Taibbi: "Hate Inc. ultimately makes a forceful case that the American media is broken by design."

I didn't know, either.

Chyron: a text-based graphic overlay displayed at the bottom of a television screen or film frame, as closed captioning or the crawl of a newscast.

How do you know what you know ... what you believe you know? If I make a statement with which you disagree, what are your grounds for thinking otherwise?

Manufacturing Consent One Chyron at a Time, by Luke Savage (Jacobin)

Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is a raucous updating of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s classic dissection of capitalist news. Its message is hilarious yet grim: behind the buffoonery of the 24-hour partisan news machine is a propaganda system devoted to upholding the power of entrenched elites.

Review of Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another, by Matt Taibbi (OR Books, 2019).

 ... Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc. is a seething, if amusing, indictment of American political media in the Trump era. But, more importantly, it is a systemically-minded account of the actual sources of media debasement and the ways in which particular patterns of behavior are hardwired into the news.

Those unfamiliar with Taibbi’s past work in media criticism, invariably skewering, may get a misleading impression of the book’s content from both its title and cover ... (but) Taibbi offers us a necessary and timely update to the theories advanced by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their landmark 1988 book Manufacturing Consent and a series of illustrative case studies drawing on his own frustrations with contemporary journalism.

The basic thesis advanced by Chomsky and Herman was that management of public opinion in capitalist democracies rarely takes the form of overt propaganda or censorship, but is instead achieved through vigorous policing of what constitutes acceptable opinion such that, as Taibbi puts it, “the range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.”

(snip)

Taibbi argues that three significant changes since the late 1980s necessitate an update of the thesis pioneered in Manufacturing Consent. The first is the rise of conservative talk radio and Fox News, which triggered the partisanization of news so familiar to today. “Using a point of view rather than ‘objectivity’ as commercial strategies,” Taibbi writes, “these stations presaged an atomization of the news landscape under which each consumer had an outlet somewhere to match his or her political beliefs.”

The second major change is the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, which the author says trained reporters to “value breaking news, immediacy, and visual potential over import” while creating “a new kind of anxiety and addictive dependency” among consumers.

Finally, the rise of the internet and social media contributed even further to the general atmosphere of frenzied and atomized content consumption that today structures the news business.

(snip)

Again and again, Hate Inc. returns to its central insight that the media is first and foremost a business driven by the pressures and imperatives of large-scale private enterprise. Though this will probably sound like a truism to many on the Left, it is nonetheless a useful materialist explanation for why the media tends to operate within discrete partisan silos: not, as is so often suggested, because the country suffers from some vaguely defined culture of “divisiveness,” but because it’s what the current business model both necessitates and demands. With audiences cordoned off into partisan market niches, the media can more easily commodify resentment and its leading talking heads can always get a ratings boost by stoking outrage, engaging in conspiracy, or just plain making stuff up.

It’s unclear what the solution is, or to what extent Taibbi even believes there is one. The preceding era of the news business, taken on by Chomsky and Herman in Manufacturing Consent, was arguably preferable to today’s media in that its ranks were more working-class and its leading voices less shrill. But the ethos of objectivity it projected was still the function of a business model driven first and foremost by the profit imperative (albeit in a somewhat more inclusive way) and ridden through with deference to corporate and national security interests.

Hate Inc. ultimately makes a forceful case that the American media is broken by design. Though no one will find this a particularly comforting thought, it’s nonetheless a liberating insight for those of us who would sooner suffer a hundred hours of sensory deprivation than sit through three minutes of Rachel Maddow talking about Donald Trump’s tax returns — or watch Kurt Eichenwald and Tucker Carlson do performance art on national TV.

Christmas 2018: From Munich to New (and Old) Albania, with Vietnam Kitchen to follow.

Chinesischer Turm in Englischer Garten, Munich.

Give or take a few beers, we completed the 10,000 mile loop back to Louisville at 9:45 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The sheer awesomeness of Bavaria still was throbbing in the rear-view mirror.

