I've read more than once that Matt Taibbi is my generation's Hunter S. Thompson. While Taibbi can hurl insults and turn a simile with the best of them, he is a bit more down to earth than HST. Furthermore, I suspect that Taibbi doesn't sit around his backyard naked, drunk, and stoned while shooting whatever he cares to with one of weapon of a massive arsenal. I could be wrong, however.
So while he may not be warped like HST, Taibbi likes to take on The Powers That Be and call out stupidity and inanity in only the harshest terms. I recently finished his book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire - the first book of his that I've read – and he gives us large helpings of both. Here he documents American madness as reflected by the "mess in Washington", i.e. – exposing how laws are really made, and how millions tune out of mainstream and into "escapist lunacy". The book alternates chapters that look at the sausage making process and describe an extended excursion into Evangelical madness wherein he attends a Christian retreat and the Cornerstone Church run by the controversial Pastor John Hagee. And there's descriptions of his encounters with 9/11 Truthers thrown in to demonstrate how many on the Left have succumbed to the madness.
Taibbi begins by describing how a lot of lawmaking goes on out of the public eye. Sure, the sessions where they name post offices are on C-SPAN but the important stuff goes on during late-night "emergency sessions". He writes:
No one ever asks why Congress needs to debate massive energy bills, or sweeping, pork-filled highway legislation, or fiendishly transparent corporate handouts like the prescription drug benefit bill late at night…
Later on he describes how Rep. John Duncan of Tennessee shepherds the Gasoline for America's Security Act through the Energy and Commerce Committee. The bill was cover for overturning parts of the Clean Air Act on behalf of the oil companies. Ostensibly it allowed more refineries to be built but, when it was pointed out that the oil companies have gone on record saying that they do not need nor want to build any more refineries Duncan could only give bland reassurances like, "I think it's a good thing we have environmental law."
In another section he shows that the Democratic "earmark reform" effort was a fraud. Taibbi gets some help from an independent budget analyst named Winslow Wheeler who picks apart a budget bill that was popularly thought to be earmark-free only to find them cloaked in budgety shadow.
With such chicanery in Washington, many of the electorate are turned off and tune out. On the right side of the aisle, many turn to religion, specifically Evangelical Christianity. Intrepid reporter that he is, Taibbi joins John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church and begins his excursion into Evangelical derangement by attending an encounter weekend.
The weekend turns out to be a mix of group chats and sermons. Taibbi meets a host of people who spill their guts in the group sessions telling everyone of their failures and the parts of their pasts that drag them down today. After stories of drug use, emotionally unavailable mothers, broken homes and broken marriages, Taibbi made up his own tale of woe involving a father who was an alcoholic circus clown that beat the young Matt with his oversized shoes.
The preachers gave their spiels about the wickedness of homosexuals and of Harry Potter novels, blaming them for a host of America’s troubles. Then came the Christian Zionist spiels about how great Israel is and that they must hasten the Apocalypse. However, these rants and those inveighing against enemies such as Iran don’t get the applause and the “Amens!” that the preaching about individual salvation does. By the end, the attendees were speaking in tongues and vomiting up…vomiting up…well, demonic bile. Or something like that. Taibbi concludes that the people who attend these churches and their encounter weekends surely do so for the camaraderie and the feelings of belonging. Even he began to feel some changes:
There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed ou fee, and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self.
Taibbi also encounters the derangement of the Left in the form of 9/11 Truthers, or those who think that the attacks of 1 September 2001 were anything but the work of terrorists. Some thing they were taken down by Bush and his cronies to give him a casus belli. You know the story - bombs were planted on load bearing members of the WTC, the planes did not have the passengers aboard, etc. And then there are those who simply believe the government stood by and watched it happen for the reason above.
At first he didn’t think that the 9/11 Truth movement was particularly large until he wrote about it and was bombarded with e-mails. He decides to take them head-on but his arguments get him nowhere. He meets some of them in person and finds that most are very nice people who happen to believe some batshit insane things.
The whole narrative of the movement is so completely and utterly retarded, it boggles the mind.
Every bit of evidence against a conspiracy by the U.S. Government only enlarges the numbers of conspirators until the Truthers’ brains’ waveforms collapse in an infinite regression of paranoia. Taibbi dedicates much of one of the Truther chapters to a fictional conversation among Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Irv Kristol, etc. in which they plan the attacks which is as absurd as the idea that the government carried out the attacks themselves.
It is the 9/11 Truthers of the Left that are the saddest here. Politicos trying to pass legislation that benefits their donors? No surprise there. That’s just greed. People turning towards religion? No revelation there. Sure, religion is a derangement but it is its own unique brand. Their Yahweh-driven narrative is utterly retarded as well but I tend to view it as being in its own category that is, while not entirely forgivable, is at least, to my mind, understandable as a mental phenomenon that differs from your ordinary conspiracy drivel.
The Truthers were saddest because, not only were their theories retarded and easily shown to be false without having to resort to metaphysics, but also for the way that their anger goes nowhere. Of one meeting Taibbi writes: “The group ended up split down the middle on the issue of whether or not to schedule an informal ‘hangout night’.” At least Evangelicals can organize encounter weeks and they also lash out at those they hate. They protest things like gay marriage and get elected to school boards where they actually modify curricula. Religious nuts get stuff done while the 9/11 Truthers here tend to sit around like the People's Front of Judea in Life of Brian and argue whether they should sit around arguing quite so much.
The Great Derangement is a fun, if sad, read. Taibbi is a good writer. His prose is littered with some namecalling here and wonderfully insulting similes there which may not be to your taste, however. He writes with a good eye for detail and has an Average Joe persona, with the most obvious example of this being his use of sports analogies. I suppose that looking at politicians in Washington, Evangelicals, and 9/11 Truthers may not be the soundest basis for concluding that the American Empire is almost over and that Americans are, generally speaking, gossip-mongering, reality TV show-watching doofi but it goes a long way in demonstrating just how much stupidity is out there.
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