Yeah, Matt Taibbi is half Paris Hilton and half Alex Cockburn, making him the Vincent Gallo of journalists who might party with Vincent Gallo. Taibbi says shit partly to see if anyone is paying attention, partly to get attention, and partly because he knows that more people care about the Jets game than the end of the Clean Air Act. That said, Taibbi's smarter than most of his peers. Over the last year or so, his articles have been more accurate, more detailed, more honest than, say, Judith Miller.

Gak.

Urk.

Eep.

Um, I don't know what to say.

Except this, maybe . . . I read a lot of articles about Rwanda at the time, and I recently read a harrowing book about the genocide, and one thing that was perfectly clear from all of that coverage was that the Hutu and Tutsi "races" were a construct, that they were do intermarried and intermingled that if there had _ever_ been a real physical difference between them (something that was debated to begin with), it was long gone. The supposed "prettiness" of one race was created by government propaganda in the first place.

(As an aside, can I tell you how tired I get of the whole "funny, you don't look Jewish" thing? Guess all Jews are squat, dark, hairy people with great hooked noses; they look more like apes than human beings. It's the same sort of idiocy.)

"Over the last year or so, his articles have been more accurate, more detailed, more honest than, say, Judith Miller."

Granted, but don't you think this is setting the bar just a bit low?

What a profoundly stupid and hurtful thing to say. Not to mention false in the particulars.

Some Rwandans do have "classic" Hutu or Tutsi features - and I wouldn't begin to presume to know in which group other Rwandans would categorize them. Outsiders simply can't tell. But, boy, are they good at lapping up colonial propoganda.

And another thing . . .

Taibbi was clearly paying only select attention when in Serbia (if he's ever been there). Young Serb women are beautiful, but the majority of Serb men, well, aren't. But, you know, young women everywhere are beautiful and most men, well, aren't.

And who is it that's wiping out the Somalis?

Anyone remember the Monty Python “Archaeology Today” sketch?

Interviewer: The Watutsi! That's it — the Watutsi! Oh, that's the tribe, some of them were eight foot tall. Can you imagine that. Eight foot of Watutsi. Not one on another's shoulders, oh no — eight foot of solid Watutsi. That's what I call tall.

Sir Robert: Yes, but it's nothing to do with archaeology.

Which are we?

As opposed to the taller tribes wiping out their shorter neighbors?

Any group looks pretty sexy if all you show are a hand-picked bunch of late teen and early twenty-somethings. White Americans are an amazingly handsome bunch, at least judging from the latest Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue.

The reality, of course, is something else.

>Granted, but don't you think this is setting the bar just a bit low?

Well, it's higher than the NY Times.

Taibbi's just being a shithead to get attention. Once he's got your attention, if he's not too hungover, he might spin an interesting tale. Taibbi knows that the bar has been removed and he's curious enough to look around to see who's using it for the javlin toss. And, speaking of low bars, he wrote that for the eXile, a low bar paper on the frontier of low bar.

As one of the squat and ugly (Taibbi doesn't specify a tribe, so I assume he means all of us), I'd just like to offer the datapoint that I am not wiping anyone out.

Oh, for heaven's sake. Taibbi is one of the liveliest writers out there, with deep knowledge of ex-Soviet reality and corporate shenanigans; his style is not for the faint-hearted, but he's hilarious and much closer to the mark than the oblivious sheep who man the opinion/analysis desks at Major Media Outlets. If you have a weak stomach, by all means skip him, but you'll be missing a lot of information. (His former paper, The eXile, was far more consistently right about Russia than any other Western publication.)

Given that I just LJ'd something of Taibbi's I thought was brilliant, I feel obliged to point out that even if he's nuts, he has frequent flashes of genius that go a long way in my opinion to mitigate the nuttiness. The quote above, however, is indeed nuts.

Taibbi's great when he's skewering targets you feel are deserving and he royall pisses you off - and his flaws are apparent - when he aims at something you actually like.

Sort of like a smarter more interesting version of Maureen Dowd. Oh, and on acid.

I don't care how smart he is. If he's saying stuff like that and meaning it he's stupid. If he's saying stuff like that and not meaning it, he's worse.

MKK--also a squat ugly who's not wiping anyone out

Who was wiping out the serbs and when? It was my impression that barring the Austrian foofaraw of last century, the Serbs have primarily been wipers, not wipees.
And who was wiping out Somalis other than, well, other Somalis?

