Reading Taibbi
Wandered into the Strand just before closing tonight and picked up Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. First chapter on Palin and the Tea Party, and he ain’t holding any punches:
In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in nacro-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.
In the ghetto, nobody gets real dreams. What they get are short-term rip-off versions of real dreams. You don’t get real wealth, with a home, credit, a year, money for your kids’ college—you get a fake symbol of wealth, a gold chain, a Fendi bag, a tricked-out car you bought with cash. Nobody gets to be really rich for long, but you do get to be pretend rich, for a few days, weeks, maybe even a few months. It makes you feel better to wear that gold, but when real criminals drive by on the overpass, they laugh.
It’s the same in our new ghetto. We don’t get real political movements and real change; what we get, instead, are crass show-business manipulations whose followers’ aspirations are every bit as laughable and desperate as the wealth dreams of the street hustler with his gold rope. What we get, in other words, are moderates who don’t question the corporate consensus dressed up as revolutionary leaders, like Barack Obama, and wonderfully captive opposition diversions like the Tea Party—the latter a fake movement for real peasants that was born that night in St. Paul, when Sarah Palin addressed her We.
Some reviewers such as Derek Teslik over at The Millions will think Taibbi overstates his case. I don’t. I’m not convinced, as is Teslik, that the financial crisis was a mere problem of “laziness and arrogance.” Nor do I buy, as does Michael Lewis, who Teslik sets up as the better read, that the crisis was caused by a select group of greedy bankers and hedge fund managers. A curiosity I share with Taibbi is why the American people continue to fall for the same line over and over again, as if in some collective amnesia. As if, I say, with emphasis, because I’m sure it’s much more complicated than a false consciousness reading would imply. But then what is the proper explanation?
