The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [126]
J.C. is at this protest with her mother and her brother, Aaron. Her brother used to be the reviled family liberal, a “conspiracy theorist” who had a lot of ideas about 9/11 his family didn’t even want to listen to. Now Mom, Sis, and Brother are all together under one banner, campaigning for Ron Paul. And while all the protesters here seem genuinely smitten with their candidate, I get the feeling that it’s more what Paul represents that turns them on. The vibe here is very science fiction, very Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Romney, an insectoid big shot among the pod people, is to be protested, while the unpodded, still-human Paul crowd holds its banners and tries to stay awake.
“It kinda felt like in The Matrix, where it’s like, ‘Take the red pill,’ you know?” she said. “They make it sound like if you support Ron Paul you’re some crazy 9/11 conspiracy wacko. But we’ve just been lied to so many times, you feel like you’ve just been chumped, you know what I mean?”
“Well, yeah…” I said.
“And I’m ready to blow up my TV!” J.C.’s kindly bespectacled mom shouted. “Ready to blow it up and watch YouTube!”
“Yeah,” said J.C. “I used to watch all that stuff…O’Reilly…Fox…”
“I used to think everything on TV was true,” chimed in Mom.
“Now we know,” said J.C. “And the worst thing, we used to be so hard on Aaron,” she said, referring to her brother, who was holding a banner across the street.
“We thought he was paranoid,” agreed Mom.
“Now we all get along again,” said J.C.
I asked what family gatherings used to be like.
“We didn’t even talk at Thanksgiving,” said J.C. “About politics we couldn’t talk at all. I mean, he was the tree-hugging Democrat, while I was the conservative, married to a Republican doctor…”
“Didn’t talk much,” agreed Mom.
Just then, while I was talking to J.C. and her mother, a reporter for the local Orlando TV station, Channel 6, swooped in to shoot some protester footage. The reporter had a perfect helmet of wavy anchorman hair. One of the Paul supporters leaned over and whispered to me. “Check it out, it’s Mitt Romney,” he said.
“You mean the hair?” I asked.
“Not just the hair,” he quipped.
AMERICAN POLITICAL MOVEMENTS always seem to have an us and a them, and the them is often more important than the us. With plenty of justice the Ron Paul movement identifies the them as an incestuous oligarchy of insider assholes: congressmen and businessmen and TV reporters who show up once every four years dressed in nearly identical Halloween-like costumes—ties, sculpted hair, high-production values. Canny campaign strategists have always keenly understood the depth of popular distrust of those types, which is why you’ll seldom see a mainstream campaign event without a candidate taking a shot here and there at the superficial trappings of his own political class. Even Romney lately has been making haircut jokes—not at his own expense, of course, but at the expense of John Edwards, whose plan for a federal savings program that would save $250 a year for most Americans seemed ripe for ridicule to Romney’s handlers. “That wouldn’t buy John Edwards a haircut,” cracked Romney today, eliciting a half-fart of muted laughs from the crowd.
But not many people are buying this bullshit anymore, and that may mark the beginning of something genuinely new in the American political system. The Derangment that I describe in this book kicked off when Americans finally figured out that they’d been betrayed by their mainstream political system, but still failed to abandon that old paradigm completely. The 9/11 “Truth” and Christian End Timer phenomena are