July 11th, 2008
AVC: Any time you use the words "omnibus" and "appropriations" in the same sentence, people will probably zone out for a second.
MT: Yeah, exactly. It's so longwinded and awful-sounding, nobody will listen to it.
AVC: Everyone wants to be the "change" candidate. Obama seems to have at least won exclusive use of the slogan for now. But will this presidential election change anything?
MT: Actually, this is sort of going to be the subject of my next book: how incredibly pointless presidential elections are, and how we all get worked up about them for two whole years, and then as soon as they're over, we go back to being just as fucked as we were before. There was a Joseph Heller play called We Bombed In New Haven—you know, the guy who wrote Catch-22—and there's this scene in it where one general says to another, "We're gonna bomb that city off the map." And the other guy says, "Why don't we just bomb the map?" It's the same thing with this. Instead of actually effecting change, we just turn change into a T-shirt. Buy the T-shirt, you know? It's a shortcut to actually having it: We just say we have it, and that's just as satisfying. If you go back to 1992, Bill Clinton's campaign slogan was "A change for America's future." Change was the slogan then, too. It's always the slogan. That's permanently part of our political landscape. Until we've learned to distinguish between bombing the city and bombing the map, we're going to have that problem.
AVC: The subtitle of your book refers to "the twilight of the American empire." Are we really at the twilight of this empire?
MT: I actually didn't write the subtitle. [Laughs.] But I'll cop to it. It's my book. There are certainly signs of us being on the downside of our world influence. Having lived in a collapsed empire before—I lived in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed—you can see a lot of the classic signs of an empire that's on its way out. If you look back in history, as the barbarians were invading the gates of Rome, people were consulting fortunetellers and worrying about the end of the world and all sorts of other apocalyptic notions. When the tsars were finally overthrown, they were all reading tarot cards even as the revolutionaries were banging at the gates. With America, it's kind of the same thing. We get bombed by an Islamic terrorist, and half of the country thinks it's because we are supporting gay marriage, and the other half thinks it's because we did it to ourselves. This is a symptom of a country that's no longer able to effectively digest the things that are happening to it. On the other hand, America is still a very, very strong country in so many ways. Compared to other places in the world, my God, it would really only take incremental improvements across the board for us to be as healthy as a country can possibly be. We have a very powerful economy, we have a functioning court system, elections that are more or less honest. So I don't think we're that far off from reversing the problem, it's just that there are signs of us taking a nosedive.
AVC: On the occasion of every presidential election, we're told, "This is going to be the really important one, the historic one." Is it this time, for real?
MT: Well, it's certainly a very important election, for a lot of reasons. I think we're in a situation now where the Bush people have done so much damage to so many different aspects of our society that this is an important election just in that respect. We can't continue along those roads. As regards to the themes in this book, Bush in particular has done a lot of damage to our ability to have a national discussion about things, because they have so frequently insisted upon having their own reality when it suited them. Remember that famous quote, "We're in the reality-making business," from one of his aides? When it suited them, they just changed the facts and told their supporters "Stick with us," and "We want you to subscribe to this faith-based politics where what we say is true because we say it is." That's an enormously damaging way of operating the White House. You really need to have appeal and try to talk to the entire country, and not just your constituents. I think Barack Obama—as little faith as I have in his ability to actually change the system—he does at least have the opportunity to repair that aspect of things, and to talk to the whole country, and bring us back to reality. That would be a huge step. I think John McCain is a guy who's got his own psychological problems that would prompt him, for instance, to continue this war under very cloudy, illogical circumstances, and that would be very destructive. So yeah, I think it would be meaningful, I just don't think it's going to affect a whole lot of systemic change if Obama gets elected.
AVC: The other night, Larry King was talking about the election with Joy Behar from The View—
MT: [Laughs.] There's two intellectual giants debating politics.
AVC: Behar was talking about some US Magazine cover where they explore Michelle Obama's relationship with her husband. It's even called something like "Why Barack Loves Her." And Behar was saying, "Well, not everyone reads The New York Times or watches the news, so this might be the only way they get to know about the Obamas." Are we that hopeless?
MT: Oh, man. That's terrifying. I'm out there on the campaign trail all the time talking to people who are going to vote in this election. I was talking to this woman in Louisiana last week, and she's standing at a McCain rally, she's actually there supporting the candidate in person, and I say, "What is it about Barack Obama that you don't like?" She turns to her friend and says, "What was that thing about his wife? That anti-American thing?" The other one says, "I don't know. Which thing do you mean?" And she's like, "That thing, where she's anti-American." And the other one is like, "Oh, I don't know. I don't know what you mean." And so she says to me, "Well, I heard this thing about her being anti-American." That was as specific as she could be about why she didn't like Barack Obama, because she heard a thing somewhere about his wife. People are voting on the basis of shit like that. [Laughs.] How we're not back in the Stone Age already with this situation, the way it's going, is beyond me.
AVC: As a journalist, what did you make of the coverage of Tim Russert's death? Are we at the point now where certain journalists are to be memorialized like statesmen?
MT: I've already gotten in trouble for something like this before the Pope died. [Taibbi wrote an article for NY Press in 2005, "The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death Of The Pope."] I mean, obviously he's the Pope, he's not Tim Russert, so it's not as ridiculous—but you knew that there was going to be that eight consecutive days of "Oh my God. This person that we can't possibly live without has died!" And, "He is the greatest person who has ever lived on the entire face of the earth!" There's something about the way our media is constructed that it has an instinct and an appetite for that kind of bullshit that just goes beyond all reason. I don't know what it is, but if you watch ESPN, for instance, and you watch anybody talk about any sports team, it's like they jump at any chance to jack off any athlete they can, because the thing that they do best on TV is just worship people or things. Celebrating the dead is the schlockiest form of worship, and they have a limitless appetite for it. I just can't figure it out. I mean, Tim Russert, he's a fat guy from Buffalo who did his job okay. I don't have anything against him. But people die! That's part of what your life is all about. I don't know. It's really weird shit. It's certainly repugnant. But I can't imagine that it's going to end anytime soon. I think it's probably only going to get worse.
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