"Spanking the Donkey" by Matt Taibbi

[BurtWorm]

I wanted to love the book, but I have to say, I wound up having seriously mixed feelings about it. Many of Taibbi's points about the corrupt media and contentless campaigns are very well taken. Unfortunately, Taibbi's own disturbed, self-obsessed, borderline criminal personality intrudes into his lucid and penetrating analysis of the big picture so often that you wind up not trusting his faithfulness to the truth. In fact his stories of lying and being cruel to subjects and even to incidental characters who are kind to him undermines the trustworthiness of the whole book. Also the numerous college-level creative writing assignments for New York Press that fill out the book between the more interesting, straightforward reportage for Rolling Stone and the Nation are painful to read. Very unfortunate, because there's quite a bit of food for thought when Taibbi takes the camera off his own fucked-upness. For example, one of the points he keeps returning to is the complicity of the media--even their leading role--in keeping presidential campaigns stupid. This is one of his least original ideas admittedly, though he usually handles it well. But then he turns around and attacks Jodi Wilgoren for being ugly and having a fat ass. It's this kind of confusion that will keep Taibbi from becoming the Hunter Thompson of his generation--which is a pretty useless goal for anyone to have anyway, though Taibbi seems to have spent a lifetime preparing for it.

Still, it's worth a read. Especially interesting and valuable is a long section about Taibbi's infiltration of the Bush campaing in Orange County, Florida. If only his fucked-up self hadn't flared up during dinner with a fundamentalist activist, it would have a perfectly informative interlude about the kinds of vermin-averse people who make-up today's Republican Party.