An Exclusive Interview w/ Matt Taibbi

Here's a little preview from the September issue of The Toilet Paper:

(photo courtesy of motherjones.com)

An Interview with Matt Taibbi

By John Dicker

Quite simply, Matt Taibbi is one of the last great writer-journalists not lapping up right-wing dick to prove that he’s not a part of the propagandified "liberal media." Oh, and he has a sense of humor.

Curriculum Vitae: After more than a decade living in Russia, Uzbekistan and Mongolia as a young writer, professional basketball player (no kidding) and publisher (of the ex-pat humor rag eXile), Taibbi returned to America and found his way to The New York Press, an alternative weekly founded in the late-1980s by Russ Smith.

At the Press, Taibbi began attracting attention for spewing vitriolic and intelligent political analysis without being a pedantic bore — characteristics that (along with prankster inclinations and a fondness for drugs) have earned him none-too-few comparisons to the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Taibbi is perhaps best known for covering the Kerry campaign dressed as a monkey, interviewing the former head of the Office of National Drug Policy in a Viking hat while on acid, and going undercover in the Bush 2004 campaign machine in Florida, where he became so immersed in the mobilization that he was practically running the Orlando office after a month. These antics can be found in his compilation of campaign trail journalism, Spanking The Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season (New Press, 2005).

Taibbi recently left The New York Press and will now be a roving writer for Rolling Stone. In an exclusive interview, he spoke with The Toilet Paper about the state of journalism, Christianity, his departure from the NYP, and his preferred form of burial.

Toilet Paper: When you were doing eXile in Russia you threw a pie filled with horse semen in the face of the New York Times' Moscow bureau chief. What was his offense?

Matt Taibbi: That was Michael Wines. Explaining Wines' crime would require a lot of Russia-specific back story, but basically the guy was a shameless apologist for America's ridiculous neo-colonialist Russia policy, and also a shameless apologist for Vladimir Putin when he first took office.

Wines went so far in his whitewashing of Putin that he even explained away Putin's KGB service by saying that joining the KGB of Putin's youth was actually a good career move for educated Russians, and that only people who were really guilty had anything to fear from the KGB.

More than anything, Wines was the perfect symbol of a kind of reporter we couldn't stand — the blind pro-Western chauvinist who shat on Russia every chance he got, even though he himself couldn't speak the language and knew nothing about the culture.

TP: What contemporary pundit is most in need of an equestrian jizz pie? (Besides Ann Coulter)

MT: I guess of the current pundits, Sean Hannity is most sperm-worthy. What a monster that guy is.

TP: Are there any writers out there that you actually like and/or read on a regular basis?

MT: Probably Seymour Hersh. That guy still works so hard, it's amazing. Beyond that, I read more sports writing than anyone on earth. I like the ESPN football guys, Len Pasquarelli and Joyn Clayton. There's a new guy called the "Football Scientist" who's interesting.

TP: You seem to write from the left, yet your tone so much different than that of, say, The Nation, The Progressive, or Monthly Review. Why do you think so much lefty journalism is unbelievably dull?

MT: First of all, I'm really not so sure what the word "left" means and I'm never comfortable when people call me a lefty. If anyone were to ever ask, I'd say I'm probably more of a libertarian than anything else. I believe in capitalism, small government, etc. I have doubts about Roe v. Wade (for the same reason I'm against the national drug laws). So I don't think I fit exactly in that category. But none of that is important anyway — I mean, if you can tell exactly what a writer's politics are, he's probably not a very good writer.

As for why the left's writers are dull, that's probably the reason — anybody who's doctrinaire is also always going to be dull. If I know what your opinion is going to be on any subject, why should I bother reading you? Plus, most of the left's writers are like Democratic politicians in general — always worried about offending somebody. And they're always trying to stay on message. There is something there left over from the old communist dictum about art for art's sake being dangerous and unorthodox. What's most infuriating about this is that humor is the most subversive force there is. If you can become the place where people go to laugh at the system, you will attract all the dissenting energy in the population. But the American left has no sense of humor and no sense of fun at all. And so the would-be revolutionaries all avoid them like the plague, go into day-trading and shit like that.

