Krishna
The government is not helping the people and the people are beginning to lose trust in the US government – this book was written during George W Bush Presidency. Matt seems to be angry about everything. But makes good points. He realizes that Americans have lost trust with the government (both left and right) as well as the media (both left and right) and if they vote, they vote to keep out the ‘enemy’ so they vote with hate, not for any particular ideology or candidate. Interesting.
He talks about the ‘religion as a mass market’ and the Christian Zionism, which makes the end of the world anticipating, Bible-as-a-literal-book crowd, which supports Israel staunchly because the final Armageddon will be between Jews on one side (from Israel) against a combination of the Atheist Russia and Muslim Iran. They, of course, will be vanquished. Israel is happy with the support, even though the group believes that after the Armageddon, all Jews will be voluntarily converted to Christianity and the Lord will return.
Also, he talks about the boring sessions in the House where they discuss at length naming an obscure post office after the local heroine, Ava Gardner. Yes, the film star of yesteryear. A shocking description of the irrelevance of the House processes and also the blatant abuse of the secret committees where laws are passed are described, with Senators’ names on who is doing the maneuvering. For instance, in the guise of helping Katrina’s victims, oil companies are given free rein to pollute, by loosening environmental standards in an act that does not seem to be related to Katrina at all. Interesting stuff.
Next comes a chapter where the author under a false name joins one of the voodoo evangelist’s camp (Phil Fortenberry) where that man goes to ridiculous lengths to ‘expel demons’ and ‘instill God’ in those who have paid to come to his camp. He expels ‘the demon of intellect and the demon of rationality’ among other things, and most of the crowd responds by writhing in agony (You have to keep your mouth open all the time for the demon to get out) and also speaking in tongues as if on command. You are astounded at the gullibility of huge crowds. (Yes, I am aware that this happens in most countries in one guise or another, not just in the US). It stops getting interesting there.
The next piece is about Iraq and how the local police would not even get out of the fortified place to confront bombs going off right outside the walls.
He talks about another preacher’s idiocy and then back to politics, where Democrats, who were ‘oh so righteous’ about abandoning earmarks (political pork by another name) go right into stuffing pork into their budget proposals the moment they are in power. But the alternate duo-mania on religion and politics gets to you, even if the author sounds constantly angry about what he sees.
Off he goes to another religious meeting – and by now you get the feeling of reading the same chapter alternately. It gets repetitive and your attention wanders. Much of it is too dry and pedantic to hold your interest.
His chapter on the conspiracy theorists and an extreme fanatic called Haupt and his screaming, babbling frenzy in place of a cogent argument are well described. And your attention snaps back, but probably for just that bit. And then he foams at the mouth about false advertising and the government duplicity and advertisement duplicity, without offering any solutions or analysis, sounding like a slightly more erudite version of the same fanatic.
And then he goes into the conspiracy theory of 9/11 again and this time he painstakingly constructs a very long, very boring, imaginary conversation of the ‘conspirators’ – senators and government officials on what they would have said to make the conspiracy theorists’ theories to be reality. You restrain your urge to throw the book across the room or burn it and read on, because you have invested already so much effort to come this far.
When he goes undercover at the church, and then to the conspiracy theory, it is like reading the same chapter again and again.
When I finally skipped the epilog, that was my bonus for putting myself through the rest of the book.
1/10
– – Krishna