by Matt Taibbi
Sirota, God bless him, kept haranguing Sanders to use the power of the filibuster to bully Harry Reid into keeping the timeline in. After all, apart from being able to get $500 million with an offhand conversation, each senator also has vast procedural power, and it seemed to be the judgment of the reporters in the room that Sanders should use that power on the war issue. I got the strong sense that the senator, just from a strategic standpoint, wanted nothing to do with talk like that; he wanted first to get his feet wet in the Senate and if he was going to take a stand on anything, it was going to be on one of “his” issues, like veterans’ benefits or heating oil assistance, not the war. That made sense to me, but the people in the room wouldn’t leave him alone.
“People say, ‘Let’s end the war right now,’” he said. “Okay, fine. How?”
“Well,” said Sirota, “the Washington Post this morning is reporting that the new supplemental is going to have the timeline taken out, or reduced to a nonbinding, advisory timeline.” He paused. “They’re apparently doing this because conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson are threatening to not vote for any bill that has a timeline in it. Let me ask you this—can your side play a similar role in these proceedings? Or does the leadership only listen to the Ben Nelsons of the world?”
Sanders sighed. “That’s a difficult question,” he said. “I suppose you have to take it on a case-by-case basis. On the one hand, you don’t want the president to get a great victory, but on the other hand you don’t always want to be on the losing end—”
“Let me put it to you another way,” interrupted Sirota. “In general, does the leadership listen to the conservatives like Nelson much more than people like you? Is there a way to play it like he plays it?”
Sanders looked grimly over at Sirota.
“Look, I’ve been here three and a half months,” he sighed. “I like Harry Reid. I think sometimes you have to put yourself in his shoes. Sure, you can say to the Ben Nelsons, ‘Ben, we don’t want you to be in the coalition anymore.’ And then what? You walk over to Mitch McConnell and say, Congratulations, you’re the new majority leader. That’s the reality of the situation. You want to do that? We can do that tomorrow.”
“But—”
“So given that reality, what do you do? What do you do?”
The room fell silent. I looked down at my notebook. The word “reality” had been written about fifty times in the past hour. Every time he used the word “reality,” it seemed, a little life went out of the room. Suddenly I was confused about something.
“Senator,” I said, “isn’t there a chance this whole thing could blow up in the faces of the Democrats? I mean, if they were planning on compromising all along, if they were always going to cave after the veto, then won’t it look like they were just playing politics with funding for the troops this whole time? If you were always going to compromise in the end, isn’t it fair to ask—what was this?”
Sanders sighed again.
“That’s a good question,” he said.
In the end the whole drama of the Democrat-controlled Congress publicly musing over whether or not to fund the war turned out to be a classic Washington mutual masturbation session, a prolonged exercise in favor trading and power maintenance that had as little to do with actually serving the desires of the electing public as a Martian zoning hearing would have. The “reality” narrative that even an honest guy like Bernie Sanders has to play along with to survive turns out to be no more rational or grounded in fact than the conspiracy narrative sustaining the 9/11 Truth Movement—in both cases you have a group of people whose community is defined by its members’ common deference to a vast range of plainly bogus assumptions. Put five people who believe the Twin Towers were mined together in a room, and you have a 9/11 Truther meeting; put together five people who think they won’t be able to golf in Scotland anymore if they vote “against the troops,” and you have a caucus of Democratic senators. The fact that the internal logic—the “reality”—of congressional procedure has drifted so far from the needs and expectations of voters is highly convenient, of course, for the entrenched bureaucratic class in Washington; once you’ve created a situation where elected officials feel like they have to kowtow to this kind of artificial reality, you can find a way to mold that reality to the needs of the D.C. job-holding class and the financial interests supporting them.
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 be
fore, I couldn’t even listen to the music we all sang along to during services. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was music; so atonal and emotionally neutral, it was music that didn’t even attempt to engage and excite the senses. Instead it sort of just lapped over you, like a saline solution. Blah blah blah…the blood of Jesus…blah blah blah…the blood of Jesus…The music was so bad, in fact, that the empiricist in me spent weeks mulling over possible explanations for why and how the congregation spent so much time singing these horrid tunes.