As a tall beautiful person, I thank you. But could you do something about where you put the chandeliers in living rooms?

Forget the chandeliers in living rooms--do something about the ones in foyers and entry halls.

A short friend of mine and his equally short family had never noticed that theirs ended in a rusted iron spike.

Oddly, I had a Serbian roommate in grad school who was 5'4" and I used to annoy him by putting his iced tea glasses on the top shelf.

I would just like to remark to Language Hat, Christine Quinones, and Atrios -- all people for whom I have the highest regard -- that I have had it up to here with forgiving evil brutality based on the perpetrator's ever-so-stylish flair.

I have indeed followed Taibbi's commentary about Russia with considerable interest, and I'm really pissed off to discover that I can't trust a fucking word of it. If Language Hat wants to dismiss this as me "having a weak stomach," well then, Language Hat can kiss my ass. I say this with the utmost respect.

I just think Mary Kay is bonkers if she thinks she's squat and ugly. Short, yes. But that's as far as I go.

I have indeed followed Taibbi's commentary about Russia with considerable interest, and I'm really pissed off to discover that I can't trust a fucking word of it.

That articulates quite well my reaction to the quoted passage.

Reading the entire article--which was "101 Reasons Why NATO's War Sucks"--makes it clear that he sticks silly things into the list presumably to make it less shrill and dreary and give it an edge. "Poetry slams" and "Slobodan don't surf" are later entries. But, man, "tallest and most beautiful"? That's not from any field where I want to be playing ball.

Damnit.

T: Huh. Well, okay, ugly is arguable on account of that whole beauty eye beholder thing. But I'm 5' 3" tall and, depending on which table you use, 40 to 60 lbs. overweight. Short and wide sounds like squat to me. And I'm still not wiping anybody out. Jerk (him, not you)

MKK

Patrick,

You realize, don't you, that you still have a Taibbi article linked in your sidebar? The one about mixed metaphors, marked: "It is a road,' as Friedman might say, 'pockmarked with hidden icebergs."

One can be completely whacked about politics and still be spot-on and funny about points of English usage.

Just another hand raised from the short and squat camp. And dark. And hairy. ("My brother is an hairy man but I am a smoooooth man.") In my youth I was short and dark and hairy as well. Only not particularly squat.

And I haven't wiped out any tribes in quite some time.

Jane

Mary Kay and Jane, let's hear it for the short-and-squats among us. Woohoo!

Hobbitses, that's what we is.

-l.
(And she has the hairy toes to prove it)

PS I don't have much patience for clever but discreditable bullshit, either.

Taibbi is funny - sometimes. He is smart - sometimes. Sometimes he is sharp, brilliant, mordant, and furious, with an eye for the unpalatable truth. He is at his unquestioned best when writing what he knows. Kind of like me (and you and you and you...) without the day job.

And on other days he is writing out his ass because he's got a deadline and a block. On those occasions he keeps his anger, misplaces his experience, and loses the truth. And without his personal experience, all he seems to have to fall back on, the contents of the little jars on the end of his mental spice rack, are the cliches some people think must be dangerous because they strike a nerve. However, many of us calling him on his shit have learned to take offense not at dangerous truths, but at dangerous lies.

I am a sucker for style in writing and Taibbi has got a fine patter in polemic. But if he wants me to take his opinions seriously, rather than merely as an example of exciting writing, then he had better learn the where the border lies between gonzo and bozo.

Kevin, I do realize that, and I agree with you.

I guess being tall and plain as a mud fence, I should go stand in a corner and whack on myself for a while.

I've been noticing a lot of aren't-I-clever, let's shake up the sissies on the left who care about this shit rhetoric from people who see themselves as non-partisan and can't quite stomach the way their olympian nods to the right are turning out to be a mistake.

I guess it sucks when you have to go with the side that has the facts on its side rather than the one with the style you're most comfortable with.

That's the trouble with populism. They'll let just anyone in, and where's the time you put in establishing your serenely rational credibility with the power structure then?

about halfway through this comments thread I came to the conclusion it was funny. I'm not sure if one should describe it as ironic, sarcastic, satiric, mordant, or what, but I'm pretty convinced it's not serious.

