Best subscription I ever had. And most efficient one too. For years, ever since the vampire squid piece, I subscribed to Rolling Stone just to read MT. And a bit of Dickinson too. But mainly Matt. Can’t help it. The combo of accurate info and biting satire is rare. Can’t afford not to subscribe to it. Respect man.
I myself am a sucker for the beautifully written word. I adore Shakespeare, Twain, et. al. because of their choice of language, no matter how brutal the subject matter, (here I am lookin' at *you, Macbeth & Mrs.), no matter how ostensibly boring (Twain's European Travelogues).
People who master the English language like that just leave me with a *long lasting high.
I do not look to Matt for those same stratospheric highs linguistic luxury, but what Matt does for me, better than any living writer, is to TEACH me, even as his language, his asides, and his pithy and well chosen anecdotes buttress and expand my understanding.
I am 72 yrs old. A mere 22 years older than Matt. I was introduced to Chief White Halfoat, for instance, while *I was in the military during that Vietnam gig. And yet, what other writer do I encounter today who not only *knows of Chief White Halfoat, but understands *precisely how to use the character as an exemplar for the writer's presently described character? Matt is also my instructor regarding things I have never HEARD of, but for $5 a month, he instructs me with honesty, integrity, class *and humor ??? I cannot tell you the hours I spend looking for anyone writing in English, Foreign or Domestic whom I can even enjoy, much less trust. Matt is not only the real deal, he is the *full package as well.
Matt, you are a GOLD MINE ! Thank you for having the stones to come to an idea like Substack with full understanding of the freedom it gives *you, and the absolute delight it gives *us !
Except now, what we look at online is tracked and stored in mega servers in the desert -waiting for indexing when you become a person of interest.
All they need to do is plug in your name, sift the results and then find you in there... then, they can see EVERYTHING you browsed, typed, said on a cell phone, said in PROXIMITY to your cell phone, did in front of the camera of your phone, (whether or not you were using the camera app,) and all of your locations.
Lets say you decide to tell your friends some nugget of truth and word gets around. You make a website. You have reach now. You gain an audience and become a threat to an established part or the whole of the system and then... you're being brought before a judge with everything they have on you going back to when data collecting began.
The same with all media, including books: once upon a time you could buy a book by walking into a storage and paying cash and none the wiser. Today that is rather more difficult to achieve, and with online media the "authorities" know even which pages you read or reread, and how often.
«You gain an audience and become a threat»
And that is big difference between totalitarian and authoritarian ones: in the totalitarian ones every step out of line is prevented or punished, in "managed democracies" only when that becomes popular or otherwise a threat (see Corbyn, Trump, Sanders), plus there is a narrow band of permitted variation around the "best" opinion.
What I have noticed is that in the recent couple of decades the range of opinion not considered a threat has considerably narrowed down in both the USA and UK.
As the years go by, I find I have more and more sympathy for Pontius Pilate. Truth is easy in physics and in math. Or at least it can be proved. Truth in Roman politics? ha! Or even in ours, sadly. We're getting more and more that way. Like Cicero and Cataline there in the senate . . .
Speaking of truth, I like the quote from the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss about proofs, "I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where ½ proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible." If only truth were that easy.
Those Russians sound like really tough dudes. Holy smokes! It seems that "proofs" of things in politics are kaleidescopes of "maybe"s strung together into star-like constellations that are pointed at with a shaking hand and vexatious face screaming "SEE, SEE!" As if it's obvious Orion is a hunter and the star Serius is his dog. How could you not admit it!
Journalists of course have to trust sources, and those sources have to trust their confidants and their judgments. At what point does even a serious journalist -- digging into something politically big -- engage in pointing at stars and saying SEE, SEE!
It's hard to say. Certainly for me, personally, I can't say with any confidence what is true -- except in math and physics, where at least there are standards that anyone who seriously looks into it is forced to acknowledge.
What brings this all to mind -- or shakes it anyway, in the mind -- is the strange case of Sidney Powell, who has made some very incredible claims about the 2020 election. To me, frankly, she seemed sincere and credible in her demeanor. Were I a juror, I'd have been inclined to view her testimony sympathetically. We'll see if she delivers any goods.
I don't have any idea what to think about all this election stuff. I do know humans conspire and they can do incredibly awful things. I am not sure that happened in this case. Who is wrong and who is right. I wonder if we'll ever know. I wonder if any journalist who seriously tried to find out would ever truly know. I wonder if it's even possible to know. That's how weird it all is -- almost all of reality gets that way if you think about it long enough. Almost all reality is constellations in the sky of the mind and you are the one who says, "It's a hunter and a dog". Almost, but not quite. It's the "not quite" that keeps us sane.
Yup. So one way to keep things going when all you have is a lie is to play Pilate: "What is truth?"
A bottomless rabbit hole that unfortunately appeals to intelligent people.
Maybe our saving grace really are the people who, if you say that to them repeatedly, in seriousness, trying to "have a difficult conversation," will finally simply punch you in the nose and walk away.
Anyway, tangent. On topic, thanks for this. I'm not (wasn't at least), all that thoughtful about journalism outside of my inate cynicism. Your articles on it (ethics, economics, logistics, history etc of it) are really enlightening.
Yup. So one way to keep things going when all you have is a lie is to play Pilate: "What is truth?" A bottomless rabbit hole that unfortunately appeals to intelligent people.»
Well many people know that "truth" is not a black-and-white matter in most cases, as most statements have exceptions and ambiguities, so "applicability" is a word that I prefer to use.
Related to that, "truth" in the abstract is a bit of an empty concept without "verifiability", and most of what we know is actually hearsay that cannot be verified by us (is the moon really not made of cheese? Well, I cannot say).
And "verifiability" bring to George Orwell, two of my usual quotes:
"As I Please", 1944-02-04: “During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people now living know to be lies.
[...] During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen.
So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners. [...] The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”
"As I Please", 1945-01-26: “The Daily Worker disapproves of dictatorship in Athens, the Catholic Herald disapproves of dictatorship in Belgrade. There is no one who is able to say - at least, no one who has the chance to say in a newspaper of big circulation - that this whole dirty game of spheres of influence, quislings, purges, deportation, one-party elections and hundred per cent plebiscites is morally the same whether it is done by ourselves, the Russians or the Nazis. Even in the case of such frank returns to barbarism as the use of hostages, disapproval is only felt when it happens to be the enemy and not ourselves who is doing it.”
And another apposite quote:
Chuck Palahniuk "Lullaby" (2002): “Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this [act of] being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”
«Even in the case of such frank returns to barbarism as the use of hostages, disapproval is only felt when it happens to be the enemy and not ourselves who is doing it.»
In currently politics returns to barbarism like government death squads snatching "enemies of the people" off the streets, or torturing suspects, or eliminating "potential criminals" (and their families as collateral damage), have been boasted of by GW Bush, BH Obama, D Trump (and most likely J Biden eventually) to win more votes. And instead of being outraged by that the "bienpensants" holler about the corrupting influence over a billionaire of a few stays in hotels to which he has licensed his brand, and similar "bombshells".
Wasn't that Huxley's dystopian future? A world tranquilized by pleasure & drugs & completely sex obsessed.
In my opinion we have a melding of both Orwell & Huxley. Pleasure & distraction for the middle classes. The boot heel & prison for the lower classes. It seems to be working quite well for the upper classes.
As much as people say they ache for change, it doesn't appear to be very hard to get them to vote for everything but change.
And then bullshit themselves about what they really voted for.
I heard a local liberal talk show host actually say that the country needs someone like Joe Biden, who can think outside the box.
Joe Biden is a lot of things, but an original thinker isn't one of them. He's had 47 years sucking at the public tit. I don't think he's had a good idea in those 47 years.
&, in my opinion, anyone who uses phrases like "think outside the box," don't really even know where "the box" is at let alone how to think outside of it.
If anything, the real prophet of dystopia was Edward Bernays who said,
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
That was written almost a hundred years ago.
Not much has changed since then & I doubt that much will change anytime soon.
E Bernays as you write was and is an essential part of the story of our modern times. But the tone of what he writes is vastly exaggerated: after all he was a propagandists, and so obviously would blow his own trumpet as loudly as possible. Those described later as the "Hidden persuaders" (V Packard, 1957) are not as powerful as he describes, and neither are the media; they have influence, but very prone to failure too.
JM Keynes wrote something similar but different from E Bernays:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
My personal impression is that both underestimate the ultimate source of hold over people's thoughts: theologians and in particular their theories of eschatology. My cod-philosophical reasoning why this happens is that most people are dominated by fear of death which creates anxiety about purpose, and that is rationalized into eschatological theology, one perhaps non-obvious example of which is for example social darwinism, "God/evolution/... wills it" is a powerful way to cope with justifying ourselves. Note: this is an expanded version of M Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" :-).
It is ancient theologians who inspire the theories of those "defunct economist" and "academic scribbler of a few years back", and who provide the mental buttons that propagandists push.
I'd be more prone to agree if I didn't know so many folk who are consumed by irrational Trump hate. I've started asking them to name Trump's crime. No one can seem to do that simple task. It just appears that they've been manipulated towards this irrational Trump hate by the media they consume.
If any religious idea is holding sway here I think it's the idea of the ritual scapegoat.
Trump has become that ritual scapegoat.
There's this entirely irrational idea floating through the Democrat controlled media that alludes to the idea that there will be some huge national epiphany of cooperation now that Trump is gone.
Michael Moore goes on the Stephen Colbert Show and rambles on about how Joe will save our national soul because he went to Catholic school.
Huh?
Priests went to Catholic school. Didn't stop them from diddling altar boys.
Meanwhile Joe's stocking his cabinet with corporate lobbyists & corporate yes men.
One would think Moore would be outraged since the story broke last week that Democrats like Pelosi & Schumer were meeting with Wall Street folk during the primary, strategizing about how to derail Sander's primary momentum.
Meanwhile, in reality, a Texas food bank handed out 600,000 lbs. of food to 25,000 cars a few days ago.
Yet no checks are forthcoming.
We're just at the outer edges of a horror show.
And Joe Biden isn't going to stop it.
I should point out that I don't particularly like Trump.
I mostly agree with what you say (which is the same as Matt Taibbi usually says) as to the substance of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I disagree with your thinking that it is media propaganda that created it.
Instead (and Matt Taibbi's writings like "Hate Inc." and academic studies support this) most media don't *change* opinions, but they pander to them. The TDS pandemic has not been created by media propaganda: those infected by TDS were already anti-Trump, they just loved their prejudices to be amplified and stroked by the media propaganda. Same as on the right. It is not so much that the media leads/creates public opinion, but they follow/pander to it.
Sometimes I think that some of the media propaganda in the recent years has been a "deep state" experiment to see just how gullible so many can be when fed deliberately ridiculous and ever-changing conspiracy theories like "russian collusion" and "Salisbury's novichok attack". If so, the wild success of that experiment must have amused them a lot.
