The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [87]
Janine laughed out loud at that one, clapping her silly little hands. For the first time since I’d met her, she was pissing me off. The TBN joke wasn’t even that funny.
He went on for a little while longer, then abruptly ended the sermon. Janine and Rebecca, as we filed out, immediately started babbling about something that had absolutely nothing to do with global warming or the environment or anything. It was as if the whole sermon had passed straight through their skulls. I interrupted and asked them what they thought of the sermon. Janine shrugged, then asked me what I thought.
“Me?” I said. “Oh, I’m stoked. I feel like going out and polluting right now!”
She laughed. “Polluting right now,” she said. “That’s a good one.”
No it isn’t, for fuck’s sake! I thought.
They then dropped the subject again and went right back to their gibberish. Rebecca started showing us some prayer journal she kept containing her “thoughts,” which I was afraid even to look at. Her handwriting was perfectly round, like a fourth-grader’s—the booklet had a little picture on the front (it wasn’t a unicorn, but it was something of that ilk), plus a scriptural quotation. I could barely hear what she was talking about—my head was spinning from Hagee’s sermon. As I struggled to keep my focus, straining to listen to the two babbling Christian ladies—one a housewife, one angling to be one—something came to me in a flash. I remembered suddenly a vicious argument I’d had with my father once when I was a teenager and I felt he wasn’t taking me seriously as a grownup. It was an incomplete thought, something about feeling free to be angry because I felt I wasn’t being listened to anyway. If no one’s listening to you, why not let it all hang out? Why be fair? Why be measured? And suddenly something clicked. If you’re here, why not hate an environmentalist? Why not hate him out loud? Like he would ever come here anyway to do anything but laugh. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on! Fuck them all!
Or not? In a flash the “clicking” disappeared and I was back to feeling disoriented and confused. Janine was saying something to Rebecca.
“I used to keep my thoughts in a diary, too,” she said. “And I used to organize my prayers. I used to ask God for things. I remember this one time, I asked God for a car. I just pictured to myself what kind of car I wanted, exactly that kind of car, and I prayed and I prayed and I asked God for that car, and he delivered it to me!”
“You see!” Rebecca said. “It works!”
“Of course it works,” Brian said. “It always works. We just don’t always see it—but we know it.”
“How did God give you the car?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean,” I said, “did you see an ad or something?”
Janine told a story about a friend of the family selling it to her.
“But it was exactly that car,” she said.
“A used Buick Regal?” I asked. “That’s what you prayed for?”
“Well, I mean, it was in good condition,” she said.
“Well, in that case, of course,” I said.
Janine smiled. We all stood around for a few minutes longer, and then after a time Janine asked me if I wanted to join her family at a bowling alley. Her daughter, her dad, and some other folks were there. She invited Rebecca and Brian, too, but they clearly didn’t want to go.
“We, uh, have to go to Wal-Mart,” said Rebecca.
“Uh-huh,” said Janine.
“Get some things,” Rebecca said. “There’s a list…”
We left them behind and went to the bowling alley, where we shared Diet Cokes, chatted, and bowled a string with her family. I explained to her, as we went up to the counter to get our bowling shoes, that where I came from, they bowled something called candlepins, with a skinnier sort of pin and a smaller ball; when she asked where that was, I said New England. To which she asked me if I meant someplace outside of America. I said no, explaining that New England meant Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
Still nothing. Finally I mentioned the New England Patriots, and she nodded, understanding. Oh, I see, she said. We went back to the