Martial says, "But, you know, young women everywhere are beautiful and most men, well, aren't," so he presumably has different tastes than the poet of the same name.

Right on, Arthur. Hey Martial, speak fer yerself!

Mary Kay, Teresa's right. You forget some people on here have met you in person...

LauraJMixon, note my email address (minus the spamproofing).

I thought I was reflecting on Taibbi and his particular carnal choices through the lens of my own travels in Serbia. In other words, I was speaking for myself - about Taibbi.

If I must offer a caveat, then be quite sure that I am in total agreement that youthful humans of whatever sex are often beautiful. Just as I think most humans - of whatever sex - aren't. To continue speaking for and about myself, I am quite sure I was beautiful once upon a time, just as I am equally sure that no one but my wife thinks so any longer. I do, however, grow more distinguished with every gray hair.

What poet?

Patrick: I'm sorry if I offended you; such was not my intention. I'm just very surprised that anyone could read even one piece by Taibbi and be shocked, shocked, that he says offensive things. It's his shtick. As Martial says very well, he does go overboard sometimes, but different people will pick different quotes where they think that happens. Above all, I'm puzzled by "I can't trust a fucking word of it." You can't trust anything someone says because they said one thing that was over your personal line? We're not even talking about actual racism here; I doubt anyone seriously believes that Taibbi thinks Somalis et al are superior races. No, we're talking ironic mock-racism that's not quite arm's-length, not mock enough, for people's taste. I hate to bring up this moth-eaten phrase, but this is the work of political correctness, foax. ("I can't trust anything he says -- he can't spell 'folks'!") It's depressingly prevalent in the left-leaning segments of the internet, and its frosty effects can be felt all over; just this morning I found Caterina raving about the humor of Randall Jarrell's Pictures at an Exhibition, quoting one bit and then saying "And the paragraph after that was funnier, but offensive." Funnier, but offensive, so she daren't quote it online. Randall Jarrell. This chills me a lot more than ironic mock-racism. Your mileage may vary.

It's more than "one thing," obviously; the bit I quoted was an example.

"Schtick" is a poor excuse for the kind of brutality and stupidity Taibbi displays in a dozen places in that piece. Lots of people do schtick--self-parody, pastiche, the dozens, what have you. For those who can make it work, it works. If you come off as an asshole, then you're coming across as an asshole. I've had enough of hipster superiority dances about how I'm just not getting the subtle irony. Quite possibly I'm not. This is not actually my problem.

Or, as Bruce Baugh famously observed, "The Net is phenomenological. Do a good imitation of a jerk, and you are one."

Xopher, very cool! How'd you pull that off?

-l.

The trouble with the net is also its great strength: the world has become a global village, and anything you say in one corner is guaranteed to offend someone else in another.

The watchword for political correctness is multiculturalism, which sounds like a fine thing until you see the public art it produces: deformed multicolored rainbow thingies, like what you'd expect if Polychrome did thalidomide.

Exaggeration? Behold the Gumby Monster of San Jose and its mate in San Diego.

That which offends no one means nothing.

You can't be funny without also being offensive because the ludicrous is tied to the unspeakable. The line between the two depends on how far beyond the pale something is, how unbelievable it is. If its sufficiently "out there" and beyond the pale, its funny. If it's still within the realm of possibility, it's shocking, offensive and horrifying.

The trouble with humor is that ever individual has a different threshold. Jokes about amusing and entertaining ways to do in twenty-six children play better with Edward Gorey fans, who will likely never encounter any such deaths, than with child advocacy activists, who could re-illustrate the Gashleycrumb Tinies with morgue photos.

Jokes about genocide do not play well when anyone has been doing it recently. It's too much within the realm of possibility.

Xopher, very cool! How'd you pull that off?

A friend of mine registered the domain before anyone else. He has yet to be sued (knock wood). But as a member of the MSU Tolkien Fellowship, we've been calling ourselves 'hobbits' for well over 20 years. Some members go back to the late 60s. We've kept a private email list going, too, which makes us the oldest extant Tolkien fan group in the US.

At Thanksgiving we all get together to eat way more than we should. At the opening of the meal we sing "We Boggies Are A Hairy Folk" from Bored of the Rings. This year we booked a roomblock in a hotel under the name "Boggie Bloat Reunion."

