The Great Derangement: We're in it
Wed., Jan. 7 2009 @ 12:33PM
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.
Taibbi uses Westar to illustrate how campaign donors buy off congressmen and senators. The Westar example, he says, was a "landmark nonmoment in congressional history," because "although it should have been a huge story, it fizzled to nothing and all the guilty got away with everything, as usual."
In the spring and summer of 2003, he reminds us:
Taibbi quotes from an internal memo from Westar VP Doug Lawrence to executive VP Douglas Lake:
The case in D.C., might have stopped there, but Wittig ended up doing time -- today, he goes back to prison to finish his sentence for bank fraud. Local coverage of the Westar scandal focused primarily on allegations that Wittig and Lake looted the company they were supposed to be running.
Taibbi fills in the blanks from a Washington perspective. Watching the proceedings from the press section of the House gallery, where few other observers bother to witness the looting of our country, Taibbi finds plenty of other examples to show that when it comes to our political system-- all of us, Democrat, Republican, independent, whatever -- are irrefutably fucked.
Many of the people he's met in the course of his reporting, he writes, are beginning to realize that "all of us have been suckers all these years. Maybe that simple observation is our path back to reality, if it's not too late." We'll see. -- C.J. Janovy
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.
Taibbi uses Westar to illustrate how campaign donors buy off congressmen and senators. The Westar example, he says, was a "landmark nonmoment in congressional history," because "although it should have been a huge story, it fizzled to nothing and all the guilty got away with everything, as usual."
In the spring and summer of 2003, he reminds us:
It was the misfortune of Tom DeLay, [Joe] Barton, Billy Tauzin and other then-influential House members that a Kansas-based energy company called Westar came under the scrutiny of shareholders for a series of allegedly corrupt practices by its corporate leadership. As part of its internal investigation, the company posted a slew of internal communications on its Web site. A number of those outlined a scheme in which the company leaders, in a series of e-mails traded back and forth, worked out contribution levels for various Republican congressmen in exchange for "a seat at the table" in an upcoming energy bill.
Essentially, Westar paid $56,000 to get an item inserted in the energy bill exempting their company -- and their company alone -- from a section of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, also known as PUHCA. The only purpose of the amendment was to make possible a split of the company in such a way that Westar CEO David Wittig would get a $15 million payout.
Taibbi quotes from an internal memo from Westar VP Doug Lawrence to executive VP Douglas Lake:
Right now, we are working on getting our grandfather provision on PUHCA repeal into the senate version of the energy bill. It requires working with the Conference committee to achieve. We have a plan for participation to get a seat at the table, which has been approved by David [Wittig] the total of the package will be $31,500 in hard money (individual) and $25,000 in soft money (corporate). Right now, we have $11,500 in immediate needs for a group of candidates associated with Tom DeLay, Billy Tauzin, Joe Barton and Senator Richard Shelby.Though the Westar story looked like "clear proof of a number of felonies," Taibbi says the only thing Congress did was issue, via the Ethics Committee, a nonbinding censure of DeLay. The Federal Election Commission also fined Westar $40,000 but, Taibbi writes, "the case stopped there."
The case in D.C., might have stopped there, but Wittig ended up doing time -- today, he goes back to prison to finish his sentence for bank fraud. Local coverage of the Westar scandal focused primarily on allegations that Wittig and Lake looted the company they were supposed to be running.
Taibbi fills in the blanks from a Washington perspective. Watching the proceedings from the press section of the House gallery, where few other observers bother to witness the looting of our country, Taibbi finds plenty of other examples to show that when it comes to our political system-- all of us, Democrat, Republican, independent, whatever -- are irrefutably fucked.
Many of the people he's met in the course of his reporting, he writes, are beginning to realize that "all of us have been suckers all these years. Maybe that simple observation is our path back to reality, if it's not too late." We'll see. -- C.J. Janovy
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