TP: You've written about how few people on the left (or elsewhere) seem to understand that right wing Christianity isn't a passing fad, and that no one ever proposes that it be taken on directly. What might a struggle with the forces of darkness look like?

MT: I suppose you could divide it up into specific things and non-specific things. Specifically I'd like to go after their tax-exempt status. More generally I'd like to see abandoned that usual party line that the nonreligious take in public — the one about respecting the religious beliefs of Christians, but disagreeing with their politics. Why should we respect those beliefs? One, they don't respect mine. Two, they're idiotic. That whole Left Behind phenomenon now is widely believed all over the country — the idea that Christ is going to come and the believers are going to be whisked away to heaven, while the rest of us will be left to rot on earth.

I run into people who believe in this stuff all the time. A few weeks ago I talked to a guy in Texas who said he was liquidating his mutual fund account because the end of the world was coming and he didn't want the businesses of nonbelievers financed with his money after he went to heaven. I have another friend who goes to school with someone whose Christian parents came around to approving of their secular daughter's career choice only after concluding that medicine will be a good field in the near future — because doctors will be badly needed in the bloody chaos that will rule the earth after Christ comes.

If this stuff wasn't masked in pseudo-Christian theology, we'd call these people lunatics — which we did, incidentally, when exactly this [same] belief system popped into the public consciousness via the Heaven's Gate cult story. Personally I think society, and in particular the mass media, needs to start treating all of this stuff like a dangerous cult. I don't know why there aren't ten-part series in the major dailies debunking these religions. I mean, it's not like that would be hard. But we have this idea in America that questioning someone's beliefs is somehow inappropriate or bigoted. Somehow it's okay for them to go door to door trying to convert us-- but it's cruel and discriminatory to run a story in the New York Times exposing Left Behind as a bunch of crap.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish the media would take the gloves off with Christians. They only criticize people like James Dobson when they get involved with secular politics. They never look at what they do the rest of the time. It's like a nonaggression pact. Weirdly, it's only enforced in one direction. If you follow Christian radio or TV, the secular media is blasted constantly. But there's never any serious return fire.

TP: In a seemingly unrelated matter, you like to rip on New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. This is a good thing. One of our premier institutes of Greater Theocracy, aka New Life Church, actually peddles copies of Friedman's books along with their religious tracts. Your thoughts on this? Why is this man so profoundly successful?

MT: It's funny, David Rees, the cartoonist, once said to me that he'd heard Friedman give a speech and that he thought that if you didn't know it was Thomas Friedman talking, you'd swear it was some evangelist preacher from the Midwest. Friedman is popular with that crowd because he's very messianic. He's selling a religion of globalism and he uses a lot of the same rhetorical techniques you'd find in the churches of fourth-rate pastors.

TP: You've written about covering the Kerry and Dean campaigns where it was like high school with the big reporters sitting up front [of the plane] and the lesser ones in the back... Did the cool kids act like pricks? Were you mostly ignored?

MT: As for the press corps, they really weren't that bad. I don't think I was ignored any more than most other small-time reporters, most of whom were pretty nice people who just had lousy jobs. But the cool kids, the people working for the big papers and TV stations who really loved hobnobbing with all the pols on the plane — they were a pretty disgusting group in some ways. I think the one image that will stick with me is Candy Crowley (CNN) jamming fistfuls of complimentary chocolate chip cookies into her mouth in a bus in Houston (the Kerry campaign had given us all free cookies wrapped in American-flag-patterned bandanas) and talking about Kucinich. She's got this huge waterfall of crumbs coming out of her mouth and she's talking about how ugly Kucinich is. That to me summed up the whole campaign press crew, right there...

TP: You write almost exclusively about politics and the media. Does this want to make you go home, take a bath and maybe write a self help book? Or can you not imagine yourself writing about anything else?

