The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [5]
Gone will be the good old days of neat blue-state/red-state hatred—a nicely symmetrical storyline that has always appealed to the Crossfire/ American Gladiators sports-coverage mentality of the commercial media. In its place, at least temporarily, will be a chaos of lunatic enthusiasms and dead-end political movements to nowhere, with calls for invasions of Babylon and, on the other side, congressional investigations into nonexistent conspiracies. Meanwhile, Boeing, General Motors, and Ford will officially become Chinese companies, and OPEC will begin trading in the euro after American garrisons in Baghdad and Kabul fall to invaders armed with nineteenth-century weapons.
That’s one possible future, anyway, suggested by the lunatic present. Of course, the thing about America is that you never know. We have a history of rising to the occasion, but the theory of this book is that history eventually stops repeating itself, and what better time for that to happen than after a massive, nationally televised attack that most of an entire country apparently missed the point of? When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes; real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible.
The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and has instead turned into a problem of information. Are the right messages reaching our collective brain? Are the halves of that brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? It’s a hell of a problem for a nuclear power.
THERE IS ONE SCENE in this book that is a little different from all the rest. One morning in Baghdad, a group of earnest, positive, patriotic young soldiers prepares for a day at work. Enjoying the presence of a reporter, they put on a cheerful, Up with People–esque show for the cameras, with each grunt wittily introducing himself, giving his nickname and characterizing his place in the group. There’s a scene like this in every American war movie, in fact every group-adventure-type film: one by one you meet the gritty crew of Ripley’s ship in Alien, or the disparate teenage cast of the latest Friday the 13th film: where one’s the tough guy, another’s the clown, a third is the brooding dissident. “I’m the token African guy,” says Jaleel Ibrahim, a black kid from New York, in his turn in front of the mic. “And I’m Sergeant Russell,” says the next soldier. “I am soft-spoken and wholesome, but also offended easily.”
They’re good kids, all of them, despite the self-conscious act. You see, this part, the part where they talk to the war reporter, they have a frame of reference for that. They understand it, they know what it’s all about. So they’re comfortable and funny in front of the camera, and they even find a way to be civil and friendly to the antiwar reporter, who despite it all is also a character they know.
But a few hours later we’re visiting a police station in an unfriendly section of Baghdad, and somewhere nearby there’s a huge explosion. None of the Iraqi police are going out to investigate, they’re too scared. And these kids, who are supposed to be there directing the Iraqis, are sitting there in the station, with bombs going off nearby, and small-arms fire too, and they have no idea what the fuck is going on. They don’t know why they’re there and they don’t know who it is who’s blowing shit up a hundred yards away. They know what they know, and they don’t know what they don’t know, and what they don’t know is turning out to be the important