Self-deprecation is my schtick. Not that I'm any good at it.

I tried the"it's never correct to joke about a genocide, especially when you're a citizen of the country that supplied the weapons that committed it" line against a particular very popular liberal blogging humorist and I don't think too many people agreed with me. There's no need to name the humorist, but the genocide in question was the one committed in East Timor, and the target of the joke was a certain MIT linguist whose obsessive interest in the subject seemed funny to other people, apparently. To my mind, American citizens have absolutely no right to say anything about East Timor without prefacing it with a line about how awful it is that we helped murder so many innocent people.

But that said, I was probably too hard on the humorist, and people like me can be both right and wrong at the same time. And it'd be wrong to say that because somebody says something we think stupid or tasteless that they shouldn't be read or trusted ever again. Also, we humorless PC types sometimes only succeed in getting on other people's nerves and don't really do any good at all.

But then I lean back towards Patrick's position--cleverness doesn't excuse callousness.

I'll post again when I figure this stuff out.

Donald,
Interesting points. I'll never forget Alan Alda's character in Crimes and Misdemeanors saying "Tragedy times time equals funny! Aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

First of all, callous cleverness can sometimes be excused when the cleverness is actually clever. Let's not overlook the fact that the statement in question is not funny, it's dumb. If he'd made a joke that was genuinely hilarious, probably impossible to do given the fact that genocide is the topic, then I might be more forgiving. But it's a dumb remark, and in my opinion, if you're going to make a joke and risk it failing, why not make a joke about something that won't make you look like a total ass when it fails? Not easy to do, but leaving genocide off the yuk-yuk roster seems pretty obvious.

tried the"it's never correct to joke about a genocide, especially when you're a citizen of the country that supplied the weapons that committed it" line against a particular very popular liberal blogging humorist and I don't think too many people agreed with me. There's no need to name the humorist, but the genocide in question was the one committed in East Timor, and the target of the joke was a certain MIT linguist whose obsessive interest in the subject seemed funny to other people, apparently. To my mind, American citizens have absolutely no right to say anything about East Timor without prefacing it with a line about how awful it is that we helped murder so many innocent people.

Donald, the answer may lie in the fact that the joke in question was about East Timor in much the same way that Godwin's Law is a commentary about Nazism.

I have to say, claims like "To my mind, American citizens have absolutely no right to say anything about East Timor without prefacing it with a line about how awful it is that we helped murder so many innocent people" set off most of my alarm bells. Frankly, it makes me feel like someone is trying to get morally one up on me without having earned the right to do so.

Andrew Northrup's joke seemed to me like a poke at Noam Chomsky's tactics of argument, not a callous dismissal of the East Timorese calamity. I don't always agree with Andrew Northrup, but I certainly don't see him as uncaring; quite the contrary, he seems to me like the sort of humorist who's fueled by a surplus of outraged idealism. Sometimes that outrage is directed at the cliches and bad habits of contemporary writers and pundits. What I'm sure of is thaat I've never seen Andrew mock the suffering, and his Chomsky joke is no exception.

I forgot about this thread. It's usually a bad sign when people use the word "frankly" in a sentence--it often means that the hostility level has risen to the point of no return. I'd just as soon lower it a notch.

Patrick, I'm sure you're right--Andrew wasn't mocking the Timorese and that's where I was wrong. In fact, I was even wrong in the way I worded the previous post, though more from the carelessness than from intention.

But I think your alarm bells ought to ring a for an entirely different reason when you consider the fact that Chomsky was virtually the only prominent American who has treated our role in East Timor with the seriousness it deserved. It wasn't just Kissinger who betrayed the Timorese-it was a bipartisan affair (though some politicians were on the right side). Chomsky is dead right--it says a tremendous amount about how Americans deal with their own complicity in crimes against humanity. It's become fashionable to look askance at Kissinger, but the fact is that the Carter Administration continued the Ford/Kissinger policies and virtually no one talks about this. I greatly admire Carter in most ways, but he ought to be questioned very hard about his policy towards East Timor while he was President. And you don't have to rely on Chomsky for info about this--my own copy is out on permanent loan, but I once had a book by Arnold Kohen (In the Place of the Dead) about the Timorese Nobel Prize winner Bishop Belo which one could read instead, and you wouldn't come away from that book feeling that Chomsky had misled his readers about the American government's behavior. I also read Ramos-Horta's autobiography many years ago. Same reaction. (Totally tangential sidenote--Ramos-Horta wrote an opinion piece for the NYT in the spring supporting the Iraq invasion for humanitarian reasons.)

