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T H E P U L L O F P O L I T I C S“ As a reporter, you sometimes have to invitepeople to say things you know are going to lookstupid when stuffed into some larger andunfriendly argument you’re making. And I don’tfeel good about that.”villains, etc. Spy magazine got people interestedin New York politics by creating a set group ofcharacters that everyone could identify—fromthe “short-fingered vulgarian“ Donald Trump tothe “churlish dwarf billionaire” Ron Lauder. Youdon’t do that, no one cares.When did your writing become so muchfun? Some earlier pieces seem less flipmouthed.Well, I’m not sure about that. Before I was atRolling Stone, I spent seven years writing reallycrazy stuff in Russia. I’ve actually toned downa lot.CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2008uinely making friends with, and then when youcome back you don’t want to say anything badabout their mission. A piece I wrote about myembedded experience was colored badly bythis dynamic, and I think I left people with theimpression that I wasn’t against the war. I mayalso have been seduced by the romance ofthe whole war environment, which is a prettygross thing for a sheltered prep school kid tolet happen.When Boris Yeltsin died, your column wastitled “Death of a Drunk.” You’ve calledAnn Coulter “skanky” and much worse.Do you ever hold back? When?I think Boris Yeltsin and Ann Coulter are bothmilitary targets. I will say that, unfortunately, mycareer has sort of evolved into a direction wherepeople are now always hiring me to carve someoneup. As a result, there’s a lot more of thisattack-dog stuff than I would like. Believe me,I’ve spent a lot of unhappy late-night hourswondering what it says about a) me and b) myprofession that no one wants to hire me whenI’m being nice. I’m not sure I even want toknow the answer to those questions.Have you ever, even for a moment, gottenintrospective and thought you might havecrossed the line? When?Let’s put it this way—I don’t worry about crossingthe line when it comes to people like AnnCoulter and Boris Yeltsin. What I will say hereis that I seldom regret attacking public figures. Ido regret it when I have to quote someone in areported piece who is going to be hurt by hisown quote. As a reporter, you sometimes haveto invite people to say things you know aregoing to look stupid when stuffed into somelarger and unfriendly argument you’re making.28And I don’t feel good about that. I also feelqueasy about doing undercover stuff that takesadvantage of the credulousness of the real peopleI end up writing about. But that’s part of thejob. You can’t have too much of a consciencein this business. Writing is always sort of cruel.When I’m wrong, there are always plenty ofpeople who write to me and let me know.Do you think (or fear) there’s an age whenyou won’t be able to get away with theirreverence? In other words, does one outgrowirreverence?That’s a fair question, and I’ve thought aboutthat before. I don’t think so. I think it’s differentfor someone like me than it is for, say, a standupcomic. If you’re a comic and you’re fifty andyou’re still ranting about people who don’t makeup their mind fast enough in line at McDonald’s,that’s kind of sad. But a political columnistalways has something outrageous to writeabout no matter how old he gets. I mean, H.L.Mencken and Ambrose Bierce didn’t have tochange their acts as they got older. The worldis going to be just as absurd and corrupt twentyyears from now as it is now, if not worse. Theonly difference maybe is the kind of languageI’ll use. When it becomes sad for me to dropF-bombs all the time—and it probably alreadyis—someone will let me know.How do you strike a balance betweenpolitical analysis and entertainment?I think you need elements of both. Politics is adull topic, and in order to get people to readabout it you have to make it colorful. The trick isin reducing something complex into terms thatpeople can grasp, and to make them feel likethey’re engaged in the subject by personalizingthe people involved, making them recognizableHow do you get in the right mindset whenyou have to write a long piece?I wait until the very last minute to start and thenlet panic carry me to the finish.You’re sometimes compared to HunterThompson. Have you explicitly tried to belike him? Is there someone else to whomyou’d rather be compared?No, not at all. I didn’t get into Thompson untilpretty late in life. My heroes were people likeGogol, Saki, Evelyn Waugh, Bulgakov, Stendahl,a lot of comic novelists. That’s what I wanted tobe when I grew