Agreed-- I would add to the theories -- that there is a virus that is MUCH worse than anything we have ever seen 🙄-- so we have to lockdown and wait until it goes away (never?). Gullibility and constantly living in a fear state from constant propaganda is being tested -- a giant experiment to see where we can be controlled easily. Or as a medical colleague of mine said " A perfect experiment in natural selection".
I always thought it was gonna be more Huxley than Orwell, but I'm increasingly convinced that it's gonna be more Bradbury/F451, right down to the Boston Dynamics robot dogs hunting you.
"You'll stink like a bobcat for a couple days, but that's all right."
I love Orwell's writings. He's so spot on that it's... emotional.
IMO an issue is the difference between journalism (now) and history (the past). I adore history - it's what I read more than anything. History is not journalism. It's why I've come to distrust lots of long form journalism; the presentation of "context" (ie, history) as cover for drawing ideological conclusions about what current events "mean". It's actually not journalism, it's propaganda. True/false is a lens that's not in use there.
One thing I like about Taibi's journalism is that when he gives "context" it's not in the service of an ideology, or anything other than trying to present whatever as accurately and honestly as he can. I might be wrong, snowed. Don't think so tho because of the number of "you're too wishy washy!" or "you're not being serious enough!" or the like posts. Ideologs hate gray, hate history that doesn't support what they're saying today.
I made the mistake of looking at Twitter for about a month recently... I can't cite examples, because that site is specifically designed to destroy one's short-term memory, but I recall a distinct trend among self-identified "left"-idpol types to "cancel" Orwell not on the grounds of anything he actually wrote, but because he is too often quoted by conservatives and therefore ideologically suspect. Take my hazy, unsupportable assessment for what it's worth: =$0.
IMO a lot of what he wrote about is as true now as it was in his time, particularly and especially the language policing.
Someone-I have no idea who-maybe a college prof of mine said “Good journalism is the first edition of history”. Quality history goes beyond the party line-any party-in it’s quest for the broadest picture of events, the same is true of journalism.
"'With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.'"
Welcome, my son.... to the machine.
"What did you dream? It's alright, we told you what to dream."
The truth is like the universe, its there whether you believe in it or not, history is just an account of whats happened and can be either true or lie.
So, um, this is sort of embarrassing. But I’ve gradually come to realize since putting away the smack that I don’t actually want to read the news. And this realization only crystallized last night, when I sat down to begin work on this project that’s been sitting in my head for months now, and I got next to nothing done because every piece of software on my computer was harassing me every three minutes with new and vital updates on this burgeoning “Vicious Idiots Screaming At One Another” story. Which was frustrating.
This both is and isn’t your fault. It is your fault in that I know my computer is only trying to please me. And having watched me reading and responding to you over the past several weeks, it’s concluded that nothing would give me greater pleasure than reading and responding to every other person on the planet who does what you do. In the same way that it knows that if I purchase one pair of socks, I must necessarily also want 85,000 additional pairs of socks. Hence my discovery of Chris Rufo.
It isn’t your fault, though, in that I’ve done everything I can to explain to it that, no, I read Taibbi despite, not because of, his position as an apex predator in the “Vicious Idiots Screaming At One Another” media ecosystem. And even that consumer habit of mine is complicated.
And yet, despite the—I think—more than generous and patient explanations I’ve been offering it, it still just keeps giving me these blank stares for fifteen seconds or so and then saying, “stop! Stop, stop, stop everything you’re doing and see what I found for you!!!! An article by Bill Kristol about how if Democrats really want to demonstrate to disaffected young men that they’ve repudiated #MeToo they’ve got to get serious about war with Iran! Praise me! Praise me! I only live to serve!”
*So*. This is just a note to let you know that I’m going away again. But it won’t be like last time! I promise! Not least because if I even gesture in the direction of either “travel” or “moral responsibility,” my family will conspire to steal my passport. And my car keys. And possibly also my shoes. Given how well that combination of concepts worked for us all the last time. Also, though, because I like what you do, and I continue to want, to quote Britney, more.
All of which is just a longwinded way of saying:
1) Happy Thanksgiving (and, if I don’t make it back before January, Happy New Year)! and,
2) *Thank you*, again, for your forbearance. I know that I don’t use this site in anything close to the way it’s meant to be used, and I am grateful to you for letting me fuck around, hidden and self-indulgent, in your digital potting shed. The fact that you helped me put the monkey back in its box was worth the price of admission alone. (Which also means that, despite my earlier cattiness, you are a fabulous imaginary sobriety buddy. I should never have snapped at you, and I will absolutely be turning to you should the needle beckon again any time soon. And doesn’t that make you ever so happy?)
“I hope she has the guts to look me straight in the eye and accept my full-throated endorsement...because I’m man enough to know what kind of doughnuts I like.” While perched on the bed of a pickup truck looking like Betty Grable on the nose of a B-52.
I know it’s on purpose. I’m not that naïve. But still—I admit it—this ad makes me feel unsafe. Not in a fun way.
And yes, yes, I get what they’re doing: Vance is a liability. Every word that escapes his lips (as it were) is more off-putting than the last. Especially when he gets that glazed look in his eye as he launches into yet another forty-five-minute podium-pounding salute to his favorite public policy topic, ovaries.**
But it seems to me that it would have been so much more effective for them—the “other side,” I mean (the problem obviously being that there is no other side in any way that matters—hence the descent across the board into Andy Kaufman territory)—to let him dig his own hole.*** Step back and let it happen. Rather than dressing up like the hellish offspring of the Virginia Slims Lady and the Marlborough Man to jeer and dance around that same hole themselves until—inevitably—they topple in after him.
Because this is one of the few areas in which the Robot Circus Left had the advantage. No? On “gender” I mean? After the Robot Circus Right spent close to a decade helpfully committing electoral suicide by focusing with such abnormal intensity on the most arcane sub-fields of gender theory that they left all but the twelve non-Robot people who follow Jordan Peterson behind—after they managed to “I’m outraged!” themselves into looking to every normal person in the country even more pervy and threatening than the most monstrously masturbatory triple-dicked lesbian who ever hid out in a public library waiting to ambush your kids—all the Robot Circus Left had to do was leave them to it. They had, as it were, fucked themselves. All on their own.
But no—yet again—rather than keeping quiet and letting the morons hang themselves (as it were…sigh), they made the same partisan move they’ve made on every single other topic: they stole the issue from the other side. “See! See! We can be just as creepy about gender as they can! We can make you nearly as uncomfortable as that one part of YouTube you really wish you didn’t know existed! Vote for us! Vote for us!”
Though I suppose one ought to give them credit for—on this *sole* issue—inverting it rather than adopting it wholesale. Not that it wouldn’t be fun to watch Elizabeth Warren trying her hand at one of those MILFMFLI “I’m Phyllis SCHLAFLY if Phyllis SCHLAFLY went to TURKEY to get plastic SURGERY that’s not LEGAL in North America and then RETURNED to beat up TRANS people on public TRANSportation using nothing but her ENORMOUS CLITORIS as a WEAPON—GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH! Now watch me bake bread for my husband.” TikTok videos.
I’d watch that. You know, I mean, using my fake VPN. My husband might also.
But the question then, as you ask in your essay, still becomes “who is this for?”
I’m wondering, actually, if it might be for the people in my neck of the woods? Maybe? Here at the epicenter of “I feel sick to my stomach, I think I’ll sit this one out?”
Likely not. Because I think their strategists are correct about not needing the “I wish my tax dollars weren’t funding the Holocaust” demographic to win. Especially in states like mine.
But it has nonetheless been remarkable—especially to someone like me, who’s spent a lifetime sitting it out (I’m not even certain how it works anymore)—how much the people in my orbit who have spent that same lifetime trying to shame me every two-to-four years with the “civic duty” talk, have quietly conceded, yeah, it’s probably a lot healthier to head to the casino come November and commune with the vaping old ladies if pulling a lever on a box that goes bing is the only activity that makes you feel alive.
Which makes me think that if this *is* outreach to that group, it hasn’t worked all that well. Because if even the people at the very center of the Elite Establishment, the people who’ve made careers out of gender theory at actual universities, are disgusted rather than entertained by your last-ditch effort to distract the planet from your death toll via a knowing gay man posed on the bed of a pickup truck talking about all the things he can do full-throated, then the strategy has failed.
Hasn’t it?
Or, I don’t know, maybe this is that “microtargeting” thing I hear so much about these days? They said to themselves, “oh yeah? Well if Vance has corralled ‘Edwardian gynecologists who are a touch too into their jobs’ for *their* side, then we’re sure as hell not losing ‘people who celebrate Hermann Göring for his courageous stand against conventional masculine stereotypes!’ Get writing, Kimmel. And take that MAGA shitheads!”
Whatever. The horse bit did make me laugh. With them, at them, who knows, but as Andy Kaufman spent his own lifetime showing, that’s the point, right?
And then I felt all dirty again…
p.s. is it okay if I steal “camp without libido” as a subtitle for this thing I’m writing? That was a good one…
**Don’t worry: I’m still, despite appearances, one hundred percent sticking to my promise of rooting for your guy and your guy alone. The question, though, is whether you really *do* want him to win. Because yes, obviously, there’s an excellent chance that he’ll tap you for Press Secretary once he’s in office (which would be hugely gratifying to watch—though only if you keep your Substack while you’re doing it so that we Sea Monkeys can cheer you on).
But then, at the same time, being oppressed over the past four years hasn’t exactly been *un*-lucrative, no?
Consider all the options before you make your choice is all I’m saying.
***Oh! oh! You know what? Do Hole next! *Please*? I was so delighted by the Village People. If you slip some Courtney Love into the mix, I give you my word, I’ll buy the mug *and* the tracksuit. And all of my friends will be sick with envy.
Goodness. Agitprop was a surprise. I was certain, having missed the Babel, that I’d be stuck reading seven or eight weeks of “Boy’s Own American Slop: Little Danny Accidentally Shoots his Golden Retriever in the Face But in the Process Learns Important Life Lessons About the Bill of Rights, Especially the Bit About Quartering Soldiers.” Rather than writing meant for people who’ve mastered the mysteries of fifth-grade composition.
And I was content with that! More than prepared. In fact, I’ll warn you now, I’ve got a good three or four thousand words jostling around in my head these days, clamoring to escape, concerning my willingness to kill and die—to spill my blood—to spill everyone’s blood—to protect my 3A liberties. Elite Establishment assholes better keep their grubby Communist hands off it, is all I’m saying.** You know?
But *then*, instead of “Danny and his Dog and the Constitution and the Communists,” you blindsided me with a double feature.
Babel followed by Tolstoy! Hooray!
Not my favorite Tolstoy, true. “Dissociative, Self-Flagellating Voyeurism as the Only Real Love”*** leaves something to be desired. But still—Tolstoy!
