The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [43]
I offer you more than your earthly father ever could.
For I am the perfect Father.
Every good gift that you receive comes from my hand.
My thoughts toward you are as countless as the sands on the seashore.
It went on like this for a while. By the time the recording was over, there was much sniffling and crying. After all this talk of wounds and this cathartic confession about our parents, hearing this crazy Mr. Clean voice assert himself as our eternal dad was too much for some of the people in the room—particularly when it ended like this:
My question is…Will you be my child? I am waiting for you.
Love, your dad.
Almighty God.
Some time later, we were dismissed. Back at the barracks, I found Dennis lying in a fetal position on his bunk, eyes shut. I stopped in front of him, thought about waking him, then thought the better of it, grabbed my stuff, and rushed out, not saying good-bye. Jose shook my hand warmly on the way out, then hurried away. Aaron I later saw walking with a blank look on his face back toward the barracks, but I never got a chance to speak with him again.
In the main building I saw big Maria, who had grown progressively cheerier throughout the weekend, laughing joyfully and embracing several women who presumably had been in her group. Earlier in the weekend I’d made it a point to wave to her whenever I passed and sit near her at meals when she was alone, but now she looked enraptured with new friendships and scarcely recognized me when I waved good-bye.
I hitched a ride home with Laurie and Janine, who had driven to the ranch in Janine’s car. “Wasn’t that recording wonderful?” Laurie said.
“Oh, yes,” said Janine. “You never heard that before?”
“No,” said Laurie.
“Neither have I,” I said.
Janine turned on some Christian tunes; I fell asleep in the backseat, mentally and physically exhausted. At the beginning of the weekend I’d been fairly bursting out of my skin from the stress of having to play this difficult role, plainly freaked out by the whole scene, but that was a distant memory now. I closed my eyes to the gentle acoustic strumming of Janine’s CD and slept a deep mannequin sleep.
BY THE END of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq war or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this—once you’ve gone this far—you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.
By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.
FOUR
Baghdad Interlude,
or
The Derangement at War
I’D BEEN IN IRAQ for close to two months, as part of an ongoing assignment for Rolling Stone. After