It was a bittersweet homecoming, as we already knew the amazing Miss Nadia had used up her ninth life during our absence. Nadia's passing was unexpected, if not surprising at the age of 16. There'll be more to say about this, but not quite yet, apart from expressing eternal thanks to the Bluegill family for care-giving in our absence.

The year 2018 was Diana's first visit to Munich. Our days were spent wandering Christmas markets and pausing frequently for principled refreshments. It's hard to imagine better "together" time.

I hadn't been to Munich in 14 years, and found myself reflecting about the way things were in 1985, and my initial experience with hoisting steins in the city's amazing traditional beer palaces (and equally enjoyable tiny nooks). There have been a zillion changes during 33 years, and yet the combo of cool lager and steaming pork remains wonderfully timeless.

Now it's Christmas Day, and it would be futile to attempt to deal with the jumble of emotions crowding my noggin. I may have to chip away at them over the coming days, knowing all the while that the year to come probably is going to be even more exhausting than the one about to pass.

But there are a few billion people out there who have it worse off than us, and I try never to forget it -- whether a holiday or any other day when we roll out of bed and seek yet again to finesse the rough edges of the existential dilemma.

The following thoughts are a variation of ones previously posted.

---

Often I’m asked: Roger, why not relent and embrace the Christmas spirit?

Would it be so hard to be human, just for once?

Contrary to popular perception, I do relent – after a fashion – and in spite of my best efforts, Vulcan-caliber logic continues to elude me. It is enjoyable to have a (relatively) work-free day, to spend time with loved ones, to plan parties, to eat and drink, and to do what anyone else does on a holiday.

But you see, as an unbeliever, I simply cannot indulge the Christian aspect of the day as it pertains to my sphere of individual conscience. For the same reason, I cannot support Christian displays in the sphere of public property. There is secular rule of law in America, and it reaffirms and protects an individual’s religious or non-religious conscience, whether it speaks to no gods or many.

Without this fine line, theocrats like Mike Pence really will try to tell me which church to attend – or else.

At Christmas time, I respect the wants and needs of the genuinely devout, for whom the day is an expression of deeply held belief. More grudgingly, I acknowledge with deep groans the annual recitation by Ayn Rand fetishists of a belief in hyper-consumerism and pervasive materialism as a capitalistic manifestation of self, one worth glorifying in priestly fashion.

Maybe, but only up to a point. In 2015, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi contributed a thoughtful essay linking consumer Christmas to the stoking of irrational fears: This Christmas, Tune It All Out.

As for the rest of that shopaholic, mall-rushing craziness that can make this holiday so stressful, it turns out that it's optional. Switch off the wi-fi for a few days, turn off the TV, and it's amazing how much more reasonable the world instantly seems.

Supernaturally, just know that you can count me out. Perhaps religion remains the preferred opiate because too much of the profit from consumerism remains in the hands of the 1 per cent.

---

In fact, I do have a favorite Christmas story.

My sole “corporate” day job lasted from 1988 to 1989, with a solitary Christmas in between. So it was that in 1988, management at our office in downtown Louisville declared a contest for best work station decoration.

With entirely uncharacteristic zeal, my friend and co-worker Jeff Price, who was well-connected within local radical leftist circles and later would meet me in East Germany to take part in the “summer of ‘89” volunteer student brigade, went to work toward his stated goal of winning first prize.

He soon appeared with scissors, glue, armloads of construction paper and dusty old copies of the English-language edition of the “New Albania” propaganda magazine, as borrowed from a socialist workers group somewhere in town.

Who even knew Louisville had such an organization?

Come the day of judgment, Jeff had transformed his pod into a veritable showplace of dully-colored agitprop, with a few bright red placards bearing impenetrable phrases in the Albanian language, photocopies of stiffly posed Communist leaders like Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia, and a genuinely demented final touch, which I’ll never forget.

