The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

by Matt Taibbi

  “So, did you decide to go to the Men of God program?” was the first thing she said to me.

  “Huh? What?” I said.

  “The Men of God program,” she said flatly. “We passed out a sheet at the meeting.”

  My mind raced. Men of God, right—the junior Promise Keepers–type deal for Cornerstone men. For anthropological reasons I wanted to go, but doubted I’d be able to, owing to an assignment in D.C. I was being packed off to.

  “Um, I don’t think I can make it,” I said.

  “I see,” she said, glaring.

  We went into the chapel—Joshua’s Generation met in a small chapel on the Cornerstone grounds, much smaller than the basketball-stadium-sized sanctuary and about the size of a neighborhood church. It even had stained-glass windows to bring out the small-town feel, although the stained glass looked somehow too new. The four of us slid awkwardly into a pew, Janine first, then me, then the watching Rebecca, then her doofus husband, Brian.

  The sermon began. In the previous times I’d seen him, Hagee the younger had seemed to follow the Bush model of political heredity, being both dumber and more vicious than his dad. This would be no exception.

  He began slowly, asking the crowd if there was anyone here who was concerned about global warming and the environment. Stupidly, unconsciously, I raised my hand. Still not completely awake, I turned to look at Janine, smiled, and then actually saw my hand raised.

  Fuck! I lowered it right away, but Rebecca caught me. Pastor Hagee then snorted and said something about being tired of being told that using nonrecyclable cans was destroying the world. I am not of the opinion that that is true, he said. Doesn’t sound right to me, he said. Then he mentioned the Oscars from the previous weekend, and the Oscar Al Gore received for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

  He asked if anyone had seen the excellent speech by our former vice president, spitting the words “vice president” out like they were dead flesh. When the chapel filled with hisses, he plowed on. “I felt a need to rebut this individual,” he said, and proceeded to rail against Gore, the environment, and global warming for a half hour.

  “These environmentalists,” he said, “they’re trying to tell you that somehow all of these terrible things are going to happen because of us. Something WE did.

  “They want to tell you,” he went on, “that it was America that did something bad, because they want to be able to tell us what we did wrong and send us a bill for it. China burns coal like—they burn so much coal, like it was nothing. But it’s all America’s fault, of course. If you ask anybody who knows whether America is a polluter, they’ll tell you, America is the cleanest country there is.”

  “Amen!” shouted the crowd.

  “Now,” he said, “why do they want you to believe this? Because they want to control what you do. They want to control where you go, what countries you go to, what cars you drive. They want to use the environment as a way to control the world!”

  “Amen!” I shouted.

  “I’ll tell you what they want to do,” he said. “They want to use the environment to force America to reduce its population. And how do they want to do that? Through abortion.”

  I was ready to cheer for that, too, except that I couldn’t figure out what the fuck he was talking about, so I kept my mouth shut. There were more Amens, though. Encouraged, the portly pastor now looked down at his pulpit and read from a bunch of paper sheets.

  “Time magazine says that the Sierra Club and others met with environmental leaders in Brazil in 1992 to discuss how to use the environment to reduce the American population from 175 million to 75 million, to control us. This was 1992. How many environmental laws have they passed since then?”

  I frowned. Come on, people, I thought. First of all, in 1992, the population of the United States was already well over 200 million. There’s no way such an article could possibly have existed. And indeed, when I went back and looked later on, the only mention in Time’s Earth Summit coverage of population control that I could find—amid otherwise massive and voluminous coverage of the summit participants’ proposals for greenhouse gas restrictions, sustainable development policies, preservation of genetic material, species protection, air quality, and dozens of other issues—was an item about how “in what is perhaps the worst example of bureaucratic obfuscation, the text at one point endorses the promotion of appropriate demographic policies—the nearest negotiators could come to confronting the explosive issue of population control.”

  The idea that someone at the Earth Summit was proposing cutting the American population by more than half ought to have struck even these people as absurd. Beyond that, the whole idea was counterintuitive. Not even environmentalists think the American population is threateningly large—not compared to Bangladesh, India, and China. But more interesting to me was the fact that Hagee felt so comfortable offering up these absurd fictions; he must have known that no one was going to call bullshit or bother to look up his “facts.”

  Hagee went on. “Then there was a law they tried to pass last week,” he began, “to make it mandatory to check for birth defects using amniocentesis. Now why would they want to check for birth defects? What is the only reason you would want to know if a baby has birth defects before birth? To abort. To abort.”

  I looked that one up, too. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act—which I had to assume was the piece of legislation he was talking about, since no other bill involving genetic screening popped up in Congress that week—was a law that I suppose could have, in the abstract, encouraged abortions. But it certainly had nothing to do with requiring prenatal screening. All the proposed bill would do is prevent health insurers and employers from discriminating on the basis of genetic information gleaned from medical tests. The general point of the bill was to alleviate concerns people might have about getting themselves or their fetuses tested for birth defects. Hagee didn’t have to misrepresent this bill—he could have said quite honestly what it was and still have been correct in saying that it encouraged abortions. But what’s interesting is that he didn’t do that; he just went the fictional route.

  Next he went after global warming, denouncing it as a bunch of bosh.

  “These people, what they do is, they tell you that something is a problem when it isn’t,” he said. “That is how they control you. And who else does that?”

  “The Devil!” some voices shouted.

  “The Devil, that’s right,” he said. “You know who else? Hitler did that. What did he say Europe’s problem was?”

  “Jews!” the voices cried out.

  “The Jews, that’s right. Now, were the Jews a problem in Europe?”

  No! No!

  “Of course not,” he said. “Of course the Jews weren’t a problem. And that’s exactly the same thing they’re doing with global warming!”