As for someone trying to "morally get up on someone" without earning it, I didn't feel like writing a very long post and gathering together supporting citations. If you're skeptical, do your own research. But I think you'll find, if you didn't already know it, that the US played an important role under successive Administrations in helping Indonesia kill 200,000 Timorese. And given that unpleasant fact, then yeah, I think it's way too early in the day to be making jokes about the one of the few Americans who tried to call attention to the fact. Chomsky has said things which arguably deserve Andrew's ridicule. Nothing he's said about East Timor falls under that category. Should news stories be all East Timor, all the time? Well, no, but maybe it'll be time for people to ridicule Chomsky's obsession when most Americans know what we did to the Timorese. We aren't there yet, are we? And chances are, we never will be.

To spell it out a little more, if Chomsky always brought up America's treatment of Native Americans or the history of slavery whenever someone raised the issue of terrorism, I'd have giggled a little myself when I read Andrew's joke. Everyone knows what we did to the Indians and the African slaves and nearly everyone outside the KKK agrees it was wrong. But well-educated Americans commonly talk about the need for the Arab world to admit its shortcomings and face up to the fact that Arab countries often either support or breed terrorist groups, without ever seeming to notice how many innocent people America has helped kill with our own support of murderers. So yeah, when American politicians commonly face questions about these sorts of issues, then I for one will stop reading Chomsky, who I agree sometimes goes too far. His niche will vanish the day Americans start practicing what we preach to others (fat chance) and then he can stick to annoying people in linguistics, where I gather his personality brings out the same mixture of adulation and hatred.

Good observation about "frankly." I'm all for not getting into a slanging match.

I do know this stuff about East Timor, and I think that if you read my own comments about current events over time, you'll find that I'm reasonably alert to the folly of that persistent American belief that of course we're the good guys. I grew up around anti-Franco dissidents who talked at length about how the US was helping prop up the guy who would happily toss them down an oubliette if they were unwise enough to go home. One of our closest family friends, the woman who was (and is) kind of my honorary older sister, spent the early 1970s in Chile designing public facilities for the democratically-elected Allende government, and got out just ahead of the murderous US-backed coup against it. There was also this war going on in Southeast Asia, as I recall. It has not escaped me that the US does some pretty shitty things in the world.

I do grant Chomsky props for his dogged persistence on a number of issues that lots of people would just as soon forget. That said, I also note that it's entirely possible to be both (1) right and (2) an asshole about it, and that Chomsky often manages this, much to the detriment of his own effectiveness. As a result, Andrew's joke made me laugh. Yes, it was transgressive. Yes, one could construct a lengthy and sober-minded rebuke of Andrew for daring to take such a poke. Yes, this is what humor is.

What I really want to understand is, how many lives have been saved, oppressions overthrown, crimes exposed, genocides averted by going after comments like Andrew's? Maybe I'm missing something and it's a really useful tactic. I've been wrong before.

Maybe I'm missing something and it's a really useful tactic.

Seems to me that it's nothing but the annoying (and widespread) presumption that prim sanctimony is a prerequisite for genuine concern.

Patrick, I agree with your criticism. I'll probably make a fool of myself from time to time like I did on Andrew's blog. I have a very sensible rule--never post when I'm angry, because I'm apt to spout kilobytes of spleen-filled (if that makes sense) nonsense when I'm in that state. Over the years this rule has spared the pristine internet world several extra megabytes of garbage, but occasionally I don't have enough self-control to hit the delete key and I go on a holy jihad against erring humorists.

But you remember what the original subject of this thread was. I know Andrew's joke was about Chomsky, not the Timorese and the Indonesians, so Taibbi's joke was arguably much more offensive. But to me the connection between the two was whether it's worthwhile to slam a person when you think they've told a joke in very poor taste and whether it's right to judge them on that basis. It's a judgment call, I guess, and right now I lean in the opposite direction from the one I took when I went after Andrew.

In fact, I usually get a little tired of how the far left sometimes focuses on what I think are relatively trivial PC issues and what I admire about Chomsky (for all of his very real faults) is that he obsesses about the things which really matter.

