The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [12]
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Inside the Halls of Derangement
TO DIAGNOSE A CANCER, you have to find its source—the organ where the first batches of abnormal cells started breeding and metastasizing. In the body America the most visible symptoms of the national derangement are in the extremities, the huge sections of the population gone far off the farm into distrust and paranoia, the bitter and disgust-ridden electoral contests, the violent rejection of the national media, etc.
Before going to Texas, I went to Washington, D.C., because this is where the disease began. The problem started when our elected leaders started playing a different game from the one the people sent them to play. They corrupted the process, made it sick, and in the end created a new species of government, an organism that functions well to serve its own ends but is nonresponsive to the public need. It’s a heart that beats but doesn’t pump blood.
This is something different from individual instances of corruption, of a few bad apples taking liberties and stealing a little on the side, here and there. What we have in Washington now is a systemic kind of corruption, a corruption of the whole organism of government. And it’s that corruption at the core of the American polity that’s radiated into the rest of the population, sending out ripples of madness and discontent.
The nonresponsive government may have sent the people scurrying toward magical or conspiratorial explanations for their betrayal, but when I went to Washington—in the fall of 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—what I found was a much less exotic, but frankly harder to accept, explanation for why things are falling apart. The best cover our corrupt politicians have for their behavior is the very banality of their crimes; to quote Tolstoy, their corruption is “most ordinary and therefore most horrible.” To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight—it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil—but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.
That’s why people will think up all sorts of crazy things to explain what’s wrong, long before they get around to the actual truth. But it’s the simple, unvarnished reality right out in the open that’s most frightening.
IT’S 2005, and although no one knows it yet, the beginning of the last Republican Congress of the Bush era, the death spasm of the Contract with America team that had been running the country’s lawmaking body for a dozen years. A fall afternoon and I’m entering the Congress, the House, to be exact. On the third-floor corridor snaking around the House gallery a line of tourists waits to squeeze through a metal detector. Lots of families, suckers from the middle of nowhere, here to take a gander at that whole Democracy thing.
A big-assed foursome is at the head of the line. Dad is balding, paunchy, a cop’s caterpillar mustache, dense curly black arm hair, wearing a Faded Glory Duo-Stripe polo shirt—I’m guessing a size 9XL, red colored, untucked all around, the Olaf the Tentmaker look. I know the exact brand of shirt because I saw it on sale for seven bucks in a Wal-Mart in Houston a few weeks back and almost bought it, just because it was seven bucks. Mom has messy dirty-blond hair, eyes like a tarantula’s, too close together, obstetric hips, and a voice that could break glass. She’s wearing a T-shirt that says “ITHACA IS GORGES,” but I don’t think either of them is from New York State. Two little boys, both pretty young, blank eyes, neither old enough nor guilty enough yet to be villains in the American drama.
Dad leans over to one of the kids:
“Remember what I said,” he says. “They can arrest you if you make a joke right up here.”
“Is that really true?” the older boy says.
“It sure is, son,” Dad says, tapping Junior on the back, speaking with what appears to be