Matt Taibbi's new book is on the shelves. Taibbi, the national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone, will stir your juices and light your fire, as he tells "A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire."Here are a few excerpts describing what he discovered traveling the country.
On our governing body, the U.S. Congress: "Excepting a few, rogue, quixotic members who eschewed the usual campaign donors, Congress was mostly a highly advanced, finely tuned mechanism for turning favors into campaign donations and vice versa. It was a system of formalized political tribute not at all unlike that of the old Supreme Soviet, where the daylight hours were occupied with 'political debates' about how the USSR could best aid socialist friends in Mozambique or confront American racism in the South, while behind closed doors fat bloated party functionaries conducted the real business of divvying up military contracts and highway concessions."
On the essence of Bush's America post 9/11: "It all came together for me one day when I tried to imagine the whole thing from the point of view of Osama bin Laden. Here he had gone through all the trouble of attacking New York City, and how did the victim nation respond?
"Well, its government responded by counterattacking the wrong country and passing a whole host of insane laws that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism; its president responded by encouraging its citizens to buy Chevys and go on vacations. Then, when it came time to ask why the attack happened, the president announced that it had happened because the terrorists, well, those folks hated our freedom. Examining this rationale, the mainstream press did not denounce Bush's reasoning as the preposterous horseshit it was, but instead tripped over themselves en masse in a desperate attempt to find new ways to compare their leader to Winston Churchill. Months later, bin Laden himself had been forgotten, and the country moved on to denouncing the real enemy, culminating in the banning of French fries from the congressional cafeteria."
Taibbi sums up: "The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and has 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."
Get your copy of "The Great Derangement" today at Amazon or other fine bookstores.
1 comment:
The trouble is that no one, not even the agents of change, Obama, Hillary, McCain, Ron Paul or Mr. Barr will change much unless all sides join together and ban any form of money, gifts or influence from those that make the rules. So far, that has not happened because those that make the rules are still influenced by the same people that influenced their predecessors. Does anyone believe that the next election will not have some frauds? Does anyone believe that big money will flow so that ads can be taken by people who will then owe the donors something? So far, the candidates tell us that we, the people, must get involved and can change the world. How? Right now, we, the people, have little input on either side. What will change that, no matter who wins? A few have been trying to make changes from both sides of the aisle but little has changed. Will either winner make it happen? What will change the hearts and minds of the Congressmen and Senators beholden to lobbyists with lots of cash?
Bob Poris
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