Yes. So, before I go any further—because I can feel the sneering building up within me even as a type—let me be clear: I do not have a Tolstoy problem. In the way that I have, for example, a Dostoyevsky problem. Or a George Clooney problem. Tolstoy never fails to make me happy (even when he doesn’t want to). And blah blah: he’s uniquely brilliant, rivalled only by Shakespeare and Dante and Plutarch and, I don’t know, Lady Murasaki, the people who evaluate and rank such things are one hundred percent correct, etc. etc. blah. I even periodically include entirely irrelevant references to the steeplechase scene in Anna Karenina in my own work because it’s the best eight pages of prose ever written. And I like to think about it. (They usually make me remove those references, but I persist nonetheless.)
Still, though: that “I’m a uniquely brilliant Victorian Author” selective Platonism thing he pushes does get tiring pretty fast. Eros is Eros and Wisdom is Wisdom and never the twain shall meet (except in every line of Phaedrus and the Symposium, but they’re disreputable, so let’s pretend they don’t exist). And it’s true that as Victorian Authors go he’s lightyears ahead of the rest in terms of artistry (which he hated, right?), and moral sophistication (which he hated even more, no?).
But “After the Ball” is a real doozy. Thanks for going there. :-/
Because there’s the Message-message, yes? Desiring, dingy romantic love crumples up and dies—as it should!—even when (he protests) it’s chastely “clad in bronze”—in the absence of universal spiritual love. But then there’s the actual story: Ivan is inconstant. His great life-altering choice happens when he craftily switches out one beloved for the other (I’m not talking about the callously jilted German girl here. Or her dad (?)).
He drops Beloved A for Beloved B, however, not because one is purer than the other, but because he can’t figure out which gives him a greater thrill—the “it” in the form of the Tatar writhing, trembling, and beside himself as he exposes the “motley, wet, red, unnatural thing” that was once his body in the *now* or the “it” in the form of the flirtatious and untouchable lady writhing, trembling and beside herself as she exposes the “motley, wet, red, unnatural thing” that was once her body in the potential future (conjugally, obviously, though Tolstoy didn’t really trust the conjugal escape route all that much either, did he?).**** And, unsurprisingly for a Victorian Author afflicted by selective Platonism, he decides he wants the degraded, yet “spiritual,” thrill now. Set to a drumbeat rather than a waltz or mazurka.
Which means that then, forty years later, he finds himself—by chance—in a perfect position to excuse it all by telling himself and his audience of helpfully forgiving little boys and girls—joking and absolving him, “a man we all respect,” the sort to tell stories “very sincerely and truthfully,” of any responsibility (shades of Sea Monkeys—I wish my real-world audiences would do that for me)—that the secret relief he felt as he was let off the hook—as Voyeurism killed Eros (to say nothing of Wisdom)—was in fact, secretly, “morality.” And that the demeaned and degraded beloved kept at arm’s length while it’s beaten mercilessly as a show in the snow is spiritually superior to the exalted beloved you’re actually allowed, on occasion, to touch. With your eyes closed. Indeed, watching the beloved in agony—from afar—through the wrong end of a telescope—is, it seems, the *only* properly Christian route to Agape. (The gulag writers would undoubtedly have had something to say about that.)
Because that *is* the basic story, isn’t it? Ivan is more enraptured—all else “eclipsed” (at least in my translation—does it have the same implications in Russian?)—when he’s impotently observing pain from afar than when he’s at risk of actively participating in pleasure, or for that matter beauty (Platonic or otherwise), up close. He keeps the glove. He keeps the feather. The rest, however, he emphatically does not want. Too tainted. Impure.
And yes, yes, I get that Tolstoy carves out for himself his traditional plausible deniability by taking refuge in the frame story. Keeping his distance from his narrator. Allowing him to kick off yet another para-literary Tolstoyesque narrative arc in which 1) The Uniquely Brilliant Author writes a story, 2) everyone on the planet interprets that story in the only way it can be interpreted, 3) The Uniquely Brilliant Author retreats to his estate in a huff for two or three years, and then, eventually, 4) lo! The Uniquely Brilliant Author publishes a querulous, defensive “Afterword” that screams at said planet, “what’s wrong with you people? That’s not what I meant! I didn’t mean that at all! I was talking about, like, Christian spirituality and shit. Because I’m a Christian. An attractively—indeed devilishly attractively—tortured Christian that ALL the ladies—damn it, you’re taking it the wrong way again! Renunciation! I’m doing renunciation! Friendship is for girls. Help me Mary, mother of—shoot, now I have this overwhelming desire to write again. But oh, the horror that is Writing! And Desiring to Write! Unclean! Idolatrous! Worse than se—hmm. Maybe if I try like a political parable or something? Yes. That ought to solve the problem.”
On repeat. For fifty years. He’s the most insanely egomaniacal, arrogant, control freak-y proponent of self-abnegation, humility, and release who ever lived. Better than Shakespeare by far. (Which he took care to note. Several times. In writing. Because he was modestly Christian like that.)
And he’s wonderful!
Poor man.
**I’m not quartering any fucking soldiers, okay? That’s all. Consequences be damned.
***Though it’s true that a story about an emotionally crippled coward telling himself that outraged voyeurism carries more “life-altering” value than idiosyncratic erotic attachments in the morally compromised real world does speak in an oddly direct manner to our current moment. In all of its “I don’t care about the content”^^ glory.
****I know it’s a personal preference thing, but I much prefer sex as a dead horse in Anna Karenina to sex as a whipped Tatar in this one. To each his own, I guess.
^^Speaking of which, your “world’s policeman” piece was beautifully written. With all sorts of lovely references. But I don’t trust you or a single one of your horrible friends on anything remotely related to this issue. And it is a testament to my genuine gratitude to you for letting me hide out here in your comments sections, sniping at your grotesque profession, that I took a deep breath last night and soldiered on to the end, past, “the event, hosted by the Free Press and FIRE and moderated by Bari Weiss, turned on the question: ‘Should the U.S. Still Police the World?’”
Because that’s a perfectly normal sentence, isn’t it?
“Jigsaw, in a touching display of community spirit, hosted the Rosa Parks Elementary Model UN this past week, and let me tell you, the debate got heated!”
So, you know, nicely done. Ordinarily Graham Greene irritates the hell out of me, and yet you made him pop. At the same time, however, I will slice off my typing fingers before I ever, *ever* praise you for your courage and sensitivity in being publicly sad about Pol Pot.
As much as I like to watch you reading Tolstoy. And shouting j’accuse about, like, the tribulations of Eric Adams or something.
I can cope with Eric Adams. (It seems like there would be stuff there you could spin into an engaging piece (?)…though, true, it’s not an issue with which I’m all that familiar.)
Yet again, I refuse to believe that these allegorical mediasphere figures of yours exist. At the very least, you’ve got to come up with more creative names for them. Or translate them into Greek or something. Or German maybe? Because Big Boat and An Appletree are still hanging in there pretty well from what I’ve seen. (Whatever happened to what’s her face, Jeannette Wipper, the one you introduced as an entertainingly incongruous jump scare in your re-telling of The Great Gatsby via Activision and the Horrors of Regulation? She was fun.)
Though this particular iteration of Wipper/Whippman is, I admit, endearingly harmless in a way that few of the others have been. Or are. Or, that is, she’s endearingly harmless to the extent that I could parse her bright-eyed op-ed-y argument via your review. (I couldn’t read the article itself because of the paywall. And unlike you, I’ll be fucked before I add a book called “BoyMum” to my bedside table.** My husband is tortured enough as it is.)
Still, though, as much as you—effectively!—well done!—checkmate!—squished the whole thing into a devastating partisan takedown of the one—and only!—stupid and corrupt side,*** I confess that my primary thought on reading the piece was less, “ha, look at that limp, effeminate cuck Tim Walz [mostly because I already think that whenever I stumble across him parroting the scripted Nazi bilge they’re writing for him re: Armenia],” and more (as always—being a mother is so difficult), “ah shit. Is that what happened? Is my son the way he is because at an impressionable never-to-be-recovered age, I unwittingly trained him to follow commands, to perch coquettishly in a fancy purse, and to shut up and stop weeping like a little bitch whenever I tossed him down a well? Did I do it all wrong? Damn you, patriarchal parenting books! Now it’s too late! Now he’s developed an unhealthy fixation on this southeastern European art collective that not only embraces ‘being shackled to the word toxic,’ but fetishizes it! Though, to be fair, they also fetishize the word ‘spongecake.’ And ‘mustelid.’
“How will he lose his virginity now? Fucking sports metaphors.”****
And stuff.
But far more important than all of that, can I just say that you’re a total sweetheart? Because—aw—Sofya Kovalevskaya! You chose a lady mathematician to round things out! So open minded and exceptionally feminist of you. But here’s the question: it’s clear that Christina Rosetti and Jane Austen map onto Robert Frost. And Ingrid Bergman maps onto Michael Buffer (?).***** The problem, though, is that I can’t tell whether Sofya Kovalevskaya is meant to be girly Abraham Lincoln or girly Weird Al Yankovic (I’m setting Prince to the side for now). I hope it’s the latter. *Is* it the latter?
Please say it is. Would make my morning.
(A churlish, nagging type might wonder why the male role models you invoke in this piece span the mid-nineteenth century to the present, whereas the female role models you set up alongside them flourish throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before dying out completely, old, flabby and forgotten, forty years ago. And whether the implicit message—that little girls ought to be looking to the period before suffrage—and electricity—for tips on appropriate gender-coded behavior deliberately dovetails with the Robot Circus Right’s brilliant strategic move to mobilize Vance as the shepherd of that key swing state voting demographic that is Edwardian Gynecologists Who Are A Touch Too Into Their Jobs? Or whether it’s just a happy accident.
I, however, am not that churlish nag. Nothing in my empty head but Go Team!!!!! Promise. It’s such a relief to be back. I’m glad the Robot Circus Left wouldn’t have me.)
**Though admittedly, nothing would delight me more than watching a kangaroo crossing a minefield. In fact I’d pay to watch a kangaroo cross a minefield. I’d bet money on it. So much so that I’m hoping the people who coordinate the Vegas Sphere might set up some sort of one-off exhibition event. Because here’s the thing: I’d pay even more—a lot more—to watch a kangaroo crossing a minefield in overwhelmingly inescapable titanic 4-D set to Schubert. While enjoying the reactions of the sensitive, impressionable little girl in the seat in front of me, all worried about what violent death looks like. “See, darling, it looks just like that. Boing, boing, boing, boing SPLAT! Now you’re a woman.” Good times. Worth every penny.
***Which, to repeat, I support one hundred percent. How dare they attack zygotes for supporting Trump? How DARE they? He’s a beleaguered hero! A misunderstood saint! A hero with compassion! A saint with charisma!
And disco!
I do wish he’d do more with the disco. I know Abba is off-limits now, but there’s a whole universe of Village People out there waiting to be exploited. Why is he so parsimonious on that front?
Maybe you can put a word in to your contacts? I understand that Vivek’s got his ear...
****Though in all fairness to Whippman, I too daydream about “threatened and enraged masculinity…staring back at me…[from] that dark secret place at the end of the anxiety track.”