Snaking along the tops of the dull gray office partitions stretched strands of coiled barbed wire fashioned from silver holiday tinsel.

Jeff’s display was dubbed Christmas in Albania – at the time, the world’s only officially atheist state – and while the judges could not quite bring themselves to give him the top prize, second place was decreed his, from sheer perverse creativity alone.

In short, exactly my kind of Christmas, but please, feel perfectly free to enjoy yours.

Christmas Day means Vietnam Kitchen, which will be open from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We'll be there.

In the absence of farm-raised Slovak carp, it'll have to do. To refresh your memory about this hallowed yuletide practice, go here: Carp in a bathtub.

Photo credit: Peter Dedina, in Košice, Slovakia.

Undisputed top MUST READ of the week: "The Iraq invasion is no longer just one of the great crimes of this or any age – it's become a crossroads event in the history of America's decline."

Welcome to rock bottom.

Taibbi: The Legacy of the Iraq War, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

The invasion is no longer just one of the great crimes of this or any age – it's become a crossroads event in the history of America's decline

Fifteen years ago this week, George W. Bush invaded Iraq. It was an awesome drama, made more thrilling by the seemingly obvious craziness of it all.

People were looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes, shrugging, and asking: Can we really do this without a reason? That was the dramatic subtext of the invasion.

In the press, no one could really make sense of the supposed justification for the invasion. That it was compelling, no one could deny. Hell, just look at the fonts. We all used the biggest ones we had! The New York Times said it all with its dramatic banner:

"BUSH ORDERS START OF WAR ON IRAQ; MISSILES APPARENTLY MISS HUSSEIN"

GOON BOMBS CITY ON HORSESHIT PRETEXT would have been more accurate, but editors were giving everyone the benefit of the doubt back then, and getting on board, for patriotic reasons. The Gray Lady, who was playing such a key role in what was going on, was certainly getting in the spirit, giving in to the adrenaline rush of Bush's evil gambit.

It was the same with CNN's breathless coverage of that first night, with the creepy green-hued night-cams showing explosion after monster explosion.

Shock and awe, we called it: a new plan for "achieving rapid dominance." What a great Hollywood name, and goddamn if people didn't sit glued to their TVs to watch its rollout, getting off like a bunch of kids blowing up frogs.

Wars are great TV. The prolonged political lead-up, the decision to kill, it's all rich with suspense, and when wedded to the sight and the sound of the bombs, after waiting all those months for one nightfall, at the hour of crime and sex, to launch the first sorties from a secret location at sea – it all trips the senses. It's a turn on. It makes the Super Bowl look like paint drying. The sheer drama is how they sold this thing to the public, fifteen years ago this week.

But that's not how our rulers sold the war to themselves. They weren't overcome with emotion, or some post-9/11 yearning for vengeance. They knew what they were doing.

The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America's decline, was instead a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi "enemy."

As citizens, we haven't started to reckon with any of this. We write it off rather than deal with it. In fact, when we think of Iraq at all, we often describe the invasion as a mistake. Embarrassingly, even I did this a few weeks back, talking about how we "blundered" into Iraq.

It's understandable. There are superficial plot elements from the Iraq narrative we lean on to soothe ourselves that the invasion was caused by an unlikely confluence of accidents and errors, not the inherent venality of our system ...

From 2015, "Fairytale of New Albania" ... including my favorite Christmas story.

I fixed it.

From December 24, 2015. Lightly edited and updated.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Fairytale of New Albania (2015 mashup).

I had intended to take the day off from the rigors of column composition, but with such a beautiful spring day outside in the aftermath of flash floods and tornadoes on December 23 -- Festivus, no less -- why not huddle indoors a bit longer on Christmas Eve, and plagiarize a previous effort?

After all, there is a legitimately important news item to report.

First, there is you. As a regular reader, you already know that I publish my ON THE AVENUES column on Thursday, a slot inherited from the pre-merger Tribune.

