The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [80]
But President Bush was a man on a mission. He had been convinced by a tiny group of advisers that throwing “the long bomb”—attempting to transform the most dangerous Arab state—is a geopolitical game-changer.
It is not a good sign when even your supporters don’t even bother to take your cover story seriously. And yet that was the position the Bush administration was in by 2003–4. No one except his most dug-in Republican loyalists took anything his people said or did at face value. When the administration submitted its “Clear Skies” plan to Congress, who among us didn’t automatically know that it was a giveaway to polluters? Or that “Healthy Forests” was somehow going to result in more trees being cut down? America by the early years of this century was a confusing kaleidoscope of transparent, invidious bullshit, a place where politicians hired consultants to teach them to “straight talk,” where debates were decided by inadvertent coughs and smiles and elections were resolved via competing smear campaigns, and where network news programs—subsidized by advertisements for bogus alchemist potions like Enzyte that supposedly made your dick grow by magic—could feature as a lead story newly released photos of the Tom Cruise love child, at a time when young American men and women were dying every day in the deserts of the Middle East.
The message of all of this was that Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before. A factory worker in suburban Ohio now needed to understand the cultures of places like Bangalore and Beijing if he wanted to know why he’d lost his job. Which, incidentally, he probably had. Now broke, or under severe financial pressure, with no community leaders, no community, no news he can trust, Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him.
What story is he going to tell?
NINE
PEAK EXPERIENCE
THERE WAS a weird scene at Bible study on an otherwise uneventful evening. A new guy had joined the group, let’s call him Ron. Ron was overjoyed to be in the group. He had the glow of a person hitting an early peak in his Christian experience, although he was still very much a person to be pitied; he’d had a family tragedy many years before. But throughout the Bible-study session he kept raising his hand and making it plain to everyone how thrilled he was to be here with all of us.
“You know,” he said, “we all of us are in the Body of Christ, not just here in San Antonio but all over the country, and I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be here sharing this time with all of you. I feel such love in my heart and I can really feel the spirit of the Lord in here tonight. I can even feel it on my skin!”
He tapped the exposed skin of his arm. Ron was a white-haired, shortish man in his fifties, with a mustache and glasses, the formerly wayward younger brother of a longtime group member, now a full-blooded Christian on the Right Path. He’d been Lost and was so happy to be Found again, he couldn’t be silent about it. The crowd ate him up.
“We’re overjoyed to have you here, too, Ron,” said Richard, scratching his beard.
“Thank you,” he said. “God bless you.”
The meeting went on. The “Bible lesson” turned out to be a reading of Deuteronomy 19, which to me seemed like a fairly arcane and legalistic section of the Bible, involving God’s instructions with regard to “cities of refuge.” In biblical times, if a man were to kill someone accidentally, he was supposed to flee to a city of refuge, where he would be safe from