All-American Entertainment Part 52: Insane Clown President, Matt Taibbi

“There was a lot of accepted racism when the war started….“I’m American, man, I’m American, fuck all these foreigners, I’m American”.  And that was cool.  And then it was “I’m American, man, I’m American, fuck the French!”  And that was cool. Then it was “I’m American, man, I’m American, fuck all these Arabs!”  And that was cool.  Then they went to “I’m American, man, I’m American, fuck all these illegal aliens!”  And then I started listening – cos I know “Niggers” and “Jews” is next. 
Any day now – that train’s never late!"

Chris Rock

“America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show.”
Matt Taibbi, Insane Clown President

Post-truth.  Alternative facts.  A torrent of absolute bullshit.

A pendulum swinging.  A basket of deplorables.  A roll-back of human rights.

Isolationsim.  Unpredicatability.  A more likely nuclear war.

This isn’t as funny as his other books…

What can we even say about the new President that hasn’t already been said? 

That he’s an emotionally stable feminist adult, scrupulously fair and honest in his business dealings, humble, modest – even diffident.  A thoughtful public speaker with a strong sense of priorities.  An articulate exponent of human rights, a messenger of peace with a selfless attitude and a keen understanding of the complexity and nuance of international relations.  A good-looking, erudite grown-up with no need to garner the attention of strangers, and no worries about the size of his penis.  And convincing hair.

There is not much funny about this President, or his rise to political prominence.  It was bad enough when he was just another blowhard TV character; I’ve always found him utterly repellent and been glad to live a long way away from him.  The fact that Nigel Farridge is the British version of him says a lot about the differences between these two awful political cultures.  The British version is just a bit less showy, but no less disgusting for it.  In a sane world, the two would be stuffed into a time capsule and fired into space, instead of on TV, grinning like twats in a gold lift.  They are proof that the cream does not rise to the top, but that a layer of scum can form if the thing is not covered with cling film.

It’s cool for white, trendy people to hate this guy; but, as ever, marginalised people will feel the full force of the madness.  And it is madness: as this book carefully documents, the President rode a wave of extreme resentment in a way no politician could have.

The irony, of course, is that when America finally wrested control of the political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place where we spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world’s most unapologetic asshole.  It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.  (p. 36)

Having spent decades trying to make sure no effective change could be rendered through the ballot box, including some hilariously pious and deliberately ignorant navel-gazing about low turnout at general elections, the political class in the US are reaping the results of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus they have so carefully sown.  It couldn’t happen to a nicer set of people, but there is no celebration to be had here; the result is something even worse than what preceded it.  Like JFK once said, whoever makes peaceful revolution impossible makes violent revolution inevitable.

Voter concerns rapidly take a back seat to the daily grind of the job.  The ideal piece of legislation in almost every case is a Frankensteinian policy concoction that allows the sponsoring pol[itician] to keep as many big-money donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt.
This dynamic is rarely explained to the public, but voters on both sides of the aisle have lately begun guessing at the truth…Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen….(p. 196)

The challenge of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination is dissected expertly by Taibbi: the Democrats and Republicans faced an insurgency, a result of the contempt and anger the electorate felt toward both parties.  In an ironic twist on the “Left can’t organise anything” cliché, the Organised (Official) “Left” had its shit together (heading off the insurgent Socialist), while the Right didn’t.

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings.  Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn’t an organic expression of disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders…
Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is…and the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, this crisis is over.  No person, no problem. 
This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag…
But they’re not worried.  Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.  (p. 196)

The field of Republican candidates, meanwhile, was so hilariously inept, so pathologically unwilling to see, or care about, the way their traditional support was thinking, conspired to allow the insurgent loon to win a surprise victory.  The Republican field was a seemingly endless succession of neoliberal nonentities.  This was following a standard pattern, but the result was not standard.  Nothing about this election was standard, except the fact that it was a bloated, unedifying spectacle designed to keep the rabble out of the real business of politics.

As ever, both parties remained committed to the neoliberal agenda, unwilling to cede any ground on economic policy – or even seriously discuss it – and saw all this as purely an image problem.