However, you may not be aware of your curious non-existence as a regular reader. Upon closer examination, it seems the page views and hit counts recorded here are entirely figments of my imagination, and the curiously timed denunciations and rebuttals emanating from purportedly non-reading public officials and functionaries merely an Orwellian coincidence.

There is no dissent in the Hermetic Dixiecratic Disney Republic(an) of New Albany, where the referendum of support for Mayor Jeff Gahan Presents the Doggie Doo Doo Fun Park and Canine Water Slide passed muster with 98.6% tally in favor, but disclaimers aside, I am informed that tomorrow is a religious holiday of some vague sort – a forever confusing proposition for an atheist like me – so I’ll try and keep it short.

Let’s begin with Great and Wonderful Tidings.

In 2014, I wrote these words:

"In spite of Indiana’s flagrantly fascistic proclivities, substantial progress has been made in freeing innocent tipplers from the oppressive yoke of the preacher man’s hellfire and damnation, and yet we retain at least one world-class example of prohibitionist backwash.

"It remains illegal to sell any alcoholic beverages on Christmas Day, a ban that violates church-state separation so openly and brazenly that I’m surprised the ACLU hasn’t parachuted into Indianapolis to help save us from ourselves."

See what I did there? That's right: The law finally changed in 2015.

Just a bit related to the topic at hand.

It's about time, isn't it? Maybe the Freedom from Religion Foundation intervened. After all, the prohibition of alcohol sales on Christmas Day was a blatant imposition of selective religious blue law on what should be secular tippling.

Indiana may be a basket case, but at least this one's finally right.

Hoosiers can buy alcohol on Christmas for the first time since Prohibition (Fox59)

The Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission (ATC) announced today you can buy alcohol on Christmas.

Although many businesses are closed on Christmas, restaurants, bars, liquor stores and grocery stores that are open will be allowed to sell alcohol to you.

I'm told that Kansai Japanese Steakhouse in Clarksville will be open on Christmas Day, is cognizant of the change (many probably aren't), and will be serving adult beverages. Surely Horseshoe Casino will be, as well. Anyone else? Let me know, and I'll spread the word on social media.

(Let's assume that by now, two years down the road, everyone knows the drill.)

---

Often I’m asked: Roger, why not relent and embrace the Christmas spirit?

Would it be so hard to be human, just for once?

Contrary to popular perception, I do relent – after a fashion – and in spite of my best efforts, Vulcan-caliber logic continues to elude me. It is enjoyable to have a (relatively) work-free day, to spend time with loved ones, to plan parties, to eat and drink, and to do what anyone else does on a holiday.

But you see, as an unbeliever, I simply cannot indulge the Christian aspect of the day as it pertains to my sphere of individual conscience. For the same reason, I cannot support Christian displays in the sphere of public property. There is secular rule of law in America, and it reaffirms and protects an individual’s religious or non-religious conscience, whether it speaks to no gods or many.

Without this fine line, Mike Pence really will try to tell me which church to attend – or else.

At Christmas time, I respect the wants and needs of the genuinely devout, for whom the day is an expression of deeply held belief. More grudgingly, I acknowledge with deep groans the annual recitation by Ayn Rand fetishists of a belief in hyper-consumerism and pervasive materialism as a capitalistic manifestation of self, one worth glorifying in priestly fashion.

Maybe, but only up to a point. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has contributed a thoughtful essay linking consumer Christmas to the stoking of irrational fears: This Christmas, Tune It All Out.

As for the rest of that shopaholic, mall-rushing craziness that can make this holiday so stressful, it turns out that it's optional. Switch off the wi-fi for a few days, turn off the TV, and it's amazing how much more reasonable the world instantly seems.

In the main, just know that you can count me out. Perhaps religion remains the preferred opiate because too much of the profit from consumerism remains in the hands of the 1 per cent.

---

In fact, I do have a favorite Christmas story.

My sole “corporate” day job lasted from 1988 to 1989, with a solitary Christmas in between. So it was that in 1988, management at our office in downtown Louisville declared a contest for best work station decoration.

