July 11th, 2008
As the au courant acid-tongued political reporter for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi can't help but do his dirty work in the long shadows of the celebrated scribes that preceded him, like Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi doesn't sport a proud initial in his name, but his easy eloquence and ability to call bullshit by its name are helping him carve out his own small legacy in the unwinnable war against nonsense. In fact, his inability to curb his cussing has also found him a welcome home on Real Time With Bill Maher as a contributing reporter.
His latest book, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story Of War, Politics, & Religion At The Twilight Of The American Empire attempts to reconcile our perception of the world with real events. By his own estimation, we are living in "a country that's no longer able to effectively digest the things that are happening to it." Whether he's infiltrating John Hagee's apocalyptic ministry in San Antonio or shaving his head to go unrecognized at 9/11 Truth Movement meetings, Taibbi's tireless pursuit of what has deranged us is often as troubling as it is hysterical. The A.V. Club recently spoke with Taibbi about Christian fundamentalism, blowing up buildings, patriotism, change, Joseph Heller, and the death of Tim Russert.
The A.V. Club: Let's just get one question out of the way, so you'll be taken at your word for the rest of the interview: Do you love your country?
Matt Taibbi: [Laughs.] Yeah, sure. Of course. One loves one's country the way one loves a family member. And sometimes that family member does really embarrassing, shitty things, right? But you still love them.
AVC: Are you more of a cynic or a realist? Is there a difference?
MT: I get the cynicism thing all the time, although I don't really know where that comes from, because I think I'm actually the opposite of a cynic. I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they're normal and can't be changed. A lot of what I write about is, "Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn't need to be, and that's why it's so offensive." Things should be better.
AVC: In The Great Derangement, you document your infiltration into John Hagee's Cornerstone Church and your incognito participation in 9/11 Truth Movement meetings. Have you gotten a reaction from either camp since the book's publication?
MT: Oh yeah. Among the people that I was in church with, one of them actually saw me on television earlier this spring and called me up right afterward. So my cover was blown before the book even came out, which was kind of embarrassing. But I haven't heard too much from that whole crew. Weirdly enough, the letters I've been getting from a lot of Christians—not specifically from that church, but from other fundamentalist Christians—have been strangely positive in a way that I really didn't expect. A lot of people are very critical of Hagee's church, that it's deviating from the real message of Christ. I get a lot of letters of the "If only you'd experienced Christ through our church" variety. There's a lot of that, but relatively little abuse of the sort that you would've expected. The Truthers, on the other hand… [Laughs.] I think they're probably the most self-Googling sliver of humanity on the planet. The instant you write anything about them, your e-mail is flooded with letters. I haven't gotten a single positive reaction from anybody who's a self-described Truther.
AVC: You'd think a movement devoted to seeking truth would encourage debate as a way to arrive at the truth, rather than trying to suppress whatever doesn't already align with their own views.
MT: Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the subject matter in much the same way a defense attorney does. A defense attorney takes a case and he sees six pieces of evidence that are going to convict his client, and he sets out to destroy those six pieces of evidence, irrelevant to the actual truth of the situation. That's not to denigrate defense attorneys, but that's what they do. It's exactly the same thing that Truthers do. They just take the 9/11 Commission Report piece by piece, and they try to break down links in that evidentiary chain that compose the official story, but they never really try to find out what happened. They're just trying to convince you that the official story couldn't possibly be true. For instance, the stuff about Hani Hanjour—the hijacker who reportedly made that maneuver into the Pentagon. They're really hopped up about the fact that he was a bad pilot and couldn't have made that sophisticated maneuver. But they make absolutely no effort to tell you what actually did happen. They're like, "Oh, it could have been a remote-controlled plane." Offhandedly, they'll say that. [Laughs.] Like that's a very simple thing. It's really weird.
AVC: The whole "smoking gun" of the Truth Movement seems to revolve around the collapse of Building 7, near the Twin Towers. There's this matter-of-fact assertion that the government obviously blew it up.
MT: I love when you ask them, "Okay, so let's just say for instance that it wasn't collapsed by the fire. Why would you demolish Building 7? What would be the propaganda purpose of doing that?" They're like, "Oh, you know, they're hiding the evidence." I'm like, "They need to blow up a whole building to hide the evidence?" It's just crazy. But whatever. I mean, once you jump on board that train, you're on it for life. [Laughs.]
