The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
Matt Taibbi, . . Spiegel & Grau, $24 (269pp) ISBN 978-0-385-52034-8
With his trademark mordant wit, journalist Taibbi explores the “black comedy” of the American polis, where a citizenry shunted out of the political process seeks solace in “conspiratorial weirdness and Internet-fueled mysticism.” Trained from birth to be excellent consumers, Americans have become experts in “mixing and matching news items to fit [their] own self-created identities,” according to the author, who embeds himself in these pockets of people as he travels to the Congress press gallery, Iraq, meetings of the 9/11 Truth Movement, and goes undercover at a Christian Retreat. He pillories born-again Christians and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, concluding that despite their differences: “Both groups were and are defined primarily by an unshakeable belief in the inhumanity of their enemies on the other side; the Christians seldom distinguished between Islamic terrorism and, say, Al Gore–style environmentalism, while the Truthers easily believed that reporters for the
Reviewed on: 03/17/2008
Genre: Nonfiction