With entirely uncharacteristic zeal, my friend and co-worker Jeff Price, who was well-connected within local radical leftist circles and later would meet me in East Germany to take part in the “summer of ‘89” volunteer student brigade, went to work toward his stated goal of winning first prize.

He soon appeared with scissors, glue, armloads of construction paper and dusty old copies of the English-language edition of the “New Albania” propaganda magazine, as borrowed from a socialist workers group somewhere in town.

Who even knew Louisville had such an organization?

Come the day of judgment, Jeff had transformed his pod into a veritable showplace of dully-colored agitprop, with a few bright red placards bearing impenetrable phrases in the Albanian language, photocopies of stiffly posed Communist leaders like Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia, and a genuinely demented final touch, which I’ll never forget.

Snaking along the tops of the dull gray office partitions stretched strands of coiled barbed wire fashioned from silver holiday tinsel.

Jeff’s display was dubbed Christmas in Albania – at the time, the world’s only officially atheist state – and while the judges could not quite bring themselves to give him the top prize, second place was decreed his, from sheer perverse creativity alone.

In short, exactly my kind of Christmas, but please, feel perfectly free to enjoy yours. Usually we spend Christmas Day eating egg rolls, Singapore rice noodles and Happy Family, but in 2015 comes another banner headline: Vietnam Kitchen is open on Christmas Day. Again in 2017, VK is open on Christmas Day from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and we'll be there.

The very best Christmases are the ones that come and go with nary a trace, but this tiding truly is special. Clay pot catfish and beer?

In the absence of Slovak carp, it'll have to do.

(Addendum: My friend Peter Dedina evidently is visiting his hometown of Košice, Slovakia, and posted this photo of yuletide carp.)

Wastin' away again in Nizhny Novgorod: "Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives."

As I remember him (photo credit).

Since I've been to Russia a few times ...

Euro ’85, Part 30 … Or, as it was called at the time, Leningrad.

"My shoes are filled with Volga mud ... "

 ... and once might well have enjoyed fine East German beer in the same room as Vladimir Putin ...

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part One).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Two).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Three).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Four).

 ... I'm designating myself the reigning local expert. As such, my expertise compels me to defer to a journalist who actually lived in Russia for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, the inimitable Matt Taibbi.

Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

 ... Even I think there should be a legitimate independent investigation – one that, given Trump's history, might uncover all sorts of things. But almost irrespective of what ends up being uncovered on the Trump side, the public prosecution of this affair has taken on a malevolent life of its own.

One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn't believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.

Matt Taibbi and Charlie Pierce on Drumpf, HRC, Tailginner Ted and Bernie.

First, Charles P. Pierce in the aftermath of Stupor Tuesday (bold/underline is Roger's).

At This Point, It's Either the Vulgar Talking Yam or Ted Cruz -- And on the other side, Bernie ought to stick around for a while, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

 ... There is no reason at all for Sanders to drop out now. He raised a spectacular $42 million in February. But the best reason for Sanders to fight this all the way to the convention could be found in one passage in Hillary Rodham Clinton's Super Tuesday speech.

Unfortunately, too many of those with the most wealth and the most power in this country today seem to have forgotten that basic truth about America. Yesterday I was at the old south meeting house in Boston where nearly two and a half centuries ago American patriots organized the original Tea Party. I had to wonder what they would make of corporations that seem to have absolutely no loyalty to the country that gave them so much. What would they say about student loan companies that overcharge young people, struggling to get out of debt, even young men and women serving our country in the military or corporations that shift their headquarters overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Like Johnson Controls and Auto Parts from Wisconsin, that we taxpayers helped to bail out with the auto rescue back in 2008, now they're turning their back on America. I'm interested this making things right. Let there be no doubt, if you cheat your employees, exploit consumers, pollute our environment or rip off the taxpayers, we're going to hold you accountable.

