![The Great Derangement - A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire The Great Derangement - A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire](https://www.proleacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-Great-Derangement-Taibbi.jpg)
The Great Derangement is a book about the early 2000s – the Bush years. Reading it now is like finishing a connect-the-dots image from my son’s coloring book. Matt Taibbi goes from Congress to Texas, from a Baghdad barracks to the minds of 9/11 Truthers. It’s a tour through what he calls the “last stage of the American empire”. Taibbi gathers perspectives of many different people in “a nation of reality shoppers.” The author is trying to trace the beginning of something that we have seen more fully mature since. He’s witnessing the emergence of a land where there is no one popular mindset, no common sense of reality. Truth is a buffet.
Taibbi argues the disease no doubt started long before 2001. Still, to him, 9/11 was perhaps the first twinge of pain bad enough to make us go get a doctor’s checkup on the problem. While the narrative of national unity held for a moment, it quickly devolved into conspiracist camps. It amped up drives for increased government power, a push for war and dominion over faraway places. It convinced gatherings of believers that the war on terror signaled an End-Times confrontation between good and evil.
Taibbi works throughout the book as a congressional reporter. He is convinced the process is not only broken, but that it is purposefully broken to keep Congresspersons in power. After all, you have to motivate supporters to vote, and if you can only motivate them with petty, sensationalist bullshit, it’s just as well if it works. He points out a neoliberal consensus holds in Congress that allows all parties to largely agree on everything that really matters, while they create the illusion of vigorous debate on something else. It’s a distraction play, essentially. Taibbi gives many valuable anecdotes about how the process does and doesn’t work, and I won’t spoil them here. He’s in his element as a congressional reporter. Same goes for later in the book when he visits soldiers occupying Baghdad, Iraq.
Taibbi’s turn as an undercover reporter, is where the real fire and unease come through for me. He infiltrates John Hagee’s evangelical megachurch in San Antonio, Texas. There he joins small ministry sessions with people convinced that only their faith can solve their problems. Alternatively, their problems will be made moot by the oncoming Rapture of all believers and the Final Judgment. He sits with people yearning for it, begging it on, looking to it as a source of salvation. He watches as they swallow falsehoods about politics and the wider world fed to them by the heavily politicized Hagee pastorhood. Taibbi tries to parrot it back so as not to blow his cover. As long as he empathizes with some of these people and their struggles, I feel it with him. When he criticizes them, I struggle to determine whether he’s “punching up or down”. When Taibbi’s vitriol hits the powerful, it’s a site to see. His viciousness and righteous contempt of corrupt manipulators and warmongers is fantastic. But sometimes, I do think he goes too far with the rank-and-file. Maybe it’s because I see my own family and friends in some of them, I don’t know. Maybe because he’s now been saying some things on Twitter I find unsavory, and I’m projecting backward into his writing. Maybe that’s his deal, and I just can’t stomach it.
His explorations of 9/11 truthers is illuminating as well. In doing so, he manages to skewer conspiracy theorists on both the left and right. One observation, upon watching a 9/11 truther film with a group of activists, stuck with me. Taibbi writes “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.” It’s something I want to keep in mind going forward. At the moment I can’t do much in the way of political activity due to my job and family circumstances. But this makes the need to avoid political hobbyism all the more real.
Taibbi’s vision of a society unraveling into camps that no longer know how to talk to one another has only gotten starker in the years since. It’s a worthy read now, if only to see anew what Taibbi finds when going undercover. He sees us, adapting to a crisis that leaves us in the wealthiest country in the world, but never feeling safe, and never feeling whole.
The Great Derangement - A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
Matt Taibbi's embedded reporting guides us through the George W. Bush years, filled as they were with paranoia, war, dysfunction, and a sense of the Apocalypse rising. Who can imagine what THAT ...
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