If journalism is the first draft of history, and history is argument without end, then Matt Taibbi has fired the opening salvo of a new argument about the current political and religious culture in the United States. I can just see grad school papers 20 years from now with titles like, “The Deranged Decade: The Hegemony of Myth in Political Manipulation, 2000-2008.”

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire is laced with gallows humor but also some sharp observations about certain sectors of American culture. What Taibbi is concerned with is the way in which Americans construct protective bubbles around themselves with narratives about the big bad world — which are more often than not delusional, deranged, and flat-out wrong. He arrives at this conclusion while reporting on the Iraq war as a “embedded” journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. While stationed at “Camp Liberty”– where 30-foot walls are constructed to protect the soldiers inside from attack (even though bombs are randomly being set off by Iraq insurgents) — Taibbi reasons:

Over time I started to feel in my bones that this weird walled-off archipelago was itself a profound metaphor of American domestic reality … the more I looked at them, the more they reminded me of the freaky-tall bulwarks on King Kong’s Skull Island: masterpieces of architectural overkill, the panic visible in each extra foot of protection, walls designed to keep something in, not out. In America we live in a bubble and the rest of the world is a dangerous mystery, about which many legends may be spread by those cunning and unscrupulous enough to bother. The outside world has become scary enough that most of our people have decided not even to bother trying to figure it out — which is how you end up with such lunacies like They hate us for our freedom and 9/11 was an inside job.

Taibbi takes one for the team (and that would be Team America) by not only embedding himself with U.S. troops in Iraq, but also in the Bible Belt as a convert to Cornerstone Church. He also takes us inside the U.S. government and confirms in one chapter what the likes of Ron Paul and Ralph Nader have been telling us for years: When it comes to the day-to-day business of the government, there is very little that differentiates the Republicans from the Democrats.

He has the unenviable task of faking his way through indoctrination and baptism as a born-again Christian. He often feels terrible about his fake identity, is appalled by the rampant hatred that permeates sermons that are supposed to “lift the spirits” but are often reminiscent of the “Two Minutes Hate” in Orwell’s 1984, and flummoxed by the lack of understanding of not only world geography but a basic understanding of the geography of the United States (one of his fellow converts had no idea where New England was, even after he rattled off the names of the states that comprise the region. Only when he mentioned the New England Patriots did she have a slight understanding of what he was talking about). (more…)