Politics-a-palooza

Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi will do anything -- including throwing a pie made of horse sperm into the face of a New York Times bureau chief -- to bring political reporting back to life.

By Jonathan Shainin

May 12, 2005 | Matt Taibbi is a natural provocateur. He has an uncanny knack for kicking up storms of indignation, and occasionally stumbles into an uproar he didn't even mean to stoke. This happened most recently when he made light of Pope John Paul II's imminent death -- and the saturation coverage sure to accompany it -- in a New York Press cover story titled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope." His piece infuriated what seemed to be more people than the paper has readers, and provoked a storm of humorless condemnation from a panoply of local pols like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Anthony Weiner, the mayoral longshot who urged New Yorkers to gather up bundles of the free paper and throw them in the trash.

That Taibbi found himself embroiled in such a brouhaha was no surprise to anyone familiar with his work. When I met him, in 2001, I mentioned that I liked the newspaper he published in Moscow, the eXile, which I had read online. Precisely the sort of operation that libel law and common decency disallow in the United States, the eXile, an English-language weekly, was an unstable concoction, equal parts uproarious and offensive. A newspaper on amphetamines, it ran serious press criticism salted with vicious personal attacks on reporters -- as in an NCAA-style tournament held to crown "Moscow's Worst Journalist" -- and its lengthy reported pieces shared space with nightclub listings designed to guide the discerning Western businessman to Moscow's finest sex retailers.

After I told Taibbi I read the paper, he excitedly pulled from his bag a foul-looking photograph of a man with pie all over his face. The pie-faced fellow in the snapshot was the "winner" of the tournament of journalists, and Taibbi had thrown the offending dessert that was splattered all over him. "The pie," Taibbi calmly explained, "is made of horse sperm."

After a decade of Moscow troublemaking, Taibbi returned to the States in 2002 to settle down in Buffalo, N.Y., where he started an alternative newspaper, the Beast. But Taibbi, whose fans and enemies alike have a habit of comparing him to Hunter S. Thompson, soon found himself on the presidential campaign trail, filing dispatches for Rolling Stone, the Nation, and the New York Press, where he writes a weekly column -- trying to do for 2004 what Thompson did for 1972. He insists that he failed, and indeed, "Spanking the Donkey," his campaign diary, is a riotously funny account of that failure. It's a kind of "Network" by way of Kafka, with our furious protagonist trapped in the bowels of a campaign he loathes and cannot comprehend, trying to make sense of what he calls a "tour de force of lies" in which, to his horror, he can find not a shred of humor.

Frequently touted as the most important election of our lives, the ugly Bush-Kerry clash was an episode many of us would now prefer to forget. But "Spanking the Donkey" is all the more necessary in the aftermath of an election that harnessed enough liberal outrage to light the Vegas strip, cost more than a billion dollars, absorbed hundreds of hours we will never get back, and achieved absolutely nothing. Nothing, that is, except to convince thousands of media types that, just as the right has long alleged, they are "out of touch" with the values of Middle America, thus enshrining forever in our political discourse the idiotic construct of a country depicted in two Crayola camps. "When one hundred million people don't vote," Taibbi quips, "the nation is not bitterly divided. The nation mostly doesn't give a shit."

With the country peacefully restored to its natural state of apathy, Taibbi's scabrous complaints about the 2004 race -- "one of the greatest and most prolonged insults to human dignity the world has ever seen" -- are not only a hysterical catharsis, a kind of laughing cure, they are essential reading for anyone who's been wondering where John Kerry's vaunted electability got us. Taibbi took a moment to speak with Salon about his inimitable approach to media criticism, Soviet America, and whether anyone got laid on the Kerry press plane.

Your writing is unlike typical campaign journalism, which is often a bit formulaic -- you're playing pranks, and working in barbs and jokes alongside your reporting. How did you fit in on the plane with all the straight-laced Times and Post types?

All the reporters on the trail kind of go through the same thing. When you first show up, it really is like the first day of school. On the campaign trail, the popular kids are the reporters who have been on the trail the longest, and they literally sit at the front of the plane, all together. The further back on the plane you are, the bigger a loser you are. It's so much like high school, because the big hitters don't want to talk to you, they don't want to be seen talking to you, and so you have to work your way up just to be able to socialize. And, of course, because I worked for sort of a disreputable organization at the beginning -- the New York Press -- nobody even thought about talking to me. Of course, as soon as I started working for Rolling Stone, it was different.

Next Page: No sex on the Kerry campaign for this journalist, or anyone else

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