I even considered that some sort of mass hypnosis was going on, that the repetitious chanting (mixed with some effects that I could see the church leaders clearly were manipulating, like the carefully timed dimming of lights) was some sort of clever way of numbing the brain and heightening suggestibility.
But now I could see that that wasn’t really it at all. It wasn’t the music that numbed you. It was the relentless, self-annihilating message of the church—the constant driving home of the idea that you were nothing, God was everything, and the End was coming—that did the numbing. Even if you weren’t inclined to fight it, it was intellectually exhausting and depressed the senses. You felt freed from the guilty burdens of Self, but once Self was safely in its cage, you were left with nothing but meat and bones as tools for listening and enjoying. You were listening not with your ear but with your cerebellum, your brain stem—with your horseshoe-crab self. And suddenly music that couldn’t have sucked worse a few months back sounds sweet, and inviting, and pretty, like it was written just for you, which incidentally it was.
I had come to church late that morning and so didn’t sit down on the first floor with Laurie and Janine, as I usually did. Instead I went up to the balcony, whipped out my notebook and Bible, and prepared to receive the Wisdom. I sang some songs along with the crowd, and then Pastor Hagee trotted out a young female vocalist to sing a solo tune called “The Cross Said It All.”
Churchgoing Matt purred; from the balcony, the vocalist looked a little like a young Linda Ronstadt (I would later see her up close and be troubled by the size of “her” Adam’s apple). The tune had a stunning chorus:
He ain’t never done me nothing but good…
God used three nails and—two pieces of wood!
I chuckled, wondering if the song’s author had, like Salieri, thanked the Lord for that inspired rhyme. Then I sat down with the crowd and listened as Hagee ascended to the pulpit.
By any standard, Pastor John Hagee is an orator of unusual ability. His physical form is clownish; apart from the central-casting head of white, swept-back preacher hair, he has short, stubby arms and the body of a beach ball. He is one of those perfectly round fat men whose whole body seems like a platform for a straining top suit button that might at any moment shoot out skyward like a champagne cork. But when it talks, this beach ball has tremendous oratorical range, zooming back and forth from wry folksy humor to humility to booming fire-and-brimstone hellfire and back to humor again with effortless ease. When he asks for money, he sounds like he’s asking you the time. John Hagee could, as they say down here in Texas, talk a dog off a meat truck.
Hagee started off slowly. He announced that today was the beginning of a new three-sermon series called “The Edge of Time.” Right on cue, a flurry of helpers appeared out of nowhere to put up a billboard behind Hagee labeled “THE EDGE OF TIME” that contained several huge cartoonish illustrations, including the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and “the woman” of Revelation 12. The illustrations, as illustrations frequently do in fundamentalist Christian media, recalled the covers of Dungeons and Dragons modules. Hagee explained that the sermon series was going to help reveal to us the mysteries of “God’s clock” and unravel the “advanced mathematics” of the Bible, in this way helping us to understand that 2007 was going to be a “special year” in God’s plan. I got the distinct impression that Hagee was hinting that something big was going to happen soon, End Times–wise.
Hagee spent this first sermon talking mostly about the Four Horsemen and this mysterious woman of Revelation 12. He read from the scripture:
1 Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars…
5 And she bore a male child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron…
Hagee noted that some people interpreted the woman in Revelation 12 as being the church.
“But the church didn’t give birth to Christ,” he said. “Christ gave birth to the church. It is not the church.”
And he gave another reason why it was not the Virgin Mary, as was commonly assumed. It was, however, Israel, and this had something to do with some previous scripture involving Joseph and Israel carrying eleven stars—only Joseph himself was the twelfth star, or something like that. It was an awesome thing to watch, the way Hagee just dove up to his neck in all of this hilarious horseshit and passionately sold the audience on it actually meaning something with a perfect deadpan delivery. The audience cooed. He went back to the Four Horsemen and pointed to the fourth horse.