Completely normal. And very nice, I must say, of those Edwardian gynecologists to invent that gadget to help us along with said musings.
*****Ingrid Bergman. It’s a shame you aren’t raising girls. Because what girl wouldn’t appreciate her father telling her, “no, no! Not Marlene. Not Greta. Model yourself on the dull, obedient mouth-breathing one who keeps losing her boyfriends to Claude Rains. Even when she’s married to Claude Rains. That’s the secret to success in life. Mark my words.” None that I can think of. None at all.
You may have noticed? Because I was doing my thing over the summer?
It went very badly, in case you were wondering.
And then, in July, I returned**—just as I promised! And I said to myself, “well. That was interesting. It’s nice to know that Mr. Shalamov remains relevant. Clearly, the only ethical stance here, at the moment, in the world, is to shut up. To shut up completely. I, therefore, will shut up. Completely.”
And I *did* shut up. In fact, I like to think I did a pretty good job of shutting up. With the judicious use of lots of drugs, I even showed my son, my extended family, and most of my friends just what they needed to see over those weeks. In silence. Having returned. And shut up.
And thus, I made it through August.
[I’m aping Babel—can you tell?]
But then September arrived. And—whoops. Not so successful. For the first time ever—ever in my junkie life—the pharmaceutical solution to my assorted issues began to interfere with my job performance. (This has never happened before. And guess what. It turns out that office hours can get a little awkward when the professor is face down on her desk in a puddle of drool.)
So I said, “all right then. It appears that shutting up isn’t working quite as well as I’d hoped. As a life choice. In fact, if I don’t find somewhere to express this entirely un-Shalamov-y A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!! that continues to sit like a cold lump of disconnected dead flesh in the pit of my stomach, something important is almost certain to give, and to give in ways that will be supremely unattractive to watch.”
The problem, however, was the following: no one in my family, even if they were good at feeling feels (which they’re not), deserves to be on the receiving end of that sort of self-indulgence. Whereas my friends, many of whom do very effectively feel all sorts of feels—and who quite like self-indulgence as a means of passing the time—would be “concerned” about me in all the wrong ways. And then obviously, contra David Frum, I have zero interest in indoctrinating my students. Which means that there’s no way in hell I’m going to inflict those same un-Shalamov-y feels on a room full of innocent nineteen-year-olds.
I don’t do therapy. Any more than I do resistance movements.
Which left the internet. Robot Land. That infinitely understanding digital prostitute who never, ever judges. And so, yes, you probably didn’t notice because you were busy doing other things, but I crept back here in the first/second week of September to see what you were up to.
And I saw what you were up to.
And I said to myself, “oh dear God, no. NO. No, no, no, no, no.”
And I crept away.
And I thought further. And I said, “all right, yes, it’s true that Substack is my only portal to Robot Land, and thus to digital-prostitute-processed superficial sanity. Every other similar platform I’ve visited gives me at best a migraine and at worst a severe case of Wernicke’s aphasia. (And also what I sometimes worry might be some weird form of cybernetic herpes.) Might as well make use of the needle. But Taibbi’s not the only one here! Substack has grown into something nearly as massive and carnivalesque as Twitter once was, which means that there’s got to be somewhere else for me to go. Someone willing to rent me a teeny, tiny bit of electronic space for five dollars per month, in a weedy backwater comments section, where I can, very occasionally, strip naked, pull out my hair, and go A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!!”
And so, throughout September I did research. Lots of research. Far more research than the project merited, if I’m honest. I lurked about on hundreds of sites and pages. Until eventually, I narrowed things down to two writers. Good writers. Talented, respectable multilingual people with publication records that extended well beyond the Robot Circus Big Top—in one case even onto physical paper—who were floating all sorts of nice, grounded lefty takes on every one of the issues that are apparently not planning to leave my head or my stomach any time soon.
And I thought, “finally! Yes! This is where I belong!”
So, I dusted off the fake VPN, retrieved my shoebox full of laughably traceable disposable payment methods,*** offered up my five dollars, and said, “please. Please, is it okay if I crouch and mutter here in the shadowy comments section of this essay you wrote three years ago and that eight people, many of whom may even have heartbeats, appear to have liked quite a lot? All I want to do is periodically go A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!! I won’t be a bother. Promise. And I do like your work. Please?”
And do you know what happened? *Do* you?
I’ll bet you can guess what happened.
They rejected me. Both of them. One within days, the other within hours. And when I say, “they rejected me,” I don’t mean they ignored or neglected me. No. That’s what I wanted. I *wanted* to be ignored. I cried out to be neglected. I *like* that. I get off on it. (I may have mentioned that before.)
No. When I say, “they rejected me,” I mean they actively unsubscribed me from their publications and refunded me my five dollars.
They wouldn’t take my money, Taibbi! What’s wrong with these people?
It seems that the infinitely understanding digital prostitute does, after all, judge. :-/
So, look, here’s the thing: all of this is just a long-winded way of saying that I’m back now, counting on you—and only you—to preserve my sanity. I’m *depending* on you—you and your “free speech,” and your 500,000 dead souls that are a fair number to keep track of, so maybe my return can happen under the radar, and you won’t even notice, and above all your principled refusal *ever* to turn down five dollars—to rescue me from my stomach. And my head. And assorted other psychosomatically afflicted body parts I’d rather not discuss right now. You’re all I’ve got. So—please, *please*, can I stay here? For the sake of my students if no one else? I’m just on the verge of slowly tipping sideways and slipping to the ground against my podium—geriatric American politician style—in the middle of a lecture. They don’t need to see that. They really don’t.
And, moreover, I promise you, Taibbi, I’m willing, in my desperation, to make you a very good deal on this offer. Truly. I can give you a lot more than five dollars in exchange for the privilege of cowering here, unmolested, in your empty, dusty TK News-era cupboard.
For example (and this is just a partial list—I can do so much more—I can): I’ll root for your guy in the upcoming election (because, seriously, who cares). Yes? Right? He understands The People! The Populace! The Plutocrac—oops. He’s our great hope! The only rational choice! I’ll tone down my contempt for Dipshit and every one of his Dipshit friends. I can’t quite bring myself to call it “Elon,” but—here, watch: he’s a genius! Our last true genius! His sole aim in the world is to save us from the Depredations of The Dastardly Democratic Elite! He’s Thomas Jefferson! He’s Caesar Augustus! He’s Bruce Willis! He’s Rabelais! Whatever would we do without his subtle social commentary and virile, manly guidance? I’ll watch the literary roadkill served up by you and Walter Kirn every week with total equanimity, and I won’t even once ram a pencil through my eyeball at 1:47:33. You want to turn up alongside Douglas Murray on a stage paid for by a slave-trafficking, arms-dealing mining conglomerate to debate the merits and contemporary relevance of Evelyn Baring’s “Modern Egypt” (parts one AND two)? Well, you know what? Three cheers for Victorian race science! Score one for Western Civilization! You want me to feel sad about British lynch mobs turned rabid in the heat being surveilled by progressive, woke-ridden Euro police forces? Oh, the Orwellian horror! Bari Weiss and Tulsi Gabbard as feminist heroes for their trailblazing introduction of poets to pit bulls (and vice versa) at CIA black sites? You’ve come a long way, baby! Sitting in front of a plate of plastic food with Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy to discuss how Chaucer and Dryden would have dealt—harshly but fairly—with the illegals buying up all of the nice suburban houses from under the nice suburban white people? Table for one, please! Handling snakes with Jordan Peterson at a Baptist tent revival? Rape as a crime against masculine honor? Bobby Jr. as the most oppressed and censored man on the planet? Yes! Absolutely! Hallelujah, the bitch was asking for it, and the invisible transsexual UFOs living in the wifi better start showing some proper respect fucking soon!
I’ll buy the t-shirt. I’ll buy the coffee mug. I’ll fist bump my colleagues while saying, “I’m an American, motherfucker.”
Just—please? All I want to do is—very occasionally—go A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!! In peace. Without anyone judging me. Or trying to interact with me.
Okay?
I probably won’t even need to do it very often. Because I think I got most of the stuff that built up over the summer out of my system in the paragraphs that went poof on the lefty sites? And I’ve got a feeling I won’t be traveling all that much in the foreseeable future. So, you know…please?
(As bizarre as you’ve become—and make no mistake, you have become bizarre—you’ve still got a better natural ear for prosody than the rest of them combined. Pity you’re a lunatic.
**Except that now I’m “Semele.” I hope that’s okay? The stochastic rhetorical peregrinations of the other one were starting to make me very nervous…
***Re: the laughably traceable disposable payment methods: I know it’s got nothing to do with you and your content creation, but it took something like a week of office hours and twenty-two cards before I finally found something that would work on your site this time around. And can I just say? Oh boy do I miss the days of old, when the relationship between online subscription services and their funding sources operated at a level of financial respectability just a notch or two above that of people who meet up in toilet stalls at airports. Why are all of the trivial things—the things that once made life bearable—so horribly, horribly difficult now? *Why?* Why can’t I purchase a month of Racket News with a Hello Kitty Glitterslippers Gift Card borrowed from Thomasina Slivovitz in Panjakent anymore? WHY???
So demoralizing.
My accountant mocks me when I ask for advice on navigating these issues. Not sure why. It’s almost as though he knows something I don’t…
****I’m serious when I say I plan to do everything in my power to believe, in its entirety, this story you continue to spin. I owe you. You’re the only pundit in Robot Land willing to put up with me, and I am, despite the occasional stumble, more than capable of loyalty.
I know I can do it. It’s merely a question of will.
Koppel was spot on. Still... things changed and here we are: in the land of politicized bullshit. Can't even do a google search without results being sorted for you based on "your private information" -or more specifically, what your private information reveals about your own susceptibilities to programming and being steered along and worse: what someone would like you to see, period.
That's control. We are all subject to the whims of the gatekeepers now and the path back is grown over with trash, debris and lunacy.
Best subscription I ever had. And most efficient one too. For years, ever since the vampire squid piece, I subscribed to Rolling Stone just to read MT. And a bit of Dickinson too. But mainly Matt. Can’t help it. The combo of accurate info and biting satire is rare. Can’t afford not to subscribe to it. Respect man.
Ditto 💗
I myself am a sucker for the beautifully written word. I adore Shakespeare, Twain, et. al. because of their choice of language, no matter how brutal the subject matter, (here I am lookin' at *you, Macbeth & Mrs.), no matter how ostensibly boring (Twain's European Travelogues).
People who master the English language like that just leave me with a *long lasting high.
I do not look to Matt for those same stratospheric highs linguistic luxury, but what Matt does for me, better than any living writer, is to TEACH me, even as his language, his asides, and his pithy and well chosen anecdotes buttress and expand my understanding.
