The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [127]
From that point of view the Derangement was a grotesque black comedy. It was Monty Python’s Crack Suicide Squad brought to life; screwed by a corrupt ruling class, the Population at Large rebelled by ramming itself into twin brick walls of pure idiocy. It was hard to say what was more absurd, the preposterous corruption of our politicians or the utterly irrational response of the people they betrayed. For most of the time that I worked on this book, it looked like an utterly hopeless situation, the kind of maelstrom of pointlessly destructive behavior and willful misunderstanding that could leave us all fucked for a generation, with nothing left to do but laugh.
But who knows, maybe things aren’t so bleak. At the extremities of the Derangement there are signs now that the mainstream attempt to freeze-dry the debate in a permanent predictable struggle over the same old symbolic issues, voiced by the same media-political complex, has failed. And maybe the Paul campaign, as marginal as it seems, offers a glimpse at the new fault line. It’s not blue and red so much anymore. It’s on the farm and off the farm. And the numbers off the farm are growing.
And sure, some of those people off the farm are Truthers and End Timers and other members of the Crack Suicide Squad rebellion. But increasingly some are people who have their eyes wide open, who are seeing the Big Con for what it really is.
“Yeah, I’ve never contributed to a campaign before, but that’s because I couldn’t afford it,” said Terence Reilly, one of the Paul protesters. Terence does geek-squad-type computer maintenance for a central Florida company; he’s got a wife and a newborn child, and he’s getting by. He came to the Ron Paul campaign via the usual route; disillusioned with mainstream politics and the Washington media, he surfed and he read and he decided that this little-known politician was the man who stood for his values.
“There are people out there who don’t have the time, or the energy, or the…the Internet to find things out for themselves,” he said. “They don’t take that time.”
And it isn’t just on the Republican side, in the Paul campaign, that I saw this kind of thing. On the Democratic side, the John Edwards campaign seemed, to me, to have been crafted specifically to appeal to those voters who felt they’d been left behind by their party. Edwards not only promised to eschew lobbyist donations and corporate bundlers but went out of his way to shed light on the kinds of manipulations that ran the Senate he served in. In fact, part of the Edwards stump speech in the fall of 2007 was an exposé of exactly the kind of behavior described in the congressional portions of this book—in particular, he talked about a slowdown of legislation that would have eased the way for more production of cheap generic pharmaceuticals, a slowdown effected by key members of his own Democratic Party who had accepted massive donations from the pharmaceutical industry. This was heretical behavior for a formerly “mainstream” Democrat, and Edwards’s admonition to audiences not to “replace corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats” led to standing ovations when I saw him in Iowa and New Hampshire that fall. Even longtime Democrats like Harold and Patricia White, an elderly couple from a small Iowan