The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [7]
At which point Abraham and his people leave, and a few chapters later he gets to go into the tent of his wife’s handmaiden Hagar and make a baby with her. This seems like a great deal for Abraham—avoid execution, get a great trade-in deal for your wife, then bang her handmaiden—but I’m not sure I see where the lesson about deserving and dreaming is here. No such problem for Pastor John Hagee.
“You see, it happened to A-BRA-HAAM, it can happen to you!” he shouts. “Nothing is impossible to those who have faith!”
Down at the bottom of the screen there’s a notation. “PRAYER LINE: (210) 490–5100.” I write that down, too, marking it with a smiley face.
The show ends shortly after that and another, less talented preacher—his Carrot Top–esque shtick is preaching seated at a desk—comes on and starts babbling about the Christian children in the Sudan being kidnapped at birth and forced to convert to Islam. Here in South Texas everyone for five hundred miles in every direction is a Christian, but they’re constantly finding ways to think of themselves as a besieged minority. You hear a lot about our oppressed brothers and sisters in Africa, India, the Middle East. They’re ideal objects of sympathy because they’re helpless, they’re poor, and it would take them at least twenty years to reach San Antonio even if they started swimming today.
Anyway, I hit the mute button, lean back in my chair, look around at my shitty room, and sigh.
IT’S DECEMBER 2006 and I’m now on hiatus, after spending the whole fall covering the midterm elections for my depraved liberal magazine, Rolling Stone. I’m here in Texas to work out the answer to a question that has been germinating in my mind for some time, and which came to a head after the elections.
Back in the East Coast media world where I come from—an ugly place where nothing grows but scum, lichens, and Jonathan Franzen—the sweeping electoral victory by the Democrats was greeted with a tremendous sigh of relief, as if it were a sign that our endlessly self-correcting, essentially centrist American polity had finally come to its senses. In that world, there was optimism because the people had finally derailed that nutty Bush revolution, because the country had apparently seen the light about a pointlessly bloody and outrageously expensive war in Iraq, and because the cautious yuppieism of the Democratic Party had been triumphantly rehabilitated, at least temporarily quelling the potentially internationally embarrassing specter of terminal one-party rule. The pendulum was swinging back, yin was morphing back into yang. American politics moved in cycles, and the latest conservative cycle had finally ended.
The election results were being sold, in other words, as a triumph of the American system, of American democracy. Just like the producers for Monday Night Football, the counry’s political elite likes things best when the teams are evenly matched. As far as the press was concerned, the best thing about the Democratic bounce-back in the midterms was that it set up a great 2008. Even odds, or maybe Dems-1, to reach the White House. American politics had never been in better shape.
I knew better. I had been all around the country in the last year and I knew that the last thing these elections represented was a vote of confidence in the American system. Out There, in states both blue and red, the People were boarding the mothership, preparing to leave this planet for good. The media had long ignored the implications of polls that showed that half the country believed in angels and the inerrancy of the Bible, or of the fact that the Left Behind series of books had sold in the tens of millions. But on the ground the political consequences of magical thinking were becoming clearer. The religious right increasingly saw satanic influences