grau
New York, 2008
In the pointy-headed northeastern America of my experience there were no legends of wandering prophets, no dinner-table discussions about personal salvation. But in the rest of the country you had this weird dichotomy, and advanced industrial economy confidently riding the superconductor and the microchip into the space age while most of its population hurtled backward away from the Enlightenment, living out a Canterbury Tales-type quest for revelation in a culture dominated by superstition and mystery.
Reading Matt Taibbi always reminds me of the infamous scene in Dr. Strangelove in which Slim Pickens is riding the H-bomb to certain death: there's a certain bitter, wild, laughing-on-the-way-to-destruction bravado about the fireworks of the Rolling Stone contributor's biting observations and spectacular writing skills. Nowhere is this more on display than in his current offering, The Great Derangement.
In the introduction to the book, Taibbi explains his roundabout journey to the current version: first, he explains, he was going to pen a "survey of the worst people in American politics," but he feared being pigeon-holed as the left's answer to Anne Coulter, so he wiggled out of that one, pitching to the publisher a book about how the red/blue divide is a trumped-up, over-covered piece of faux divisiveness that is serving the powers-that-be. In his own words, he explains how that got off course: "I made it about eleven thousands words into that effort before realizing that even I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about." Granted, that hasn't stopped enough authors in the past, but it stopped this one. So he proposed a year-long diary of attending Congressional sessions, but realized after plunging into the project that his commitment to Rolling Stone meant he would have to travel and leave DC too much to do the job right, so this project was abandoned as well after it had begun. But during these assigned journeys as national affairs correspondent that took him away from the nation's bubbled capital, he began to tune in to the mirror images he saw in the left and right extremes in our political culture, which became the germ of the book we now have in hand:
The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and 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.
Now at the end of the long and amusing introduction, the reader is ready to embark on a journey about ... Well, something about American character and collective insanity, perhaps? But, no. It really is a book that blends his first three ideas into a not-so-cohesive whole: Congressional sessions, the 9/11 Truth movement and--in a stroke of serendipity both the author and publisher probably pinch themselves to believe--the church of Jim Hagee, the Christian right pastor enamored of the End Times, catapulted into the news cycle via John McCain's embrace of his endorsement. The book seems to be trying to pass itself off as having one theme, but it doesn't. And really, that's okay. Read as a jumbled series of essays around the three topics works just fine, since Taibbi's writing is so vibrant, rich and irreverent you'd be happy to read him list cereal ingredients if he was given permission to take the bit in his teeth.
Just as an example of his raucous, train wreck, full-speed-ahead writing, here's how he wiggles his way into making these incompatible subjects hang together:
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 long ago lost touch with the general public. What we had instead 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.
I mean, really. Who cares if the specific subjects logically belong together? If the topic is derangement and you have a writer of this caliber ricocheting words around the corners of your brain, it works.
And to be sure, there is a weird kind of balancing of the scale of obsessive craziness in choosing to focus on the Hagee crowd and the 9/11 Truthers. The juxtaposition of the author's immersion in the two subcultures is interesting, although not mined quite as deeply as it could have been. It could be that as a liberal overexposed to the Truthers, I found their sections less compelling; with Hagee, though, Taibbi actually moved to Texas, joined the church, went on retreats, got a baptized in a tank and "witnessed" to suburbanites in a shopping mall. The Truther chapters found it hard to measure up. After all, it's pretty tough for a few meetings in delicatessens with fevered MIHOP's and taut, long, crazed email exchanges with them to live up to the full immersion chapters about the Texas church. Take this realization that hits Taibbi after he goes on a weekend retreat with fellow worshipers in Texas:
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.
When he tries to position this attitude against fanatics in the 9/11 Truth movement, there is a glaring failure; as anyone who's ever tried to discuss Building 7 of the World Trade Center knows, it is not exactly a matter of "thinking with muscles, not neurons." In fact, debating with them feels quite the opposite. You get worn down with a barrage of facts, twisted facts, possibilities based on facts, speculation posing as facts and a whole range of tidbits that are factoidish but that usually have mathematical formulas attached to them that make you want to melt into a puddle of pure exhausted surrender before such bludgeoning, fact-ish fervor.
Indeed, Taibbi himself points to this when he recounts his experiences to a friend and gets the response: "Just give it up, man," he said. "This is an American controversy. No one ever gives up or admits they’re wrong. It keeps going until it’s time for the next argument."
Two great quotes--and insights that are painful if you're a liberal--leap off the page when the author reflects on the meaning of the 9/11 Truth movement. First, he observes:
Technically I was still what they would call a debunker or a "left gatekeeper," a defender of the "official story," but in a weird way I found myself in some of these gatherings getting legitimately impatient with the slow tactics of the movement. After all, I thought, if you really think that the government murdered three thousand Americans, shouldn’t you be doing more than holding sit-ins and organizing discussion groups?
Further, after he gives an account of an evening in which the group he was hanging out with watched Loose Change, he notes wryly, "If there’s one thing you can always count on, it’s that a lefty political activist will find a way to convince himself that he’s changing the world by watching a movie."
You can't scan four lines of this book without wanting to blockquote a chunk; it's quotable, pointed, painful, funny and true. Even the chapters about Congress--which end up coming across as intermissions most of the time as Taibbi bounces between Hagee and the Truthers--are riveting. If you'd told me a month ago I'd stay up past 2 AM to read 15,000 words about how the Energy Bill wound its way through various back rooms and committees in Congress, I would have told you you were nuts. But I did, and it was worth it. His head-shaking about the personalities on the left and the right in other portions of the book are nothing compared with his take on the U.S. Government and the power structure it preserves. In fact, it seems at times he approaches claiming the societal and political set-up is one of the causes of the individual madness.
Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians’ jobs. The driving motivation of all Washington politicians is to quell or deflect that power, and this is visible even in such a terrible, immediate emergency as the Iraq war, when one would think that some kind of civic instinct would kick in, for five minutes or so at least. But no: instead, a newly conquering congressional majority armed with a fresh mandate essentially spent its first year in office trying to stay on the right side of public anger while maintaining business as usual; it was very plain that the party viewed its end-the-war mandate as a burden, not a privilege.
When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.
All I can say is, thank God we have Matt Taibbi around to document the real weirdness. The ride might be harrowing, but at least we can laugh as we go down.