I do not believe for a moment that she would have said anything of the sort if she hadn't been pressed by the Sanders campaign, and as long as that campaign goes on, the less tenable any pivot toward "the center" by HRC will be.

And, last week, Matt Taibbi on The Donald:

"He might have this thing sewn up before the others even figure out in what order they should quit. It's hard to recall a dumber situation in American presidential politics."

How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

He's no ordinary con man. He's way above average — and the American political system is his easiest mark ever.

Taibbi's assessment of the Trump phenomenon is center of the target, but his greatest achievement may be his characterization of Ted Cruz.

... Psychology Today even ran an article by a neurology professor named Dr. Richard Cytowic about the peculiarly off-putting qualities of Cruz's face. He used a German term, backpfeifengesicht, literally "a face in need of a good punch," to describe Cruz.

This may be overstating things a little. Cruz certainly has an odd face – it looks like someone sewed pieces of a waterlogged Reagan mask together at gunpoint – but it's his tone more than anything that gets you. He speaks slowly and loudly and in the most histrionic language possible, as if he's certain you're too stupid to grasp that he is for freedom.

ON THE AVENUES: Fairytale of New Albania (2015 mashup).

ON THE AVENUES: Fairytale of New Albania (2015 mashup).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I had intended to take the day off from the rigors of column composition, but with such a beautiful spring day outside in the aftermath of flash floods and tornadoes on December 23 -- Festivus, no less -- why not huddle indoors a bit longer on Christmas Eve, and plagiarize a previous effort?

After all, there is a legitimately important news item to report.

First, there is you. As a regular reader, you already know that I publish my ON THE AVENUES column on Thursday, a slot inherited from the pre-merger Tribune.

However, you may not be aware of your curious non-existence as a regular reader. Upon closer examination, it seems the page views and hit counts recorded here are entirely figments of my imagination, and the curiously timed denunciations and rebuttals emanating from purportedly non-reading public officials and functionaries merely an Orwellian coincidence.

There is no dissent in the Hermetic Dixiecratic Disney Republic(an) of New Albany, where the referendum of support for Mayor Jeff Gahan Presents the Doggie Doo Doo Fun Park and Canine Water Slide passed muster with 98.6% tally in favor, but disclaimers aside, I am informed that tomorrow is a religious holiday of some vague sort – a forever confusing proposition for an atheist like me – so I’ll try and keep it short.

Let’s begin with Great and Wonderful Tidings.

In 2014, I wrote these words:

"In spite of Indiana’s flagrantly fascistic proclivities, substantial progress has been made in freeing innocent tipplers from the oppressive yoke of the preacher man’s hellfire and damnation, and yet we retain at least one world-class example of prohibitionist backwash.

"It remains illegal to sell any alcoholic beverages on Christmas Day, a ban that violates church-state separation so openly and brazenly that I’m surprised the ACLU hasn’t parachuted into Indianapolis to help save us from ourselves."

See what I did there? That's right: The law finally changed in 2015.

Just a bit related to the topic at hand.

It's about time, isn't it? Maybe the Freedom from Religion Foundation intervened. After all, the prohibition of alcohol sales on Christmas Day was a blatant imposition of selective religious blue law on what should be secular tippling.

Indiana may be a basket case, but at least this one's finally right.

Hoosiers can buy alcohol on Christmas for the first time since Prohibition (Fox59)

The Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission (ATC) announced today you can buy alcohol on Christmas.

Although many businesses are closed on Christmas, restaurants, bars, liquor stores and grocery stores that are open will be allowed to sell alcohol to you.

I'm told that Kansai Japanese Steakhouse in Clarksville will be open tomorrow, is cognizant of the change (many probably aren't), and will be serving adult beverages. Surely Horseshoe Casino will be, as well. Anyone else? Let me know, and I'll spread the word on social media.

---

Often I’m asked: Roger, why not relent and embrace the Christmas spirit?

Would it be so hard to be human, just for once?