up. Definitely not a journalist.Now that I am one, I think the guy I’m trying tobe like is Mencken. I think I can be happy in thatsort of role, which, incidentally, doesn’t approachwhat Thompson was. Thompson was a genuineliterary phenomenon. His books read like greatfiction. Mencken was basically a columnist and awitty observer of current events. He was somebodyyou read for a laugh before you went towork. His writing wasn’t nearly as ambitious asHunter’s. Neither is mine, not by a long shot.How much influence has your father, a TVnews journalist, had on your career?My father was a huge influence on me, but Inever wanted to be a journalist. In fact, just theopposite. However, because I grew up aroundit, it was something I knew, so that was whyI did it for money after college. It was the onlyskill I had.What papers, sites, etc. do you read everyday? How much time do you spend watchingconservative talk shows, and do youthrow things at the TV while doing so?I read a lot of weird stuff. I have a subscriptionto the New England Journal of Medicine, forinstance. I don’t watch much political TV for that
T H E P U L L O F P O L I T I C Svery reason: it drives me nuts. For many yearsI had a fantasy about chainsawing Bill O’Reillyin half.Are you as cynical as your writing?I disagree that my writing is cynical. I would sayjust the opposite, that most of the other writingout there is cynical. I write from the point ofview of someone who tries to continue to beoutraged by things that the rest of the press hasaccepted because that’s the way things are andalways have been. For instance, this week I’mwriting about an earmark Hillary Clinton got forLockheed to build Marine One, the presidentialhelicopter. The company gave her thousands indonations and free flights on company jets, andin return they got $11 billion to build helicoptersfor the president to fly around in—helicoptersthat will cost 400 million bucks apiece, or morethan the refitted 747s the Pentagon uses forAir Force One. 400 million bucks for a singlehelicopter? And we’re paying for it? That’s anoutrage, right? So why isn’t anyone else actuallypissed off when they write about these things?Because they take the attitude that this is justthe way politics is; everyone else is calm aboutit, so why should they be hysterical? They don’tsee Tom Brokaw blowing his top about things,so why should they?Well, they should, that’s the whole point.So when I rip these people, it’s not because I’ma cynic and I think the whole world is hopelesslycorrupt. I rip them because things don’t haveto be this way, which makes it all the more outrageousthat they are. The anger in my articlescomes from disappointed idealism, and that iswhere I’m trying to connect with my readers,many of whom feel the same way. [Ambrose]Bierce said that a cynic was a blackguard whosefaulty vision sees things as they are, not as theyshould be. You try to see both, and the distancebetween the two is where you get your outrage.people in Indochina. We’re on our way toanother huge number in Iraq. On the other hand,most Americans are very nice, well-meaningpeople. Even the people I met in Iraq were nice,even when they were occupying a country andblundering all over the place, wrecking stuff andwantonly shooting things. So when you takethe whole picture as a whole it’s very confusing.Andrew BrussoIt’s even more confusing to me now that thissociety has chosen to pay me a lot of money tolisten to me complain about it every week.Matt Taibbi’s latest book is Smells Like DeadElephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire(Grove Press).“ When I rip these people, it’s not because I’m acynic and I think the whole world is hopelesslycorrupt. I rip them because things don’t have tobe this way, which makes it all the moreoutrageous that they are.”Do you consider yourself patriotic?It depends on what you mean by patriotic. I thinkAmerica is amazing. Having lived in places likeRussia, where so few things work, I’m continuallyamazed by how energetic and efficient andinnovative our country is. But I also think oursociety is extraordinarily violent and xenophobic,and that freaks me out sometimes. I look at thepictures of the thousands of deformed kids inSouth Vietnam who got that way from AgentOrange poisoning, and I wonder about a countrythat doesn’t even think about what it did overthere and why. I mean, we killed two millionMatt Taibbi, donning Bush paraphernalia for the 2006 publication ofSpanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season29WWW.CONCORDACADEMY.ORG SPRING 2008
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