I am 72 yrs old. A mere 22 years older than Matt. I was introduced to Chief White Halfoat, for instance, while *I was in the military during that Vietnam gig. And yet, what other writer do I encounter today who not only *knows of Chief White Halfoat, but understands *precisely how to use the character as an exemplar for the writer's presently described character? Matt is also my instructor regarding things I have never HEARD of, but for $5 a month, he instructs me with honesty, integrity, class *and humor ??? I cannot tell you the hours I spend looking for anyone writing in English, Foreign or Domestic whom I can even enjoy, much less trust. Matt is not only the real deal, he is the *full package as well.
Matt, you are a GOLD MINE ! Thank you for having the stones to come to an idea like Substack with full understanding of the freedom it gives *you, and the absolute delight it gives *us !
in the 40s and 50s, my parents subscribed to IF Stone's Weekly. They had to keep the subscription secret for fear of being subject to witch hunts.
Except now, what we look at online is tracked and stored in mega servers in the desert -waiting for indexing when you become a person of interest.
All they need to do is plug in your name, sift the results and then find you in there... then, they can see EVERYTHING you browsed, typed, said on a cell phone, said in PROXIMITY to your cell phone, did in front of the camera of your phone, (whether or not you were using the camera app,) and all of your locations.
Lets say you decide to tell your friends some nugget of truth and word gets around. You make a website. You have reach now. You gain an audience and become a threat to an established part or the whole of the system and then... you're being brought before a judge with everything they have on you going back to when data collecting began.
You're toast.
The same with all media, including books: once upon a time you could buy a book by walking into a storage and paying cash and none the wiser. Today that is rather more difficult to achieve, and with online media the "authorities" know even which pages you read or reread, and how often.
«You gain an audience and become a threat»
And that is big difference between totalitarian and authoritarian ones: in the totalitarian ones every step out of line is prevented or punished, in "managed democracies" only when that becomes popular or otherwise a threat (see Corbyn, Trump, Sanders), plus there is a narrow band of permitted variation around the "best" opinion.
What I have noticed is that in the recent couple of decades the range of opinion not considered a threat has considerably narrowed down in both the USA and UK.
A good point.
As the years go by, I find I have more and more sympathy for Pontius Pilate. Truth is easy in physics and in math. Or at least it can be proved. Truth in Roman politics? ha! Or even in ours, sadly. We're getting more and more that way. Like Cicero and Cataline there in the senate . . .
Speaking of truth, I like the quote from the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss about proofs, "I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where ½ proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible." If only truth were that easy.
Those Russians sound like really tough dudes. Holy smokes! It seems that "proofs" of things in politics are kaleidescopes of "maybe"s strung together into star-like constellations that are pointed at with a shaking hand and vexatious face screaming "SEE, SEE!" As if it's obvious Orion is a hunter and the star Serius is his dog. How could you not admit it!
Journalists of course have to trust sources, and those sources have to trust their confidants and their judgments. At what point does even a serious journalist -- digging into something politically big -- engage in pointing at stars and saying SEE, SEE!
It's hard to say. Certainly for me, personally, I can't say with any confidence what is true -- except in math and physics, where at least there are standards that anyone who seriously looks into it is forced to acknowledge.
What brings this all to mind -- or shakes it anyway, in the mind -- is the strange case of Sidney Powell, who has made some very incredible claims about the 2020 election. To me, frankly, she seemed sincere and credible in her demeanor. Were I a juror, I'd have been inclined to view her testimony sympathetically. We'll see if she delivers any goods.
I don't have any idea what to think about all this election stuff. I do know humans conspire and they can do incredibly awful things. I am not sure that happened in this case. Who is wrong and who is right. I wonder if we'll ever know. I wonder if any journalist who seriously tried to find out would ever truly know. I wonder if it's even possible to know. That's how weird it all is -- almost all of reality gets that way if you think about it long enough. Almost all reality is constellations in the sky of the mind and you are the one who says, "It's a hunter and a dog". Almost, but not quite. It's the "not quite" that keeps us sane.
Congrats Matt Taibbi on sharing the 2020 Izzy Award! Well deserved, in my humble opinion.
"No amount of money will make a lie true..."
Yup. So one way to keep things going when all you have is a lie is to play Pilate: "What is truth?"
A bottomless rabbit hole that unfortunately appeals to intelligent people.
Maybe our saving grace really are the people who, if you say that to them repeatedly, in seriousness, trying to "have a difficult conversation," will finally simply punch you in the nose and walk away.
Anyway, tangent. On topic, thanks for this. I'm not (wasn't at least), all that thoughtful about journalism outside of my inate cynicism. Your articles on it (ethics, economics, logistics, history etc of it) are really enlightening.
«No amount of money will make a lie true..."
Yup. So one way to keep things going when all you have is a lie is to play Pilate: "What is truth?" A bottomless rabbit hole that unfortunately appeals to intelligent people.»
Well many people know that "truth" is not a black-and-white matter in most cases, as most statements have exceptions and ambiguities, so "applicability" is a word that I prefer to use.
Related to that, "truth" in the abstract is a bit of an empty concept without "verifiability", and most of what we know is actually hearsay that cannot be verified by us (is the moon really not made of cheese? Well, I cannot say).
And "verifiability" bring to George Orwell, two of my usual quotes:
"As I Please", 1944-02-04: “During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people now living know to be lies.
[...] During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen.
So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners. [...] The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”
"As I Please", 1945-01-26: “The Daily Worker disapproves of dictatorship in Athens, the Catholic Herald disapproves of dictatorship in Belgrade. There is no one who is able to say - at least, no one who has the chance to say in a newspaper of big circulation - that this whole dirty game of spheres of influence, quislings, purges, deportation, one-party elections and hundred per cent plebiscites is morally the same whether it is done by ourselves, the Russians or the Nazis. Even in the case of such frank returns to barbarism as the use of hostages, disapproval is only felt when it happens to be the enemy and not ourselves who is doing it.”
And another apposite quote:
Chuck Palahniuk "Lullaby" (2002): “Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this [act of] being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”
«Even in the case of such frank returns to barbarism as the use of hostages, disapproval is only felt when it happens to be the enemy and not ourselves who is doing it.»
In currently politics returns to barbarism like government death squads snatching "enemies of the people" off the streets, or torturing suspects, or eliminating "potential criminals" (and their families as collateral damage), have been boasted of by GW Bush, BH Obama, D Trump (and most likely J Biden eventually) to win more votes. And instead of being outraged by that the "bienpensants" holler about the corrupting influence over a billionaire of a few stays in hotels to which he has licensed his brand, and similar "bombshells".
Wasn't that Huxley's dystopian future? A world tranquilized by pleasure & drugs & completely sex obsessed.
In my opinion we have a melding of both Orwell & Huxley. Pleasure & distraction for the middle classes. The boot heel & prison for the lower classes. It seems to be working quite well for the upper classes.
As much as people say they ache for change, it doesn't appear to be very hard to get them to vote for everything but change.
And then bullshit themselves about what they really voted for.
I heard a local liberal talk show host actually say that the country needs someone like Joe Biden, who can think outside the box.
Joe Biden is a lot of things, but an original thinker isn't one of them. He's had 47 years sucking at the public tit. I don't think he's had a good idea in those 47 years.
&, in my opinion, anyone who uses phrases like "think outside the box," don't really even know where "the box" is at let alone how to think outside of it.
If anything, the real prophet of dystopia was Edward Bernays who said,
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
That was written almost a hundred years ago.
Not much has changed since then & I doubt that much will change anytime soon.
Outside the box-🤣🤣🤣-a box of Depends....
E Bernays as you write was and is an essential part of the story of our modern times. But the tone of what he writes is vastly exaggerated: after all he was a propagandists, and so obviously would blow his own trumpet as loudly as possible. Those described later as the "Hidden persuaders" (V Packard, 1957) are not as powerful as he describes, and neither are the media; they have influence, but very prone to failure too.
JM Keynes wrote something similar but different from E Bernays:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
My personal impression is that both underestimate the ultimate source of hold over people's thoughts: theologians and in particular their theories of eschatology. My cod-philosophical reasoning why this happens is that most people are dominated by fear of death which creates anxiety about purpose, and that is rationalized into eschatological theology, one perhaps non-obvious example of which is for example social darwinism, "God/evolution/... wills it" is a powerful way to cope with justifying ourselves. Note: this is an expanded version of M Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" :-).
It is ancient theologians who inspire the theories of those "defunct economist" and "academic scribbler of a few years back", and who provide the mental buttons that propagandists push.
I'd be more prone to agree if I didn't know so many folk who are consumed by irrational Trump hate. I've started asking them to name Trump's crime. No one can seem to do that simple task. It just appears that they've been manipulated towards this irrational Trump hate by the media they consume.
If any religious idea is holding sway here I think it's the idea of the ritual scapegoat.
Trump has become that ritual scapegoat.
There's this entirely irrational idea floating through the Democrat controlled media that alludes to the idea that there will be some huge national epiphany of cooperation now that Trump is gone.
Michael Moore goes on the Stephen Colbert Show and rambles on about how Joe will save our national soul because he went to Catholic school.
Huh?
Priests went to Catholic school. Didn't stop them from diddling altar boys.
Meanwhile Joe's stocking his cabinet with corporate lobbyists & corporate yes men.
One would think Moore would be outraged since the story broke last week that Democrats like Pelosi & Schumer were meeting with Wall Street folk during the primary, strategizing about how to derail Sander's primary momentum.
Meanwhile, in reality, a Texas food bank handed out 600,000 lbs. of food to 25,000 cars a few days ago.
Yet no checks are forthcoming.
We're just at the outer edges of a horror show.
And Joe Biden isn't going to stop it.
I should point out that I don't particularly like Trump.
Didn't vote for Trump.
Or Biden for that matter.
Just trying to be as non-partisan as I can be.
As a product of a Jesuit HS, I say dioscesan Catholic schools are the biggest peddlers of idiocy out there.......
I mostly agree with what you say (which is the same as Matt Taibbi usually says) as to the substance of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I disagree with your thinking that it is media propaganda that created it.
Instead (and Matt Taibbi's writings like "Hate Inc." and academic studies support this) most media don't *change* opinions, but they pander to them. The TDS pandemic has not been created by media propaganda: those infected by TDS were already anti-Trump, they just loved their prejudices to be amplified and stroked by the media propaganda. Same as on the right. It is not so much that the media leads/creates public opinion, but they follow/pander to it.
Sometimes I think that some of the media propaganda in the recent years has been a "deep state" experiment to see just how gullible so many can be when fed deliberately ridiculous and ever-changing conspiracy theories like "russian collusion" and "Salisbury's novichok attack". If so, the wild success of that experiment must have amused them a lot.
We can agree to disagree.
Although I'm behind your last paragraph 100%.
Maybe I'm personalizing this too much.
I didn't like Trump but, as a general rule, I don't watch television.
Or troll through social media.
So my dislike never reached hysterical proportions.
I even started defending him towards the end of his run even though I don't like him or agree with him.
Having said that I'm beginning to think I agree with you more than I think.
