eMusic Q&A: Matt Taibbi

You may know Matt Taibbi from his incisive, uproarious Rolling Stone columns, or perhaps from his satirical work for the New York Press (including one column entitled “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of The Pope”). Or it could be you know Matt Taibbi because he looks a lot like that dude who joined your evangelical church group for a few months, asked a lot of questions and suddenly disappeared. Going undercover is one of gonzo scribe Taibbi’s greatest loves, and a great source of material for his new work (understandably, he gets compared to Hunter Thompson quite often, an honor for which he feels underqualified). eMusic spoke with Taibbi via phone from his home in Jersey City.

So how did the new book come about?

I was originally going to spend a year following Congress, but since I have this full-time job with Rolling Stone, there wasn’t time. So I ended up deciding to pursue the idea of Americans having lost touch with political reality, and pursuing politics more as an escapist fantasy than as a means of actually improving their situation. This was something that I saw covering politics for the magazine on both the left and the right. I would see people who were very interested in politics, but not in real politics. When I was covering the election in ’04 I would meet these people who were very impassioned about results but who were completely indifferent to the actual issues. People who would get in fist fights over who was going to get elected, but they didn’t know the names of their congressmen or where their tax money was going.

Where do you think such wrongheadedness comes from?

We have trained the voting public to experience politics more like entertainment, or like a reality show. It has long been axiomatic that news shows, especially election coverage, are almost identical to coverage of a football game. They use the same language, the same graphics. You’ll see on the set they’ll have the same basic setup they have on ESPN on game day. You’ve got your moderator, your former participants/experts, you’re crunching numbers. That’s training the public to have an intense interest in the outcome, but you’re certainly not educating them, or trying to get them to match what they’re seeing on screen to their own lives.

The sports metaphor is great. Have you made much of that in your work?

Here and there. Everybody on the campaign trail talks about it, and when you’re on the bus following the candidates everyone says that you could be following a baseball team and it would be exactly the same — who got how many RBIs tonight. That’s exactly what you’re talking about when Obama comes off the podium. A ten-game win streak, is he gonna keep it up?

I mean, with Hillary and Obama, you had one side totally unwilling to believe anything negative about their own candidate but willing to believe anything that was said about the other guy. You see the same phenomenon with people who root for a football team. The New England Patriots fans believe that nothing happened in Spygate, while all the Colts fans were sure that it was much worse than what was reported.

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If you are committed to doing the best writing that you can, you have to…occasionally be a pretty scummy human being.

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For this book and for others you’ve gone undercover, as an evangelical Christian, in the 9/11 Truth movement. What’s the strategy?

Before I ever wanted to be a journalist I wanted to be a novelist. Obviously that didn’t work out, but I was very interested in the process of how you do a literary comedy. A lot of my favorite books when I was growing up, like The Red and the Black, Dead Souls, a lot of those stories have a mysterious stranger who comes to town with a hidden purpose that’s at odds with the society that’s surrounding him. It’s kind of a classic comic plotline. The reason why that’s naturally funny is because there’s already a tension between the protagonist and everyone who he encounters. I’m not writing novels but I’m still trying to be entertaining in my writing and that’s one really easy way of doing that. There aren’t too many things in American journalism that can make it that interesting, but this is one of them.

It’s like you’re an actor, feeling out the role through your writing. One of the ways you can shed light on what your surroundings are like, for the reader is to show how difficult an acting job it is. The fact that I’m in this world and that I have to pass in this world, it’s an intellectual challenge, which is itself a kind of plotline. And of course the fact that I’m really terrible at it is hilarious. But I mean I could practically walk into a church with a nest of press tags on my neck and still probably would have gotten away with it.

Is it ever hard on you from a personal standpoint?

There were a few moments I found myself enjoying the experience a little too much. But then, it’s like the cop exploring the underworld and he finds that this life is much more exciting than his real life. For me I was in a world that was much more boring than my actual life. Writing is always a pretty cruel and unforgiving business, especially if you’re a very honest writer. If you are committed to doing the best writing that you can, you have to limit all reservations, and occasionally be a pretty scummy human being. There are some times when you befriend people, and you know you’re only doing it to betray them in the end. And of course that sucks. But then it sucks worse for them than it does for me. I’m not going to sit here and cry about it.

Has the Rolling Stone gig been a dream come true?

For any writer, especially a comic journalist, especially a journalist who writes about things like taking drugs, which I did, you’re going to start getting buttonholed as a Hunter Thompson wannabe. The job is kind of like the Dread Pirate Roberts of American journalism. I didn’t set out to get it, but it was certainly a shocking thing when I ended up here. It’s an honor on one hand, and a big responsibility, but there are also aspects of it that suck, like getting compared to Hunter Thompson all the time, and he was a lot better than I am.

What sort of audience are you writing for?

Right now there are a lot of people in journalism who settle for being partisan. It’s really easy to talk to the anti-Bush crowd by only talking about Bush, and it’s really easy to talk to the right wing crowd by only talking about liberals. My point is never to be on one side. I hope my readers aren’t flag-waving fans of one side or another. If I write something I know is going to appeal to one group, I try, shortly thereafter to write about something that will appeal to people who are exactly the opposite. I want to test those peoples’ intellectual honesty.

The biggest deception we have in our media is the kind of Crossfire paradigm, the blue state expert on one side, and your red state expert on the other side, and training audiences to see the conflict as being between those groups, when actually the conflict is between this monolithic system of government versus everybody else.