BOOK: 'The Great Derangement'
BOOK REVIEW
MATT TAIBBI is worried about us. He may be a wiseguy journalist for Rolling Stone, that famous "degenerate liberal rag," but he fears a madness spreading across the American mind, and a new wave of paranoia and hunger for the End Times. He's watching as the masses retreat to the margins and suspects they're not coming back.
Witness the apocalyptic visions from the left and right, as many take comfort in the White House line that "they hate our freedoms," in 9/11 conspiracy theories, in the idea that the antichrist walks the Earth and he just might be a Muslim leader looking for a nuke. This is what Taibbi calls "The Great Derangement," his title for another election-year book, even if our 2008 presidential pretenders Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama make only brief appearances. Taibbi's subject is bigger than that. He's obsessed with what he sees as an increasing state of panic and corruption in the era of Bush.
He tells the story through vignettes of his time spent reporting in Iraq, at Bible study meetings in the Texas Hill Country and by examining rampant cynicism in the halls of Congress in the days after Katrina in 2005. In his introduction, Taibbi admits to worrying that he will become infamous as nothing more than "a kind of lefty/alternative hatchet man -- a liberal Ann Coulter." Conservative activists will likely see him that way, but a crucial difference is Taibbi's nasty habit of actually reporting from the scene, and then hurling terrible insults at whatever guilty Republicans or Democrats he finds.
Not everyone is a fan of his cruel jokes and playful invective. Recently on the Huffington Post, Erica Jong suggested that Taibbi's physical descriptions of Hillary Clinton ("flabby" arms) represented some Oedipal perversion; he responded by listing some lines he's written about men in politics: Rudy Giuliani ("Draculoid"), Tom DelLay ("balding incubus"), Mike Huckabee ("an oversize Muppet").
This brutal treatment of his subjects, and the fact that he writes about politics for Rolling Stone, continues to inspire comparisons to the gonzo screeds of Hunter S. Thompson. But ruthless reportage may be closer to the tradition of H. L. Mencken. The best chapters of the book have Taibbi operating more as a participatory, George Plimpton-style journalist, even going undercover as a congregant of John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in San Antonio.