Agreed-- I would add to the theories -- that there is a virus that is MUCH worse than anything we have ever seen 🙄-- so we have to lockdown and wait until it goes away (never?). Gullibility and constantly living in a fear state from constant propaganda is being tested -- a giant experiment to see where we can be controlled easily. Or as a medical colleague of mine said " A perfect experiment in natural selection".
I always thought it was gonna be more Huxley than Orwell, but I'm increasingly convinced that it's gonna be more Bradbury/F451, right down to the Boston Dynamics robot dogs hunting you.
"You'll stink like a bobcat for a couple days, but that's all right."
I love Orwell's writings. He's so spot on that it's... emotional.
IMO an issue is the difference between journalism (now) and history (the past). I adore history - it's what I read more than anything. History is not journalism. It's why I've come to distrust lots of long form journalism; the presentation of "context" (ie, history) as cover for drawing ideological conclusions about what current events "mean". It's actually not journalism, it's propaganda. True/false is a lens that's not in use there.
One thing I like about Taibi's journalism is that when he gives "context" it's not in the service of an ideology, or anything other than trying to present whatever as accurately and honestly as he can. I might be wrong, snowed. Don't think so tho because of the number of "you're too wishy washy!" or "you're not being serious enough!" or the like posts. Ideologs hate gray, hate history that doesn't support what they're saying today.
Current online efforts to trash Orwell are telling. Honest journalists evolve into honest historians over time, long after they're dead.
Who is trashing Orwell? That’s like trashing Richard Pryor or Johnny Cash-it can’t be done in seriousness, imo......
I made the mistake of looking at Twitter for about a month recently... I can't cite examples, because that site is specifically designed to destroy one's short-term memory, but I recall a distinct trend among self-identified "left"-idpol types to "cancel" Orwell not on the grounds of anything he actually wrote, but because he is too often quoted by conservatives and therefore ideologically suspect. Take my hazy, unsupportable assessment for what it's worth: =$0.
IMO a lot of what he wrote about is as true now as it was in his time, particularly and especially the language policing.
Someone-I have no idea who-maybe a college prof of mine said “Good journalism is the first edition of history”. Quality history goes beyond the party line-any party-in it’s quest for the broadest picture of events, the same is true of journalism.
Palahniuk is obviously more of an Aldous Huxley fan than an Orwell man. Both authors raise prescient and valid points.
I will say that YouTube/online gaming/door dash have ushered in a disturbing and unprecedented level of sloth......
"'With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.'"
Welcome, my son.... to the machine.
"What did you dream? It's alright, we told you what to dream."
It’s all in the name of the game, boy/it’s called riding the gravy train....
"No amount of money will make a lie true..."
If you can keep the charade up long enough that it gets into history books, that isn't entirely true....
The truth is like the universe, its there whether you believe in it or not, history is just an account of whats happened and can be either true or lie.
True. Once it's all said and done... and the aims are achieved, the only records will be those that made it.
We're kind of fucked there.
Hey Taibbi,
So, um, this is sort of embarrassing. But I’ve gradually come to realize since putting away the smack that I don’t actually want to read the news. And this realization only crystallized last night, when I sat down to begin work on this project that’s been sitting in my head for months now, and I got next to nothing done because every piece of software on my computer was harassing me every three minutes with new and vital updates on this burgeoning “Vicious Idiots Screaming At One Another” story. Which was frustrating.
This both is and isn’t your fault. It is your fault in that I know my computer is only trying to please me. And having watched me reading and responding to you over the past several weeks, it’s concluded that nothing would give me greater pleasure than reading and responding to every other person on the planet who does what you do. In the same way that it knows that if I purchase one pair of socks, I must necessarily also want 85,000 additional pairs of socks. Hence my discovery of Chris Rufo.
It isn’t your fault, though, in that I’ve done everything I can to explain to it that, no, I read Taibbi despite, not because of, his position as an apex predator in the “Vicious Idiots Screaming At One Another” media ecosystem. And even that consumer habit of mine is complicated.
And yet, despite the—I think—more than generous and patient explanations I’ve been offering it, it still just keeps giving me these blank stares for fifteen seconds or so and then saying, “stop! Stop, stop, stop everything you’re doing and see what I found for you!!!! An article by Bill Kristol about how if Democrats really want to demonstrate to disaffected young men that they’ve repudiated #MeToo they’ve got to get serious about war with Iran! Praise me! Praise me! I only live to serve!”
*So*. This is just a note to let you know that I’m going away again. But it won’t be like last time! I promise! Not least because if I even gesture in the direction of either “travel” or “moral responsibility,” my family will conspire to steal my passport. And my car keys. And possibly also my shoes. Given how well that combination of concepts worked for us all the last time. Also, though, because I like what you do, and I continue to want, to quote Britney, more.
All of which is just a longwinded way of saying:
1) Happy Thanksgiving (and, if I don’t make it back before January, Happy New Year)! and,
2) *Thank you*, again, for your forbearance. I know that I don’t use this site in anything close to the way it’s meant to be used, and I am grateful to you for letting me fuck around, hidden and self-indulgent, in your digital potting shed. The fact that you helped me put the monkey back in its box was worth the price of admission alone. (Which also means that, despite my earlier cattiness, you are a fabulous imaginary sobriety buddy. I should never have snapped at you, and I will absolutely be turning to you should the needle beckon again any time soon. And doesn’t that make you ever so happy?)
Once again, enjoy the holidays—you deserve it!
“I hope she has the guts to look me straight in the eye and accept my full-throated endorsement...because I’m man enough to know what kind of doughnuts I like.” While perched on the bed of a pickup truck looking like Betty Grable on the nose of a B-52.
I know it’s on purpose. I’m not that naïve. But still—I admit it—this ad makes me feel unsafe. Not in a fun way.
And yes, yes, I get what they’re doing: Vance is a liability. Every word that escapes his lips (as it were) is more off-putting than the last. Especially when he gets that glazed look in his eye as he launches into yet another forty-five-minute podium-pounding salute to his favorite public policy topic, ovaries.**
But it seems to me that it would have been so much more effective for them—the “other side,” I mean (the problem obviously being that there is no other side in any way that matters—hence the descent across the board into Andy Kaufman territory)—to let him dig his own hole.*** Step back and let it happen. Rather than dressing up like the hellish offspring of the Virginia Slims Lady and the Marlborough Man to jeer and dance around that same hole themselves until—inevitably—they topple in after him.
Because this is one of the few areas in which the Robot Circus Left had the advantage. No? On “gender” I mean? After the Robot Circus Right spent close to a decade helpfully committing electoral suicide by focusing with such abnormal intensity on the most arcane sub-fields of gender theory that they left all but the twelve non-Robot people who follow Jordan Peterson behind—after they managed to “I’m outraged!” themselves into looking to every normal person in the country even more pervy and threatening than the most monstrously masturbatory triple-dicked lesbian who ever hid out in a public library waiting to ambush your kids—all the Robot Circus Left had to do was leave them to it. They had, as it were, fucked themselves. All on their own.
But no—yet again—rather than keeping quiet and letting the morons hang themselves (as it were…sigh), they made the same partisan move they’ve made on every single other topic: they stole the issue from the other side. “See! See! We can be just as creepy about gender as they can! We can make you nearly as uncomfortable as that one part of YouTube you really wish you didn’t know existed! Vote for us! Vote for us!”
Though I suppose one ought to give them credit for—on this *sole* issue—inverting it rather than adopting it wholesale. Not that it wouldn’t be fun to watch Elizabeth Warren trying her hand at one of those MILFMFLI “I’m Phyllis SCHLAFLY if Phyllis SCHLAFLY went to TURKEY to get plastic SURGERY that’s not LEGAL in North America and then RETURNED to beat up TRANS people on public TRANSportation using nothing but her ENORMOUS CLITORIS as a WEAPON—GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH! Now watch me bake bread for my husband.” TikTok videos.
I’d watch that. You know, I mean, using my fake VPN. My husband might also.
But the question then, as you ask in your essay, still becomes “who is this for?”
I’m wondering, actually, if it might be for the people in my neck of the woods? Maybe? Here at the epicenter of “I feel sick to my stomach, I think I’ll sit this one out?”
Likely not. Because I think their strategists are correct about not needing the “I wish my tax dollars weren’t funding the Holocaust” demographic to win. Especially in states like mine.
But it has nonetheless been remarkable—especially to someone like me, who’s spent a lifetime sitting it out (I’m not even certain how it works anymore)—how much the people in my orbit who have spent that same lifetime trying to shame me every two-to-four years with the “civic duty” talk, have quietly conceded, yeah, it’s probably a lot healthier to head to the casino come November and commune with the vaping old ladies if pulling a lever on a box that goes bing is the only activity that makes you feel alive.
Which makes me think that if this *is* outreach to that group, it hasn’t worked all that well. Because if even the people at the very center of the Elite Establishment, the people who’ve made careers out of gender theory at actual universities, are disgusted rather than entertained by your last-ditch effort to distract the planet from your death toll via a knowing gay man posed on the bed of a pickup truck talking about all the things he can do full-throated, then the strategy has failed.
Hasn’t it?
Or, I don’t know, maybe this is that “microtargeting” thing I hear so much about these days? They said to themselves, “oh yeah? Well if Vance has corralled ‘Edwardian gynecologists who are a touch too into their jobs’ for *their* side, then we’re sure as hell not losing ‘people who celebrate Hermann Göring for his courageous stand against conventional masculine stereotypes!’ Get writing, Kimmel. And take that MAGA shitheads!”
Whatever. The horse bit did make me laugh. With them, at them, who knows, but as Andy Kaufman spent his own lifetime showing, that’s the point, right?
And then I felt all dirty again…
p.s. is it okay if I steal “camp without libido” as a subtitle for this thing I’m writing? That was a good one…
**Don’t worry: I’m still, despite appearances, one hundred percent sticking to my promise of rooting for your guy and your guy alone. The question, though, is whether you really *do* want him to win. Because yes, obviously, there’s an excellent chance that he’ll tap you for Press Secretary once he’s in office (which would be hugely gratifying to watch—though only if you keep your Substack while you’re doing it so that we Sea Monkeys can cheer you on).
But then, at the same time, being oppressed over the past four years hasn’t exactly been *un*-lucrative, no?
Consider all the options before you make your choice is all I’m saying.
***Oh! oh! You know what? Do Hole next! *Please*? I was so delighted by the Village People. If you slip some Courtney Love into the mix, I give you my word, I’ll buy the mug *and* the tracksuit. And all of my friends will be sick with envy.
Goodness. Agitprop was a surprise. I was certain, having missed the Babel, that I’d be stuck reading seven or eight weeks of “Boy’s Own American Slop: Little Danny Accidentally Shoots his Golden Retriever in the Face But in the Process Learns Important Life Lessons About the Bill of Rights, Especially the Bit About Quartering Soldiers.” Rather than writing meant for people who’ve mastered the mysteries of fifth-grade composition.
