Book Review: Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement

In the pointy-headed northeastern America of my experience there were no legends of wandering prophets, no dinner-table discussions about personal salvation. But in the rest of the country you had this weird dichotomy, an advanced industrial economy confidently riding the superconductor and the microchip into the space age while most of its population hurtled backward away from the Enlightenment, living out a Canterbury Tales-type quest for revelation in a culture dominated by superstition and mystery.

Reading Matt Taibbi always reminds me of the infamous scene in Dr. Strangelove in which Slim Pickens is riding the H-bomb to certain death: there's a certain bitter, wild, laughing-on-the-way-to-destruction bravado about the fireworks of the Rolling Stone contributor's biting observations and spectacular writing skills. Nowhere is this more on display than in his current offering, The Great Derangement.

In the introduction to the book, Taibbi explains his roundabout journey to the current version: first, he explains, he was going to pen a "survey of the worst people in American politics," but he feared being pigeon-holed as the left's answer to Anne Coulter, so he wiggled out of that one, pitching to the publisher a book about how the red/blue divide is a trumped-up, over-covered piece of faux divisiveness that is serving the powers-that-be. In his own words, he explains how that got off course: "I made it about eleven thousands words into that effort before realizing that even I had no idea what the f__k I was talking about." Granted, that hasn't stopped enough authors in the past, but it stopped this one. So he proposed a year-long diary of attending Congressional sessions, but realized after plunging into the project that his commitment to Rolling Stone meant he would have to travel and leave DC too much to do the job right, so this project was abandoned as well after it had begun. But during these assigned journeys as national affairs correspondent that took him away from the nation's bubbled capital, he began to tune in to the mirror images he saw in the left and right extremes in our political culture, which became the germ of the book we now have in hand:

The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and instead turned into a problem of information. Are the right messages reaching our collective brain? Are the halves of that brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? It's a hell of a problem for a nuclear power.

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April 24, 2009

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