The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [9]
That was what I’d come here to find out. While Washington was still basking in the glow of the Big Win and starting its revolting 2008 party way too early (headline on the Washington Post opinion page today: “An Iowan You Should Know,” about candidate Tom Vilsack. I should know now? In December of 2006! Are these people insane?), I decided to pick a spot on the map, go there, and get retarded. If the country was going to flip out, I didn’t want to be left behind.
THE MUTE BUTTON was still on, but I gathered that the deskbound TV preacher was still blathering about Sudan. They kept alternating close-ups of his face with shots of balloon-headed Sudanese kids meekly waving the flies out of their eyes. I looked down at my notebook and saw my own handwriting jump back at me: PRAYER LINE (210) 490–5100.
I grabbed my cell phone and dialed the number. Three rings, then a recorded voice answered:
“Thank you for calling John Hagee Ministries. All of our prayer partners are currently busy. You may have called at a peak period. However, your call will be answered in the order it was received…”
I frowned and started doodling in my notebook. A year and a half ago I watched a British reporter at the Michael Jackson trial draw a picture of a knife plunging into a dog’s head during the cross-examination of Larry King. Since then I can’t stop drawing the same thing. I’m now beginning to wonder if the Brit caught the disease from someone else. Perhaps this goes back thousands of years. After a few minutes I heard a click and a young man’s voice came on the line:
“Hello, John Hagee Ministries,” he said.
“Yeah, hi,” I said. “I’d like to make a prayer request.”
“Sure,” he said. “What are we praying for?”
I paused. When dealing with the kind of people who think Left Behind is really possible and who think Noah really was six hundred years old when the flood came, there is a strong temptation to ham it up, fuck with them a little, offer answers that will at least make them blink once or twice before they swallow them whole. I’ll confess to doing this throughout my stay in Texas, and I don’t feel a need to apologize for it—I live in this country, too, and sometimes I can’t help being angry about how dumb and mean our culture has become, how fast that meanness and dumbness is expanding, and how determined some Jesus-culture merchants are that people like me should not escape it. And so from time to time that anger would come out, in a tall tale or two that would pop out of my mouth in churchgoing company. But hilariously, the joke would mostly end up cutting both ways. I’d say the craziest, stupidest stuff, trying like hell to get a rise out of people, and not only would I not get one, I’d for the most part be completely ignored—smiled and nodded at, and then just waved on through into my seat in the megachurch. Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.
That’s the way things work in America. You can literally stick a fork into your own eye in public, and so long as your check clears, no one will even bat an eye. There was a lot of this sort of thing in my Texas experience, and it made for a strangely harmonious undertone to my relations with the locals: I kept sticking a fork in my own eye over and over again, and over and over again my new friends would smile like nothing was happening. You can say a lot of very weird shit when you’re a Brother in Christ, so long as you don’t forget to sing along at the right times.
In that regard, the “prayer request” I ended up making was for a fictional ex-wife who I said had run out on me. I told my prayer line counselor that my betrothed had thrown me over for a Jewish ACLU lawyer named Schatz—that she had jumped in his Saab and run away with him to Paris, to take the Bateau-Mouche ride she said I could never give her. I further told my counselor that I didn’t know what “Bateau-Mouche” meant, but I knew it warn’t Christian. When I was finished with my story,