And I was content with that! More than prepared. In fact, I’ll warn you now, I’ve got a good three or four thousand words jostling around in my head these days, clamoring to escape, concerning my willingness to kill and die—to spill my blood—to spill everyone’s blood—to protect my 3A liberties. Elite Establishment assholes better keep their grubby Communist hands off it, is all I’m saying.** You know?
But *then*, instead of “Danny and his Dog and the Constitution and the Communists,” you blindsided me with a double feature.
Babel followed by Tolstoy! Hooray!
Not my favorite Tolstoy, true. “Dissociative, Self-Flagellating Voyeurism as the Only Real Love”*** leaves something to be desired. But still—Tolstoy!
Yes. So, before I go any further—because I can feel the sneering building up within me even as a type—let me be clear: I do not have a Tolstoy problem. In the way that I have, for example, a Dostoyevsky problem. Or a George Clooney problem. Tolstoy never fails to make me happy (even when he doesn’t want to). And blah blah: he’s uniquely brilliant, rivalled only by Shakespeare and Dante and Plutarch and, I don’t know, Lady Murasaki, the people who evaluate and rank such things are one hundred percent correct, etc. etc. blah. I even periodically include entirely irrelevant references to the steeplechase scene in Anna Karenina in my own work because it’s the best eight pages of prose ever written. And I like to think about it. (They usually make me remove those references, but I persist nonetheless.)
Still, though: that “I’m a uniquely brilliant Victorian Author” selective Platonism thing he pushes does get tiring pretty fast. Eros is Eros and Wisdom is Wisdom and never the twain shall meet (except in every line of Phaedrus and the Symposium, but they’re disreputable, so let’s pretend they don’t exist). And it’s true that as Victorian Authors go he’s lightyears ahead of the rest in terms of artistry (which he hated, right?), and moral sophistication (which he hated even more, no?).
But “After the Ball” is a real doozy. Thanks for going there. :-/
Because there’s the Message-message, yes? Desiring, dingy romantic love crumples up and dies—as it should!—even when (he protests) it’s chastely “clad in bronze”—in the absence of universal spiritual love. But then there’s the actual story: Ivan is inconstant. His great life-altering choice happens when he craftily switches out one beloved for the other (I’m not talking about the callously jilted German girl here. Or her dad (?)).
He drops Beloved A for Beloved B, however, not because one is purer than the other, but because he can’t figure out which gives him a greater thrill—the “it” in the form of the Tatar writhing, trembling, and beside himself as he exposes the “motley, wet, red, unnatural thing” that was once his body in the *now* or the “it” in the form of the flirtatious and untouchable lady writhing, trembling and beside herself as she exposes the “motley, wet, red, unnatural thing” that was once her body in the potential future (conjugally, obviously, though Tolstoy didn’t really trust the conjugal escape route all that much either, did he?).**** And, unsurprisingly for a Victorian Author afflicted by selective Platonism, he decides he wants the degraded, yet “spiritual,” thrill now. Set to a drumbeat rather than a waltz or mazurka.
Which means that then, forty years later, he finds himself—by chance—in a perfect position to excuse it all by telling himself and his audience of helpfully forgiving little boys and girls—joking and absolving him, “a man we all respect,” the sort to tell stories “very sincerely and truthfully,” of any responsibility (shades of Sea Monkeys—I wish my real-world audiences would do that for me)—that the secret relief he felt as he was let off the hook—as Voyeurism killed Eros (to say nothing of Wisdom)—was in fact, secretly, “morality.” And that the demeaned and degraded beloved kept at arm’s length while it’s beaten mercilessly as a show in the snow is spiritually superior to the exalted beloved you’re actually allowed, on occasion, to touch. With your eyes closed. Indeed, watching the beloved in agony—from afar—through the wrong end of a telescope—is, it seems, the *only* properly Christian route to Agape. (The gulag writers would undoubtedly have had something to say about that.)
Because that *is* the basic story, isn’t it? Ivan is more enraptured—all else “eclipsed” (at least in my translation—does it have the same implications in Russian?)—when he’s impotently observing pain from afar than when he’s at risk of actively participating in pleasure, or for that matter beauty (Platonic or otherwise), up close. He keeps the glove. He keeps the feather. The rest, however, he emphatically does not want. Too tainted. Impure.
And yes, yes, I get that Tolstoy carves out for himself his traditional plausible deniability by taking refuge in the frame story. Keeping his distance from his narrator. Allowing him to kick off yet another para-literary Tolstoyesque narrative arc in which 1) The Uniquely Brilliant Author writes a story, 2) everyone on the planet interprets that story in the only way it can be interpreted, 3) The Uniquely Brilliant Author retreats to his estate in a huff for two or three years, and then, eventually, 4) lo! The Uniquely Brilliant Author publishes a querulous, defensive “Afterword” that screams at said planet, “what’s wrong with you people? That’s not what I meant! I didn’t mean that at all! I was talking about, like, Christian spirituality and shit. Because I’m a Christian. An attractively—indeed devilishly attractively—tortured Christian that ALL the ladies—damn it, you’re taking it the wrong way again! Renunciation! I’m doing renunciation! Friendship is for girls. Help me Mary, mother of—shoot, now I have this overwhelming desire to write again. But oh, the horror that is Writing! And Desiring to Write! Unclean! Idolatrous! Worse than se—hmm. Maybe if I try like a political parable or something? Yes. That ought to solve the problem.”
On repeat. For fifty years. He’s the most insanely egomaniacal, arrogant, control freak-y proponent of self-abnegation, humility, and release who ever lived. Better than Shakespeare by far. (Which he took care to note. Several times. In writing. Because he was modestly Christian like that.)
And he’s wonderful!
Poor man.
**I’m not quartering any fucking soldiers, okay? That’s all. Consequences be damned.
***Though it’s true that a story about an emotionally crippled coward telling himself that outraged voyeurism carries more “life-altering” value than idiosyncratic erotic attachments in the morally compromised real world does speak in an oddly direct manner to our current moment. In all of its “I don’t care about the content”^^ glory.
****I know it’s a personal preference thing, but I much prefer sex as a dead horse in Anna Karenina to sex as a whipped Tatar in this one. To each his own, I guess.
^^Speaking of which, your “world’s policeman” piece was beautifully written. With all sorts of lovely references. But I don’t trust you or a single one of your horrible friends on anything remotely related to this issue. And it is a testament to my genuine gratitude to you for letting me hide out here in your comments sections, sniping at your grotesque profession, that I took a deep breath last night and soldiered on to the end, past, “the event, hosted by the Free Press and FIRE and moderated by Bari Weiss, turned on the question: ‘Should the U.S. Still Police the World?’”
Because that’s a perfectly normal sentence, isn’t it?
“Jigsaw, in a touching display of community spirit, hosted the Rosa Parks Elementary Model UN this past week, and let me tell you, the debate got heated!”
So, you know, nicely done. Ordinarily Graham Greene irritates the hell out of me, and yet you made him pop. At the same time, however, I will slice off my typing fingers before I ever, *ever* praise you for your courage and sensitivity in being publicly sad about Pol Pot.
As much as I like to watch you reading Tolstoy. And shouting j’accuse about, like, the tribulations of Eric Adams or something.
I can cope with Eric Adams. (It seems like there would be stuff there you could spin into an engaging piece (?)…though, true, it’s not an issue with which I’m all that familiar.)
Whippman. Seriously?
Yet again, I refuse to believe that these allegorical mediasphere figures of yours exist. At the very least, you’ve got to come up with more creative names for them. Or translate them into Greek or something. Or German maybe? Because Big Boat and An Appletree are still hanging in there pretty well from what I’ve seen. (Whatever happened to what’s her face, Jeannette Wipper, the one you introduced as an entertainingly incongruous jump scare in your re-telling of The Great Gatsby via Activision and the Horrors of Regulation? She was fun.)
Though this particular iteration of Wipper/Whippman is, I admit, endearingly harmless in a way that few of the others have been. Or are. Or, that is, she’s endearingly harmless to the extent that I could parse her bright-eyed op-ed-y argument via your review. (I couldn’t read the article itself because of the paywall. And unlike you, I’ll be fucked before I add a book called “BoyMum” to my bedside table.** My husband is tortured enough as it is.)
Still, though, as much as you—effectively!—well done!—checkmate!—squished the whole thing into a devastating partisan takedown of the one—and only!—stupid and corrupt side,*** I confess that my primary thought on reading the piece was less, “ha, look at that limp, effeminate cuck Tim Walz [mostly because I already think that whenever I stumble across him parroting the scripted Nazi bilge they’re writing for him re: Armenia],” and more (as always—being a mother is so difficult), “ah shit. Is that what happened? Is my son the way he is because at an impressionable never-to-be-recovered age, I unwittingly trained him to follow commands, to perch coquettishly in a fancy purse, and to shut up and stop weeping like a little bitch whenever I tossed him down a well? Did I do it all wrong? Damn you, patriarchal parenting books! Now it’s too late! Now he’s developed an unhealthy fixation on this southeastern European art collective that not only embraces ‘being shackled to the word toxic,’ but fetishizes it! Though, to be fair, they also fetishize the word ‘spongecake.’ And ‘mustelid.’
“How will he lose his virginity now? Fucking sports metaphors.”****
And stuff.
But far more important than all of that, can I just say that you’re a total sweetheart? Because—aw—Sofya Kovalevskaya! You chose a lady mathematician to round things out! So open minded and exceptionally feminist of you. But here’s the question: it’s clear that Christina Rosetti and Jane Austen map onto Robert Frost. And Ingrid Bergman maps onto Michael Buffer (?).***** The problem, though, is that I can’t tell whether Sofya Kovalevskaya is meant to be girly Abraham Lincoln or girly Weird Al Yankovic (I’m setting Prince to the side for now). I hope it’s the latter. *Is* it the latter?
Please say it is. Would make my morning.
(A churlish, nagging type might wonder why the male role models you invoke in this piece span the mid-nineteenth century to the present, whereas the female role models you set up alongside them flourish throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before dying out completely, old, flabby and forgotten, forty years ago. And whether the implicit message—that little girls ought to be looking to the period before suffrage—and electricity—for tips on appropriate gender-coded behavior deliberately dovetails with the Robot Circus Right’s brilliant strategic move to mobilize Vance as the shepherd of that key swing state voting demographic that is Edwardian Gynecologists Who Are A Touch Too Into Their Jobs? Or whether it’s just a happy accident.
I, however, am not that churlish nag. Nothing in my empty head but Go Team!!!!! Promise. It’s such a relief to be back. I’m glad the Robot Circus Left wouldn’t have me.)
**Though admittedly, nothing would delight me more than watching a kangaroo crossing a minefield. In fact I’d pay to watch a kangaroo cross a minefield. I’d bet money on it. So much so that I’m hoping the people who coordinate the Vegas Sphere might set up some sort of one-off exhibition event. Because here’s the thing: I’d pay even more—a lot more—to watch a kangaroo crossing a minefield in overwhelmingly inescapable titanic 4-D set to Schubert. While enjoying the reactions of the sensitive, impressionable little girl in the seat in front of me, all worried about what violent death looks like. “See, darling, it looks just like that. Boing, boing, boing, boing SPLAT! Now you’re a woman.” Good times. Worth every penny.