  “Hear hear!” shouted Brian, Rebecca’s husband, clapping enthusiastically.

  “Amen!” I shouted.

  Hagee smiled.

  “They say we’re all going to die because the ice caps are going to melt,” he snorted. “No we’re not. We just gonna get wet—IF they melt.”

  The crowd roared.

  “They want you to be afraid that aerosol is going to contaminate the planet,” he went on. “So what? Don’t worry about it. The earth belongs to God. And God…”

  The crowd finished the rest of his sentence along with him:

  “…did not instill us with an attitude of fear!”

  “Aerosol,” he sneered. “Aerosol destroying the earth. Ridiculous. Why, if aerosol could kill, everyone on the set with Jan Crouch of TBN woulda been dead a long time ago!”

  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 abs
olutely 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 lane and bowled. About halfway through the game, I leaned over to where she was sitting.

  “Did I ever tell you the story about my college roommate?” I said. “He was an environmentalist. Used to volunteer for the Sierra Club.”

  “The what?” she said.

  “The Sierra Club. It’s an environmentalist organization.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yuck.”

  “Yeah, he was a real jerk,” I said. “Always telling people what to do, what kind of food to buy, complaining about their garbage, accusing them of polluting. Always complaining about the air not being clean enough and such, saying there were all these poisons in the air. Really silly stuff. But the really obnoxious thing was, he used to drink beer and pee all over the place when he got drunk.”

  “That’s disgusting!” she said.

  “It was awful,” I said. “He’d just walk into a room, whip it out, and start peeing all over the rug. He’d be like, I dare you to stop me! He even did it in class once. There was one time—you’re not going to believe this, but he even did it at a wedding. He was drunk and after yelling at everyone at the wedding about all the wrapping paper and all the trees they’d killed to make it, he just walked up to the wedding cake right during the part where the bride and groom were dancing, and he just unzipped his pants and peed all over this huge ten-layer wedding cake. Even the little wax statue of the newlyweds fell over. And even after that he was still telling us what jerks we were for polluting. He was really obnoxious.”

  “He sounds like it,” she said.

  “The thing is,” I went on, “after the wedding thing, we realized something was wrong with him. Psychologically wrong, that is. Eventually they had him committed. They sent him away to a mental institution. But he was still really badly behaved even there.”

  Janine was looking over at the bowling alley. “I think you’re up,” she said.

  “But apparently he got out of his room one night,” I continued, ignoring her. “Seriously, I just heard about this for the first time a few years ago, I had fallen out of touch with him. I heard he got out of his room at the institution and he went downstairs to the kitchen. And somehow he crushed both of his hands in the door of a walk-in freezer. Broke all the bones in both of his hands!”

  “Um—”

  “And the worst part is, they took him to a hospital to get fixed, but guess what happened? He got a staph infection in both hands. Eventually, they had to chop off both of his hands at the wrist. Amputate, that is. So now he’s walking around with no hands.”

  I mimed a pair of stumps.

  Janine looked at me and gasped. “That’s…wow. I guess he can’t pee on stuff anymore. Well, I mean, he can, but he can’t aim.”

  “He can’t aim, that’s right,” I said thoughtfully as I look my turn. “It’s kind of funny, when you think about it, considering how he used to be. Obnoxious and all.”

  “Yeah!” she said. “That’s such a wild story!”

  “Anyway,” I said offhandedly, “he’s a Christian now.”

  “Oh, well, that’s good!” said Janine.

  “Yeah,” I said. “At least the story has a happy ending.”

  She walked up to the lane and bowled. Right down the middle, pins flying.

  “Strike!” she said, clapping.

  TEN

  Conspiracy Interlude II,

  or

  The Derangement of the American Left

  THE 9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT is not easily defined. The simplest definition of a Truther is probably someone who believes that the U.S. government shared some complicity, whether direct or indirect, in the 9/11 attack. In a broader sense, most Truthers believe the culprits to be a bund of neoconservatives that includes Bush, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz and is organizationally represented by groups like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). These neocons first secured the White House by means legal and illegal (with the Florida fiasco of 2000 greatly aiding their rise to power) and then set into motion a plan to launch a series of wars in the Middle East, a plan that involved either covertly aiding or actively participating in the bombing of the World Trade Center.

  Regarding the actual events of 9/11
, the theories espoused by Truthers vary significantly. Some believe in little more than the matador-defense LIHOP theory (in which Bush & Co. simply allowed the attacks to happen), others believe that the Pentagon was hit by a missile instead of a plane, while still others believe that the “planes” that crashed into the towers were not planes at all but high-tech holograms or video tricks (the “no-planes” theory). But almost all Truthers seem at least to accept one central idea, which is that the collapse of the towers was caused not by the planes but by a controlled demolition, planned long in advance and timed to coincide with the impact of the hijacked jets.

  As proof of motive, Truthers, like the ones I met in the diner, often point to a document called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” a policy paper about future defense strategies crafted by PNAC in September 2000. In particular, Truthers highlight a passage late in the document that reads as follows:

  Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.

  This single passage is considered a smoking gun in 9/11 Truth circles. The amazing thing is that the “transformation” envisioned in the PNAC document has absolutely nothing to do with the launching of energy wars in Mesopotamia or the institution of repressive domestic security laws like the Patriot Act. In fact, if you actually read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” what you find is a rather drab and conventional conservative policy paper seemingly written by a group of people who played too much Risk as kids, one that indulges heavily in masturbatory and oftentimes wildly inaccurate speculation about the shape of future military conflicts around the world and America’s ability to fight and win them. It is a paper about reconfiguring the cold war fighting force for the challenges of the twenty-first century, and while it spends a lot of time worrying about maintaining American preeminence, there’s no evidence in it for anything like the evil plan Truthers insist is in there.