AVC: This "great derangement," as you've coined it, do you think it's unique to these times? Conspiracy theories and apocalyptic religious dogma have been around in various forms for a very long time. What's different about it now?
MT: America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine. I think what's different about it now is that we had a relatively cohesive national society for a while. For a giant industrial country, we had a situation where pretty much everybody agreed on the same sets of facts when they talked about the news, and they believed in the media. When somebody reported something, they generally accepted that it was true. For a long time, I think that was the case in this country. But recently, because of a bunch of things—there was a general collapse in faith of the mainstream news media, because of Jayson Blair. And the 2000 election was a situation where if you were on the Bush side, you believed X set of facts, and if you were on the Democratic side, you believed Y set of facts. The wound was never healed. You got a situation where people decided to reality-shop and search for their own sets of facts at their own news sources, and they just kind of stopped coming to this common meeting-place where we all had the same commonly accepted set of facts. And because of the Internet, which is a new phenomenon, people can do that more than ever before. You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before.
AVC: The Internet has fed a lot of the suspicion people have for "mainstream media," but does the Internet suffer from its own distortions? Aren't there a lot of so-called "news" sites that manufacture their own version of events to play on fears and serve their own needs just as much as the established media?
MT: Yeah, sure. It's just for different reasons. Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising. I think the Internet is a completely different phenomenon. When you have movements like this that are preying on fears, or your misconceptions, they're doing it basically just to bolster their ranks and to self-aggrandize their movement objectives. It's not for commercial reasons, which is maybe a positive. It's a very similar phenomenon, it's just that it's for different reasons.
AVC: In the book, you write about the negotiations to pass the Gasoline For America's Security Act in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which ends up having little to do with security, affordable gasoline, or the hurricane. Is a candidate like Barack Obama spreading false hope that he's going to be able to just march into town and sweep away all this nonsense that goes on in Congress?
MT: This is an institutional problem. It's not a problem of the individual people occupying the spots in government. The problem that we have with Congress is just the way it's set up. Once you get elected, you have to start running for reelection right away, especially in the House. There's just no way to keep your seat without raising tons of money constantly. And because of this constant pressure to raise money, these guys can't afford not to make a lot of legislative decisions based upon what's going to help them get campaign donations. The only guys who can afford to not do that are the people who have enormous name recognition and goodwill in their states for some other reason. Somebody like Bernie Saunders, for instance, who knows everybody in Vermont personally. [Laughs.] If you're not one of those people yet, you have to do this all the time. So when something like that refinery bill comes up, well, if you're Joe Barton [R-Texas] or Lincoln Diaz-Balart [R-Florida] or any of these guys, and you know you're going to get gigantic campaign contributions from Exxon-Mobil and all the different companies that have power plants and are trying to reduce their obligations to the Clean Air Act, you're going be strongly tempted to vote "yes" for something like this, no matter how stupid and evil it is, just because that's what you have to do to stay in office. They have tried to chip away at the underlying reasons why this is all in place, with campaign finance reform and reform of the lobbying system and earmarking. But every time they do, the system just kind of metamorphoses and they find a way around it. They pulled off an earmark reform act two years ago, and the first thing that happened was the amount of money spent on earmarks went up that year. The amount of earmarks went from under 3,000 to over 11,000. So you know, every time they try to fix this problem, it just gets worse. It's really kind of sad.
AVC: As a journalist, do you wonder why you bother covering some stories, since you know in the end it won't change anything?
MT: I think you do these stories because you want people to know about it. There are a lot of people who are actually in Congress who are very, very frustrated—people who work there and are frustrated that people don't know this is the way it all goes on there. They want to get the word out, but the problem is that Congress is boring. It's just hard to communicate and ergo, there's almost nobody covering Congress. I was at the 2007 Omnibus Appropriations Bill passage, and like eight of the 11 appropriations bills were being passed, almost $2 trillion being spent, and I was the only reporter in the gallery. [Laughs.] It shows you something. I'm out on the campaign trail and you have thousands of people following the candidates around, listening to them spew this idiotic bullshit all the time, but when we actually spend the money, when the actual business of government happens, nobody's watching because it's just too fucking boring.
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