MT: I'm a pretty happy guy, I don't get depressed all that easily anymore, not even by politics. For instance, I just had to write this piece about Bernie Sanders and congress, and everyone said it was depressing because it was about how dysfunctional congress is. But what I got out of it was, hell, this isn't Belarus or Uzbekistan. You'd never have a Bernie Sanders running around still fighting in places like that.

As depressing as our political system sometimes is, it's not an outright travesty yet, which I couldn't say about some places I lived in. Americans like to be dramatic about how broken their society is, but it's not like we're all peeing into tin cans.

TP: Now that you’re no longer writing for The New York Press, where can we find your work?

MT: Beginning next week, I'll be doing 2000 words in every issue of Rolling Stone. Basically in that spot I'm going to be traveling around the country, doing a piece on whatever the crazy news story of the moment is. So if it's Cindy Sheehan, I go to Crawford (which I did last week), or if it's the Roberts confirmation hearings, I'll go to those, of if there's another Terri Schiavo, I'll go there. Wherever there's a media zoo in other words. But that won't be like my NYP column, because it'll be journalism, not commentary.

Because I'm busy right now (I'm also writing a book on congress that's due in January) I'll probably wait a few months to start up a new commentary-type column, but I'll eventually do that again — I've spoken with a few publications about that.

TP: Why did you leave the New York Press? Did they shitcan you? You seem to be getting a lot of attention, why WOULDN'T they want to keep you and your readers?

MT: Okay, first of all, The New York Press is going conservative, so I wouldn't have fit in their lineup anyway. But I'll tell you what happened here. You should know that when the former owner, the conservative writer Russ Smith (aka Mugger), sold the paper, he negotiated an arrangement with the new management whereby he kept his column at an exorbitant fee price, and could not be fired. This was a condition of the sale. So Koyen and, later, Alex Zaitchik couldn't fire this guy, even though he a.) sucked, b.) was grossly insubordinate in print, constantly savaging the paper and its contributors, showing an utter lack of collegial loyalty, and c.) took a huge bite out of the contributor budget, even during times when the paper was hopelessly strapped for money.

If you look back, you'll find numerous examples of Smith blasting other Press contributors in his column (including and especially me, repeatedly saying that I was headed for the funny farm, a nut, and an immature lefty extremist); what readers didn't know is that in most of those cases, Smith was collecting his giant fee every week, while the rest of us who were the targets of his literary pseudo-wrath were going unpaid as the paper struggled. In other words, Smith was not only an editorial deadweight on the staff, but he had the nerve to rip the other contributors who were making sacrifices for the paper — while he sat, fully paid, in his Manhattan townhouse, watching the Red Sox on NESN.

In the year 2003-2004, The New York Press racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debts to contributors and vendors. There was a lot of mismanagement that went on at the paper during this period that was not at all (and I stress that, not at all) the fault of Jeff and Alex. The mess went on at a level above them. It should be noted that these to guys both had to somehow keep the pages filled for a period of about a full calendar year where NOBODY among the contributors — except Russ — was getting paid on a regular basis. That they even managed to keep writers from leaving during this period ought to say something about how all the writers felt about them.

All the same, it was a terrible position that management put these guys in — they had to run a paper by begging New York City writers to contribute for free. Moreover, the paper invested nothing in marketing or personnel during this time. In return for doing that thankless job, what did they get? They got a). blamed for the whole mess, and b). pushed out. The whole thing was completely slimy. I'm not saying that anyone is entitled to keep an editor job — bosses always have a right to fire employees when the numbers aren't right — but what happened to those guys was a joke, considering what was going on in the rest of the company.

The NYP management didn't fix their financial problems until about a year ago, which means that Koyen had about a half a year of being a paying editor before he was forced out. Management clearly made up its mind around the time of Koyen's departure to make the changes it's just made now, which necessarily included my leaving — I obviously wouldn't have fit the new concept, which I understand. Among others, I believe that Russ Smith was a primary influence behind the scenes in making these changes. (The new editor, Harry Siegel, is a Smith protégé) I think Russ has wanted the paper to go back to being a conservative outlet ever since he sold it, and I understand that. But I think the way he went about it — forcing himself editorially on the paper, and blasting his colleagues in print over the objections of editors who could not stop him — I think that was totally unprofessional.

