The Great Derangement: We’re in it

One of our favorite writers is Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, whose 2008 book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, is due out in paperback next week.

The book’s subtitle doesn’t lie — Taibbi leads a truly terrifying expedition through Congress, the 9/11 Truth movement and the sad God seekers at Pastor John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in Texas. Although Taibbi’s book is set before the November 2008 election, its main argument is still true: The country has lost its shit.

Partly this is a media problem — with so much information, and yet sometimes so little quality information, targeted to so many disparate niches and persuasions, our political system is “doomed because voters were no longer debating one another using a commonly accepted set of facts.” What we have instead, he writes, is “a nation of reality shoppers, all shutting the blinds on the loathsome old common landscape to tinker with their own self-tailored and in some cases highly paranoid recipes for salvation and/or revolution.”

And as Taibbi shows, the country’s gone so insane that one election has little hope of fixing it. His reporting from the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives diagnoses our government as the source of this cancerous derangement. What happens on the House floor is clearly a joke, and the only thing that makes it bearable is that Taibbi’s writing is as funny as it is frightening.

Even when he recaps our local Westar scandal.