[Hillary Clinton] has been playing the inside game for so long, she seems to have become lost    in it.  She behaves like a person who often doesn’t know what the truth is, but instead merely reaches for whatever is the best answer in that moment, not realizing the   difference……Democrats like Hillary have been saying, “The Republicans are worse!” for so long that they’ve begun to believe it excuses everything.  (p. 168)

All of which meant that the Presidential election was between bellicose, anti-politician rhetoric and a careerist politician promising more of the same.  Instead of a choice between right and left populism, it became, for some, a referendum on whether to tear the whole thing up and start again, whatever the cost.  Thus the Democrat party managed to screw the electorate in an even more shocking fashion than the Republicans.  And the Republicans reaped the bitter harvest of racist innuendo they have used for so long. 
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And The Rabble had its day.

One of the appeals of the eventual winner of this shitshow was that he “tells it like it is”.  The fact that he is actually a congenital liar is not really at issue here – he was discarding the traditional nuanced way of signalling racist appeals by a series of nods and winks, instead just saying plainly racist things out loud, in public, enhancing his image as a straight-talker, in opposition to all the political types too scared to say what they really mean, because of “political correctness”.  Again, in this context, the fact that neither the candidate who talked about it, nor really anyone else, knows what “political correctness” is, remained (sadly) irrelevant.

Matt Taibbi is, once again, way ahead of most of his contemporaries in identifying the problem: it’s hard not to share his disgust at the US electoral system – and particularly the media circus that surrounds it.  There is such a quantity of coverage, with so little quality:

It’s our fault.  We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that’s basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games.
What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism.  The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist…
When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they’re doing, informing themselves, and what they’re actually doing, shopping.  (p. 101)

The same could be said about the two political parties: the media culture reflects the political culture in a circular fashion, so that both get worse over time; the devastating result is now, of course, dominating the 24-hour news cycle.  That things are This Bad is causing some soul-searching, but much of it just as shallow and fatuous as the nonsense that preceded it.  The assault on the senses, on rational thinking, on decency and intelligence coming from the White House is taking its toll on everyone.  But, as ever, it does not affect us equally.  It can’t possibly, in such a racially and economically stratified society as the USA.  Or Earth.

Taibbi’s 2004 book, Spanking the Donkey, about that year’s presidential race, dealt with all of this very well.  As with that account, this is a campaign trail diary of reports for Rolling Stone, in chronological order.  So the thinking develops as time continues, and he does get some things wrong: “Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy.”  (p. 203)
Ouch.
Overall, though, he’s on point as ever:  “In an age when Donald Trump is a presidential nominee, what does “serious” even mean?”  (p. 173)

Honestly, though, if you are sick of all this shit, maybe just read some James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, or some other American classics.  Like most countries, the majority of “forgotten”, “ordinary” people are nice enough, but the artists, looking at society from the margins, have the most interesting things to say about that society.

This book does a pretty good job of describing how the USA got to this.  Two-hundred-and-something years of US history have culminated in this catastrophe: an insufferable gobshite, a hypersensitive bully with a persecution complex and extreme verbal diarrhea; all the very worst human tendencies toward selfishness, ignorance, greed and prejudice, personified in an outrageously (and yet entirely appropriately) ugly individual, whose parents presumably found as unbearable as almost everyone else does; an apposite embodiment of a crumbling empire – a whining, spoilt little child who stamps his feet when he doesn’t get his way; this brat, this unwanted and unloved child now has the world’s undivided attention.  And a huge nuclear arsenal.  And the biggest military machine ever.  And an opportunity to shape policy for decades to come. 
If only we could ignore him – without constant attention, he would wither and die like fruit left to rot, ravaged by the elements.  But, alas, it is far too late for that.  And the US political game now has a level of hubris that would make Caligula blush.

That’s how it is.  There’s no way to look at it that doesn’t hurt.  Still, the book is good, if a bit difficult to take.

If I take heart from this book, it will be from the fact that although millions voted for the person described above, it wasn’t actually a majority.  This is worth remembering, partly because it obviously bothers him so much and partly to keep perspective on how many US voters seem to have taken a giant shit in the pool of American public life.

But, ultimately, it will be from the central idea I tried to keep in my head while reading it, the thing that gives me succour (and, on occasion, a simultaneous apprehension), in this, or any other, dangerous moment:
There is nothing inevitable about any of this;
What happens next is up to all of us. 

 

 

[Gulp.]