“This is the Pale Horse,” he warned. “He is the color of rotting flesh. He will be given the power to destroy 25 percent of the population. This is going to happen during the Tribulation. You do not want to be here.”
From here Hagee went into a long spiel about the difference between the Christ of the Gospels and the Christ of Revelation. This is an important point for people who are not fundamentalist Christians and want to understand them. The Gospels Christ is basically a long-haired, touchy-feely hippie who goes around being nice to people. The Christ of Revelation is built like the Rock and roams the universe braining sinners with lead pipes. Fundamentalists clearly prefer the Revelation Christ. Hagee explained:
“In Matthew he is the lamb being led to the slaughter. In Revelation he is the LION OF JUDAH! He is going to rule with a rod of iron!”
And when that rod-bearing Christ comes back, us unbelievers had better fucking duck:
“How is Jesus going to crush secular humanism and liberalism and anti-Semitism and atheism?” Hagee asked. “He is not going to ask the Supreme Court to put the Ten Commandments up in our courthouses. He is going to tell them, and they will bow down to him like children.”
The crowd roared.
“And those judges who let men get married—he is going to cast them down into the pit of Hell to be roasted for all eternity like they deserve!”
I raised hands in a full Freeze-Motherfucker. Go Jesus! Waste those judges!
But just when it seemed that Hagee had his crowd right where he wanted them, he switched gears and began talking about Iran and Israel. Hagee is a subtle operator. Whenever he mentions the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it is always moments after a long tirade about Satan. He will give hints about the Antichrist’s identity—he is not an American, says Hagee, but he is a smooth talker.
“He will come preaching peace,” said Hagee, “and he will sign treaties that he has no intention of keeping.”
“Like Muslims!” someone behind me whispered.
And just as the crowd was ruminating over the possible identity of the Antichrist, Hagee switched gears and dropped a bombshell on the crowd. “Iran’s president is planning a nuclear holocaust, and how our empty-headed leaders in Washington don’t see that, I don’t know!” he grumbled.
From there he went on for a while about Israel and Iran. I felt the energy leaving the hall. The people in this church come to services for help in dealing with their own problems, which of course are legion. They are there to find a reason for living amid the financial struggle, the constant battles with sin and despair, or romantic disappointment, loneliness, abuse, addiction. They could give a shit about Israel and they could give a shit about Iran. And so, while Hagee worked himself up into a frenzy about Iran, the crowd only cheered politely. This was true even at the climax:
“And now comes a new Hitler,” roared the pastor, “and his name is Ahmadinejad. Iran MUST BE STO
PPED!!!”
Polite clapping from the crowd.
Hagee frowned slightly. After attending these sessions, I could only say the man is a con man—a very good one, of course, but a con man nonetheless. His job is to deliver Middle American Christians in support of pro-Israeli policies. In Washington, John Hagee is a political operator whose influence stems from a close relationship with AIPAC, the Israeli lobby (which had Hagee give an address last summer) and various AIPAC-connected politicians like John McCain (who would later that year address Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, group). There is talk that Hagee has been supported financially by certain members of the AIPAC board; one former AIPAC employee told me that Hagee had been the recipient of significant donations in the past. All outward appearances, therefore, point to Hagee as a canny operator, a run-of-the-mill kuntry preecher who found a Washington inside-baseball niche (delivering the Christian vote for Israel) and ran with it all the way to close access to Congress and the White House. Indeed, in 2005 and 2006, reports began to surface that Hagee’s CUFI had held a series of “informal meetings” with White House officials about America’s Middle East policy. In order to advance his agenda, Hagee hired a long-standing D.C. political operative named David Brog to lobby his cause on the Hill; Brog is a former chief of staff for Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, former Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. All of this activity appears designed to further Hagee’s aim of turning CUFI into a Christian AIPAC—which is a fairly strange and ambitious goal for a preacher whose congregation has probably never heard of AIPAC.
In that regard it takes some serious skills to get eighteen thousand Texan fundamentalists cheering, even robotically, for the Star of David. Hagee has those skills, but he can only take things so far. It’s garden-variety domestic despair that keeps the flock coming in, and he can only leave that theme for so long.