Apr
29
2008
The only decent reason for Rolling Stone magazine’s continued existence is the fact that Matt Taibbi writes for it. His latest is a real hoot: he goes undercover on a batshit insane fundie retreat: Jesus Made Me Puke. He joins a megachurch and actually gets on a bus to go to one of those crazy “Encounter Weekends” in which the truly pathetic listen to a bunch of nonsense, cry a lot, and come away even more braindead and suggestible than when they went in there. But first he had to look the part:
I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church — pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed Friendless Loser! — so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.
But I don’t think he was prepared for what he was going to experience. He even had to make up some sort of story, his being that his dad was an alcoholic circus clown that used to beat him with his oversized shoes. And they bought it. The crazy part was the ‘deliverance’ part at the end, which involved the usual nonsense of puking in paper bags, speaking in tongues and casting out of all sorts of demons:
“In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!” Fortenberry continued. “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!”
It was a rather eye-opening experience, in that it showed the deep psychological underpinnings that go with this kind of territory that makes believers willing suckers impervious to fact. It’s a fantastic and entertaining smartass read, classic Taibbi, and he really picks up on how so many of these suckers do indeed fit the stereoetypes we have of them.
Jan
18
2008
Don’t construe my posting of this as letting Taibbi off the hook for crossing the picket line. He’s still a great writer.
He’s recently posted over at Alternet his experiences out on the road witnessing the circus known as the election, more specifically on reporting on the election. On Clinton:
In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races, Hillary attacking “hope” amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. “Hope,” after all, is Barack Obama’s own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks tomorrow’s sports headline.
He does a fantastic job at pointing out the ridiculousness of this constant reality-show horeserace narrative:
When Obama responded with a series of parries at Hillary, the press applauded. OBAMA: BYE-BYE MR. NICE GUY? gushed the Chicago Tribune. OBAMA IN IOWA: GLOVES OFF! roared ABC.com. Shit, even Rollingstone.com got into the act (OBAMA TAKES THE GLOVES OFF).
The hilarious thing is that while Obama and Huckabee were blasted for not providing the press with enough boxing-metaphor material, Clinton was getting the business for being too feisty. IS SEN. CLINTON WARM ENOUGH TO WIN? wondered Slate. Just like the others, Hillary quickly proved her willingness to eat as many worms as we could dish out, hilariously releasing a whole Web site where Friends of Hillary lined up to swear on a stack of Bibles, that despite what you might think, the candidate isn’t a crabby old battle-ax in private.
The line that really sums up for me how the media has made the election into a farce of sorts,”We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned it into a bag of shit, just in the nick of time.” It’s a great read.
Jan
12
2008
Some of you who follow politics are probably familiar with journalist Matt Taibbi, whose gonzo journalism I admire quite a bit. I’ve written before about his takedowns of 9-11 conspiracy theorists and John McCain. Now, although I’m not following the WGA strike as much as others do, I’m a pretty strong supporter of the labor movement. So, naturally, I was a bit bugged by the news that Taibbi’s crossed the picket line to appear on the Colbert Report. From Scholars and Rogues:
For Taibbi, a guy who has made his career slaughtering sacred cows and speaking truth to power, to cross the line is a serious jab in the eye to the writers and their supporters. It doesn’t bother me if some no-name actor or D-list celeb does it, because these people are about nothing but promoting themselves and hawking whatever crappy movie they’ve got going anyway. But someone like Taibbi should know better. He may not care about it, but to every writer that’s refusing to play the game any longer and doesn’t have the spotlight like he does, his appearances say “Yeah, I don’t give a fuck about you and what you’re doing. I got mine, and that’s all I care about.”
Harsh, indeed, and perhaps it’s not as big of a deal as S & R makes it out to be to some, but it bothers me a little. But you know, there was something in the comments of that post that was quite spot-on:
Dear Entertainment Writers on Strike: Recently returned to so-called civilization from the canyons of Utah, I had the opportunity, after long hiatus, to enjoy the product of some of your writing as it gets shoveled into the American maw via television (no TV in my house). What a feat, this writing. It evidenced so much that was stale, false, crass, violent, foolish, salacious, gimmicky, irrelevant, sycophantic, complacent, compliant -it was, in short, the perfect distraction in a dying republic fast on its way to tyranny, the gift that keeps on giving to a government that would hope to turn the screw on free-thinking citizens. In other words, writers-you keep on striking!
Behold: The entertainment will grow cold and grey as the corpse that it already is, with no new cadavers to puppeteer for the newness of each season, where nothing is as new as the recycled dead from the last season. Like Plato’s chained slaves in the cave of shadows, let the viewers wake up, walk into the light, starved for reality-oh writers, let no new entertainments issue from your minds! You may just save the Republic.
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