Matt Taibbi
June 20, 2005
I’ll admit to rather liking Matt Taibbi, heir apparent to Hunter S. Thompson. His recent takedown of Thomas Friedman and his self-lacerating review of his own book, Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season. Taibbi is capitalizing on the rich niche market of kicking journalists and Democrats while they are down, but religionists and conservatives, like everyone else in Taibbi’s world, are equal participants in its rich absurdity.
Taibbi’s virtue is his ability to churn out unvarnished comical exposures of mendacity, calumny, and ignorance. His bizarre list of the 52 funniest things about the upcoming death of the pope seemed to come out of nowhere and is just too weird to offend. (The fact that it was published at all–and as a front page piece–however, says a lot about the mendacity, calumny, and ignorance of the New York Press.) Instead it enhances my curiosity and fascination with Taibbi, for behind his moxie and cheap, shopworn thrill of dropping f-bombs–even on C-SPAN while taking questions with his editor at Rolling Stone–I have to wonder where his moral center is, where its absent presence lurks, as it is implied in all his barbs and mischief, howevermuch he indicates a vision of the world where there is only madness. He is right: America is dying, and Taibbi is part of its death, like a teenage goth chronicling her experiments with cutting.
This is Matt Taibbi in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: My Pandybat Comes Out for Bad XML | Next: Media Waxing Moralistic with the Religious Right | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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» The Media, Sabotage and Laughter from Eunomia
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show was recently interviewed by NPR (see also this older interview), and (perhaps like Matt Taibbi) I think the man may be a minor Pantagruelist. His remarks about mainstream media journalism imply a positive rejection… [Read More]
Tracked on July 31, 2005 10:38 PM