The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [64]
Thus a Democratic Congress elected to clean up corruption and end a war will instead further the same corruption and continue the war, because that is what the people they are really beholden to expect of them. And if that Congress debates these issues publicly at all, the debate is mainly about how best to create the appearance of real action, i.e., how best to satisfy the voters’ demand for a withdrawal without actually doing anything. Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians’ jobs. The driving motivation of all Washington politicians is to quell or deflect that power, and this is visible even in such a terrible, immediate emergency as the Iraq war, when one would think that some kind of civic instinct would kick in, for five minutes or so at least. But no: instead, a newly conquering congressional majority armed with a fresh mandate essentially spent its first year in office trying to stay on the right side of public anger while maintaining business as usual; it was very plain that the party viewed its end-the-war mandate as a burden, not a privilege.
When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.
SEVEN
BIBLE STUDY
I WAS LOSING CONTROL of my Christian mannequin. I’d snap awake during a service and catch him clapping his hands—or, worse, with his hands up in full Freeze-Motherfucker mode, a dumb smile frozen on his face, singing along:
To God…be the glo-r-r-r-y…To Go-o-o-d be the glo-o-o-o-ry…!
It was really becoming a problem. Before I came down to Texas, a female photographer friend of mine from Houston had cautioned me, “If you start going all Jesusy on us, we’re going to come down and put a bullet in your brain.”
“For my own good, I know,” I said.
“Fuck that,” she said. “For our own good. And don’t for a minute think I’m kidding.”
But here’s the thing. Once you’ve spent enough time in this world, and sat through enough ball-numbingly dull sermons about The End of Everything and The Worthlessness of Me, you start catching yourself being very glad for the smallest reprieves. Specifically, after enough desperation and misery and corporate self-abnegation, and picking up the phone late at night to listen to fellow Christians wish openly that they can pray their way out of next week’s bills, and drinking cheap powdered presweetened iced tea out of plastic cups in squalid strip-mall chain restaurants with self-flagellating, past-middle-aged depressives who think Satan is the reason their kids don’t call them anymore—after enough of that, a full-on, million-piece-chorus, John Hagee Sunday spectacular starts to seem like a goddamned Rolling Stones concert.
Or so I told myself one Sunday, when—as I wandered aimlessly with the cattle flow of worshippers (or, to use the T. D. Jakes pronunciation popular around here, “wauwshp-s”) into Hagee’s megachurch—I caught my mannequin self actually looking forward to the Sunday service. I had a big postoperative smile on my face and was idly taking stock of the various odd sensual delights of Sunday worship: the cool sanitary air of the huge modern arena grazing my skin, the hypnotically faint organ music coaxing the crowd into its seats, the razor-sharp acoustics, the incipient promise of belting vocals and huge choral arrangements.
The realization that I was actually enjoying myself on some level hit me like an eighteen-wheeler. I was horrified, obviously, but I also realized that I had passed an important milestone on whatever journey it was that I was supposed to be taking.
I could clearly remember that when I first started coming to church months before, I couldn’t even listen to the music we all sang along to during services. In fact, I wasn’t even sure