The whole thing is a petty little story that obviously shouldn't be of much interest to anyone. The only reason I'm complaining about it publicly is that I'm upset about the way things worked out there. I really liked being part of The New York Press. I'm sure there are people out there who can imagine how upsetting it is for me to see it turned into a dumb neocon rag that will doubtless be full of war cheerleading and screeds about the exciting possibilities of social security privatization and prison construction. It's a little bit like seeing your sister marry a fast food lobbyist.

TP: Will people ever stop comparing you to Hunter S. Thompson?

MT: I think the thing is with that — I admit to doing drugs, I'm a comic, and I write in the first person, mainly about politics, for Rolling Stone. So no matter how silly it is, I'm going to get that comparison a lot. One of the reasons there's been so much speculation about "the next Hunter Thompson" over the years is because Thompson was just about the last writer, of fiction or of non-fiction, who really had a big impact on the whole population here. Since he stopped being really productive a few decades ago, a lot of Americans, me included, have really been waiting for that one writer whom they can depend on to help make sense of things and put things in perspective. So I think that when people talk about "the next HST" they aren't necessarily waiting for a repeat of that particular act, i.e. a drug-gobbling freak endlessly careening off a behavioral cliff in page after frenzied page. I think they're just looking for someone who can handle the responsibility of being that kind of clear, dependable, defiant voice for so many people. I myself am always looking for that person. And while I'm flattered that people say that about me sometimes, to be honest I think that the reason I get that comparison has more to do with the fact that my manner of telling jokes superficially resembles Thompson's than it does with anything else. I don't think there will ever be another Thompson, but when the next great one shows up, we'll all know it.

TP: Have you thought about how you want your ashes to be disposed of and/or what celebrities will host your funeral?

MT: I want my corpse to be thrown in the tiger cage at Six Flags in New Jersey.

Comments

[taibbi fan]

Taibbi is awesome

[Tom Voight]

Taibbi's a talentless hack. He'll fit right in at Rolling Stone.

Cool guy, I used to look forward to his Press column...

And I must say that his MJ article "Nation in the Mirror" in Rolling Stone was spot fucking on. Finally someone took in the larger picture and spread the blame around. Bravo.

I took a look at his book in a store the other day. It looks pretty dull.

The idea of Matt Taibbi is so much more interesting than the reality of Matt Taibbi.

[darksandal]

Yeah, not to mention that the reality of Matt Taibbi isn't even nearly as real as some of the other things that are REALLY real.

[Onceler]

I disagree with Taibbi at times, and sometimes think he frames issues in a non-helpful way, but I gotta say he's just about the best political analyst/journo out there right now. its hard for me to say that about someone who describes themselves as 'libertarian' - as libertarian views in general seem to me to be a lot of immature pie in the sky idealism, as much so as hippie free love used to be. this idea of having a government with no revenue - ridiculous. won't work, can't. not in America anyways. but I'll keep reading the guy wherever he's writing.

[Clay Gollobin]

Hey, does anyone know how to get in touch with Matt? I grew up with him in Massachusetts. I can be reached at clayjay@iwon.com.

Thanks,

Clay Gollobin.

[DT]

Matt Taibbi is indispensable.

And the NY Press was genuinely interesting and worth reading when he and Zaitchik and Koyen were there. Besides having dumb politics, the new NYP crew can't write for shit.

And I suspect they (or boring, self-involved Mugger) are moonlighting here as trolls.

[Yo-yo]

I liked this interview. I was waiting for some kind of explanation for why the NY Press made the changes they did. I agree with the other comment that, at least in the few issues since the editorial change, the quality of the writing has suffered. I used to read Taibbi and also find one other good column but now I can't find anything I like on the NY Press site. Some other weeklies that could substitute for the NY Press are The Buffalo Beast, the eXile (Moscow), and the Weekly Dig (Boston). Keep up the good work.

[jami]

it's annoying that taibbi makes it sound as though all the left is humorless/all humorlessness is on the left. you think pat robertson's funny on purpose?