***Which, to repeat, I support one hundred percent. How dare they attack zygotes for supporting Trump? How DARE they? He’s a beleaguered hero! A misunderstood saint! A hero with compassion! A saint with charisma!
And disco!
I do wish he’d do more with the disco. I know Abba is off-limits now, but there’s a whole universe of Village People out there waiting to be exploited. Why is he so parsimonious on that front?
Maybe you can put a word in to your contacts? I understand that Vivek’s got his ear...
****Though in all fairness to Whippman, I too daydream about “threatened and enraged masculinity…staring back at me…[from] that dark secret place at the end of the anxiety track.”
Completely normal. And very nice, I must say, of those Edwardian gynecologists to invent that gadget to help us along with said musings.
*****Ingrid Bergman. It’s a shame you aren’t raising girls. Because what girl wouldn’t appreciate her father telling her, “no, no! Not Marlene. Not Greta. Model yourself on the dull, obedient mouth-breathing one who keeps losing her boyfriends to Claude Rains. Even when she’s married to Claude Rains. That’s the secret to success in life. Mark my words.” None that I can think of. None at all.
I went away.
You may have noticed? Because I was doing my thing over the summer?
It went very badly, in case you were wondering.
And then, in July, I returned**—just as I promised! And I said to myself, “well. That was interesting. It’s nice to know that Mr. Shalamov remains relevant. Clearly, the only ethical stance here, at the moment, in the world, is to shut up. To shut up completely. I, therefore, will shut up. Completely.”
And I *did* shut up. In fact, I like to think I did a pretty good job of shutting up. With the judicious use of lots of drugs, I even showed my son, my extended family, and most of my friends just what they needed to see over those weeks. In silence. Having returned. And shut up.
And thus, I made it through August.
[I’m aping Babel—can you tell?]
But then September arrived. And—whoops. Not so successful. For the first time ever—ever in my junkie life—the pharmaceutical solution to my assorted issues began to interfere with my job performance. (This has never happened before. And guess what. It turns out that office hours can get a little awkward when the professor is face down on her desk in a puddle of drool.)
So I said, “all right then. It appears that shutting up isn’t working quite as well as I’d hoped. As a life choice. In fact, if I don’t find somewhere to express this entirely un-Shalamov-y A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!! that continues to sit like a cold lump of disconnected dead flesh in the pit of my stomach, something important is almost certain to give, and to give in ways that will be supremely unattractive to watch.”
The problem, however, was the following: no one in my family, even if they were good at feeling feels (which they’re not), deserves to be on the receiving end of that sort of self-indulgence. Whereas my friends, many of whom do very effectively feel all sorts of feels—and who quite like self-indulgence as a means of passing the time—would be “concerned” about me in all the wrong ways. And then obviously, contra David Frum, I have zero interest in indoctrinating my students. Which means that there’s no way in hell I’m going to inflict those same un-Shalamov-y feels on a room full of innocent nineteen-year-olds.
I don’t do therapy. Any more than I do resistance movements.
Which left the internet. Robot Land. That infinitely understanding digital prostitute who never, ever judges. And so, yes, you probably didn’t notice because you were busy doing other things, but I crept back here in the first/second week of September to see what you were up to.
And I saw what you were up to.
And I said to myself, “oh dear God, no. NO. No, no, no, no, no.”
And I crept away.
And I thought further. And I said, “all right, yes, it’s true that Substack is my only portal to Robot Land, and thus to digital-prostitute-processed superficial sanity. Every other similar platform I’ve visited gives me at best a migraine and at worst a severe case of Wernicke’s aphasia. (And also what I sometimes worry might be some weird form of cybernetic herpes.) Might as well make use of the needle. But Taibbi’s not the only one here! Substack has grown into something nearly as massive and carnivalesque as Twitter once was, which means that there’s got to be somewhere else for me to go. Someone willing to rent me a teeny, tiny bit of electronic space for five dollars per month, in a weedy backwater comments section, where I can, very occasionally, strip naked, pull out my hair, and go A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!!”
And so, throughout September I did research. Lots of research. Far more research than the project merited, if I’m honest. I lurked about on hundreds of sites and pages. Until eventually, I narrowed things down to two writers. Good writers. Talented, respectable multilingual people with publication records that extended well beyond the Robot Circus Big Top—in one case even onto physical paper—who were floating all sorts of nice, grounded lefty takes on every one of the issues that are apparently not planning to leave my head or my stomach any time soon.
And I thought, “finally! Yes! This is where I belong!”
So, I dusted off the fake VPN, retrieved my shoebox full of laughably traceable disposable payment methods,*** offered up my five dollars, and said, “please. Please, is it okay if I crouch and mutter here in the shadowy comments section of this essay you wrote three years ago and that eight people, many of whom may even have heartbeats, appear to have liked quite a lot? All I want to do is periodically go A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!! I won’t be a bother. Promise. And I do like your work. Please?”
And do you know what happened? *Do* you?
I’ll bet you can guess what happened.
They rejected me. Both of them. One within days, the other within hours. And when I say, “they rejected me,” I don’t mean they ignored or neglected me. No. That’s what I wanted. I *wanted* to be ignored. I cried out to be neglected. I *like* that. I get off on it. (I may have mentioned that before.)
No. When I say, “they rejected me,” I mean they actively unsubscribed me from their publications and refunded me my five dollars.
They wouldn’t take my money, Taibbi! What’s wrong with these people?
It seems that the infinitely understanding digital prostitute does, after all, judge. :-/
So, look, here’s the thing: all of this is just a long-winded way of saying that I’m back now, counting on you—and only you—to preserve my sanity. I’m *depending* on you—you and your “free speech,” and your 500,000 dead souls that are a fair number to keep track of, so maybe my return can happen under the radar, and you won’t even notice, and above all your principled refusal *ever* to turn down five dollars—to rescue me from my stomach. And my head. And assorted other psychosomatically afflicted body parts I’d rather not discuss right now. You’re all I’ve got. So—please, *please*, can I stay here? For the sake of my students if no one else? I’m just on the verge of slowly tipping sideways and slipping to the ground against my podium—geriatric American politician style—in the middle of a lecture. They don’t need to see that. They really don’t.
And, moreover, I promise you, Taibbi, I’m willing, in my desperation, to make you a very good deal on this offer. Truly. I can give you a lot more than five dollars in exchange for the privilege of cowering here, unmolested, in your empty, dusty TK News-era cupboard.
For example (and this is just a partial list—I can do so much more—I can): I’ll root for your guy in the upcoming election (because, seriously, who cares). Yes? Right? He understands The People! The Populace! The Plutocrac—oops. He’s our great hope! The only rational choice! I’ll tone down my contempt for Dipshit and every one of his Dipshit friends. I can’t quite bring myself to call it “Elon,” but—here, watch: he’s a genius! Our last true genius! His sole aim in the world is to save us from the Depredations of The Dastardly Democratic Elite! He’s Thomas Jefferson! He’s Caesar Augustus! He’s Bruce Willis! He’s Rabelais! Whatever would we do without his subtle social commentary and virile, manly guidance? I’ll watch the literary roadkill served up by you and Walter Kirn every week with total equanimity, and I won’t even once ram a pencil through my eyeball at 1:47:33. You want to turn up alongside Douglas Murray on a stage paid for by a slave-trafficking, arms-dealing mining conglomerate to debate the merits and contemporary relevance of Evelyn Baring’s “Modern Egypt” (parts one AND two)? Well, you know what? Three cheers for Victorian race science! Score one for Western Civilization! You want me to feel sad about British lynch mobs turned rabid in the heat being surveilled by progressive, woke-ridden Euro police forces? Oh, the Orwellian horror! Bari Weiss and Tulsi Gabbard as feminist heroes for their trailblazing introduction of poets to pit bulls (and vice versa) at CIA black sites? You’ve come a long way, baby! Sitting in front of a plate of plastic food with Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy to discuss how Chaucer and Dryden would have dealt—harshly but fairly—with the illegals buying up all of the nice suburban houses from under the nice suburban white people? Table for one, please! Handling snakes with Jordan Peterson at a Baptist tent revival? Rape as a crime against masculine honor? Bobby Jr. as the most oppressed and censored man on the planet? Yes! Absolutely! Hallelujah, the bitch was asking for it, and the invisible transsexual UFOs living in the wifi better start showing some proper respect fucking soon!
I’ll buy the t-shirt. I’ll buy the coffee mug. I’ll fist bump my colleagues while saying, “I’m an American, motherfucker.”
Just—please? All I want to do is—very occasionally—go A#!@SWIEOD#$#$%LDJ!!! In peace. Without anyone judging me. Or trying to interact with me.
Okay?
I probably won’t even need to do it very often. Because I think I got most of the stuff that built up over the summer out of my system in the paragraphs that went poof on the lefty sites? And I’ve got a feeling I won’t be traveling all that much in the foreseeable future. So, you know…please?
(As bizarre as you’ve become—and make no mistake, you have become bizarre—you’ve still got a better natural ear for prosody than the rest of them combined. Pity you’re a lunatic.
But then, it seems, so am I.****)
**Except that now I’m “Semele.” I hope that’s okay? The stochastic rhetorical peregrinations of the other one were starting to make me very nervous…
***Re: the laughably traceable disposable payment methods: I know it’s got nothing to do with you and your content creation, but it took something like a week of office hours and twenty-two cards before I finally found something that would work on your site this time around. And can I just say? Oh boy do I miss the days of old, when the relationship between online subscription services and their funding sources operated at a level of financial respectability just a notch or two above that of people who meet up in toilet stalls at airports. Why are all of the trivial things—the things that once made life bearable—so horribly, horribly difficult now? *Why?* Why can’t I purchase a month of Racket News with a Hello Kitty Glitterslippers Gift Card borrowed from Thomasina Slivovitz in Panjakent anymore? WHY???
So demoralizing.
My accountant mocks me when I ask for advice on navigating these issues. Not sure why. It’s almost as though he knows something I don’t…
****I’m serious when I say I plan to do everything in my power to believe, in its entirety, this story you continue to spin. I owe you. You’re the only pundit in Robot Land willing to put up with me, and I am, despite the occasional stumble, more than capable of loyalty.
I know I can do it. It’s merely a question of will.
I wish you, Matt, or someone here, would write about Koppel's point about democratization of Journalism. see this: https://kapwi.ng/c/KvTWQeGz
Koppel was spot on. Still... things changed and here we are: in the land of politicized bullshit. Can't even do a google search without results being sorted for you based on "your private information" -or more specifically, what your private information reveals about your own susceptibilities to programming and being steered along and worse: what someone would like you to see, period.
That's control. We are all subject to the whims of the gatekeepers now and the path back is grown over with trash, debris and lunacy.