Equal-opportunity hater on the loose!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, political campaigns, journalism

The book is Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season by Matt Taibbi. I put a couple key words up top, but this one defies categorization.

Is this guy just a misogynist, or is he simply more extreme than the average burned-out citizen in his disdain for "politics as usual", with a large dollop of extra venom for President Bush? What do you call a journalist who alternates serious attempts at honestly seeking a real story, with blowing his mind on magic mushrooms, LSD, and cocaine? I don't know, either.

He can be very funny; his sidebar spoofs—interviewing a somewhat spacey Osama; proposing that America simply confer citizenship on the whole planet; his "Wimblehack!" competition for worst journalist of 2004—are hilarious and eloquent.

He spends much more ink on his rage...at everyone and everything having to do with the process of selecting candidates and electing them. He has a heck of a mind between his ears, whenever he can lay of the hallucinogens long enough to let it work.

After reading a chapter or two I could have set this one down without comment. But as Churchill observed, "Even a fool is right sometimes." I slogged on, and I am not displeased. I'll bypass detailed analysis (it'd be pretty poor, anyway...), and jump to the chase.

The book is Taibbi's memoir of coverage of the 2003-4 Presidential primaries and nationwide election for at least three progressive papers. Print may be a hotter medium than TV, but he knows how the media work: "You can get all kinds of things on television, but on balance, pretty much all content has to be rounded enough at the edges, unthreatening enough to the corporations ruling the airwaves, to serve competently in its only important role: a medium to sell advertising." [p141] So he knew what he was in for setting out.

He typically avoided the costly hotels most journalists indulged in, and escaped many of the staged "events", attempting to locate more peripheral citizens. They weren't hard to find: some semi-blighted neighborhood or near-ghetto was dependably within five blocks of wherever the candidate of the day was speaking, or throwing a football, or whatever.

He found in Dennis Kucinich the only thoughtful candidate, capable and willing to speak of issues. Naturally, he watched with growing horror as the Democrats dumped their candidates, almost from the top down in terms of qualification and quality, leaving John Kerry to lose to Bush. He spent a number of weeks, using an assumed name, working at a Republican campaign headquarters in Florida. Didn't help his frame of mind...

Finally, he ran his Wimblehack! competition, which ended almost as disastrously (from his viewpoint) as the election. Finally, he concluded, "...America's political problems are bigger than Bush. The real problem in American politics is the rule of calculation and money over principle..." [p193]

His 2004 election conclusion: "The Republicans won last week—let's face it—because they stand for something that voters can understand. A large number of them stand for being deranged lunatics who believe that the Bible was the last book ever written, and for being intellectual cowards who hide from the terrifying complexities of modern society by placing all of their beliefs in infantile concepts like faith, force, and patriotism.

"Our handicap, to which they are immune, is to understand that modern society is a machine that can operate seamlessly according to its own peculiar twisted morality without obviously interfering with the advance of those concepts that they consider important. ...

"...They're fighting for a simple path to heaven, while the rest of us are fighting for something a little less exciting: the desire to have a more rational and inoffensive political atmosphere within which to wrestle with the underlying problems of existential despair in a confusing secular world whose only offered paradises are affluence, sexual freedom, and consumer choice." [p323]

In other words, the great divide in contemporary America is religious in nature. So he writes, "The country is lonely and self-possessed, ... there seems to be no solution on the horizon that anyone is offering to bring us more together, to give us the things we really need: love and acceptance and community." [p324]

Here I see, more clearly than with any other secular writer, the churchless longing for a church! No other kind of human society offers love, acceptance, and community.