Fair enough. I of course have never gotten angry online and "spewed kilobytes of spleen-filled nonsense," so I am naturally in a position of pristine moral superiority. Not.

1) The eXile is damn funny. Sometimes damn good, too. It's sort of a college paper for expats in Moscow, except with no editor to take out the filthy bits.

2) The piece in question dates from April 1999, during the Kosovo bombing. And of course it's over the top about Kosovo; the Russians were beside themselves with outrage, and I daresay this slopped over.

(I was reading some Russian media coverage in translation at the time. Crazy, crazy stuff. The eXile piece looks mild and reasonable by comparison -- and I mean, by comparison to what you could hear on national TV, or buy for a couple of nickels at a newsstand. "The West is bombing the Serbs because they're beautiful" would have gotten thoughtful consideration in Moscow in the late spring of '99.)

3) Taibbi's not a raving loon any more than Howard Stern is. He's crazy like a fox, laughing alla way to da bank.

Moving from being an eXile columnist to writing cover stories for the _Nation_ is like... well, actually it's like P.J. O'Rourke moving from writing dirty comics for _National Lampoon_ to writing cover stories for _The Atlantic_. Except that Taibbi did it a lot faster, and didn't have to become a Republican first.

What amazes me here, Patrick -- no offense intended -- is that you ever took Taibbi even a little bit seriously in the first place. Did you really think he was a serious, thoughtful commentator, on Russia or anything else? I'm sorry, but that's like getting Howard Stern confused with Dan Savage because they both say "fuck" a lot.

He's often amusing, and never to be taken seriously. -- Unless you're a _Nation_ subscriber, of course. This is the sort of thing that makes me suspect that the Abyss, having swallowed up the _Partisan Review_, is now smacking its lips and eyeing the _Nation_.

But I digress.

Doug M.

I dunno, the "What, you took him seriously?? Ahahahaha!" defense looks to me an awful like the defenses from the less nutty of the wingers of the likes of Ann Coulter.

It's just as true of our side as it is of theirs: even if these are "jokes", the making and repetition of these jokes make it appear that the sentiment underlying them is acceptable.

I dunno, the "What, you took him seriously?? Ahahahaha!" defense looks to me an awful like the defenses from the less nutty of the wingers of the likes of Ann Coulter.

Well... maybe. But I can't help that.

Patrick said he had "indeed followed Taibbi's commentary about Russia with considerable interest, and I'm really pissed off to discover that I can't trust a fucking word of it."

Well; he should never have trusted a fucking word of it. And meaning no disrespect to Patrick, but he probably didn't read Taibbi too critically at first because Taibbi seemed to be, y'know, a right-thinking kinda guy.

Reading the piece he links to, it's... well, it's typical Taibbi, actually. Picking a paragraph at random:

"The basic story is that the U.S., in conjunction with the Yeltsin administration, decided to create a super-wealthy class of oligarchs who would ruthlessly defend their assets against any attempt to renationalize the economy. In return97and this is the key point97they were to support, financially, the ruling, Western-friendly "democratic" government. It is through such machinations that we were able to bring about a compliant Russian state, wholly dependent on corporate support, that would answer the bell whenever we needed something ugly out of them97for instance their assistance in our bombing of their traditional allies, the Serbs."

That's over-the-top rodomontade, which is OK. But it's also factually wrong (insofar as it has any facts) and this is not OK.

So, fond as I am of Patrick, my point here is that he should have been sqinting critically at Taibbi a long, long time ago.

On t'other hand, it speaks well of him that he's capable of having this sort of epiphany. (Which is where the Coulter analogy sorta breaks down, I think; most of her faithful readers either excuse her more deranged comments or simply ignore them.)

BTW, I'm an expat living in the Balkans. And FWIW, there's a stereotype of expats who live in Russia. And Matt actually fits it rather well.

A nice way of putting it would be to say that gray, dull and boring people generally do not pull up stakes and move to early 21st century Moscow. A neutral adjective might be... "flamboyant".

Anyhow.

Doug M.

News flash: I have predispositions and even prejudices, and don't spend all my time in steely-eyed critical mode. Which is to say, Doug Muir is correct; I should have been picking up on the flakiness in Taibbi's reportage earlier. That's life.

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