Contrary to popular perception, I do relent – after a fashion – and in spite of my best efforts, Vulcan-caliber logic continues to elude me. It is enjoyable to have a (relatively) work-free day, to spend time with loved ones, to plan parties, to eat and drink, and to do what anyone else does on a holiday.

But you see, as an unbeliever, I simply cannot indulge the Christian aspect of the day as it pertains to my sphere of individual conscience. For the same reason, I cannot support Christian displays in the sphere of public property. There is secular rule of law in America, and it reaffirms and protects an individual’s religious or non-religious conscience, whether it speaks to no gods or many.

Without this fine line, Mike Pence really will try to tell me which church to attend – or else.

At Christmas time, I respect the wants and needs of the genuinely devout, for whom the day is an expression of deeply held belief. More grudgingly, I acknowledge with deep groans the annual recitation by Ayn Rand fetishists of a belief in hyper-consumerism and pervasive materialism as a capitalistic manifestation of self, one worth glorifying in priestly fashion.

Maybe, but only up to a point. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has contributed a thoughtful essay linking consumer Christmas to the stoking of irrational fears: This Christmas, Tune It All Out.

In the main, just know that you can count me out. Perhaps religion remains the preferred opiate because too much of the profit from consumerism remains in the hands of the 1 per cent.

---

In fact, I do have a favorite Christmas story.

My sole “corporate” day job lasted from 1988 to 1989, with a solitary Christmas in between. So it was that in 1988, management at our office in downtown Louisville declared a contest for best work station decoration.

With entirely uncharacteristic zeal, my friend and co-worker Jeff Price, who was well-connected within local radical leftist circles and later would meet me in East Germany to take part in the “summer of ‘89” volunteer student brigade, went to work toward his stated goal of winning first prize.

He soon appeared with scissors, glue, armloads of construction paper and dusty old copies of the English-language edition of the “New Albania” propaganda magazine, as borrowed from a socialist workers group somewhere in town.

Who even knew Louisville had such an organization?

Come the day of judgment, Jeff had transformed his pod into a veritable showplace of dully-colored agitprop, with a few bright red placards bearing impenetrable phrases in the Albanian language, photocopies of stiffly posed Communist leaders like Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia, and a genuinely demented final touch, which I’ll never forget.

Snaking along the tops of the dull gray office partitions stretched strands of coiled barbed wire fashioned from silver holiday tinsel.

Jeff’s display was dubbed Christmas in Albania – at the time, the world’s only officially atheist state – and while the judges could not quite bring themselves to give him the top prize, second place was decreed his, from sheer perverse creativity alone.

In short, exactly my kind of Christmas, but please, feel perfectly free to enjoy yours. Usually we spend Christmas Day eating egg rolls, Singapore rice noodles and Happy Family, but in 2015 comes another banner headline: Vietnam Kitchen is open on Christmas Day.

The very best Christmases are the ones that come and go with nary a trace, but this ... this is special. Clay pot catfish and beer? In the absence of Slovak carp, it'll have to do.

---

Recent columns:

December 17: ON THE AVENUES: Gin and tacos, and a maybe a doughnut, but only where feasible.

December 10: ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2015).

December 3: ON THE AVENUES: Who (or what) is New Albany's "Person of the Year" for 2015?

November 26: ON THE AVENUES: Faux thanks and reveries (The 2015 Remix).

November 19: ON THE AVENUES: Beer, farthings and that little-known third category.

November 12: ON THE AVENUES: The mayor’s race was about suburban-think versus urban-think. The wrong-think won.

Taibbi: "Rudy Giuliani is giving me Soviet flashbacks."

How many times have I heard it? "If you don't like it here, leave,"

In fact, I've heard it so often that it occurs to me to spend the remainder of the year turning the idiocy on its head, and pre-empting it:

"No, that's wrong. If YOU don't like me being here, then YOU leave."

Rudy Giuliani, American Soviet, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

Rudy Giuliani is giving me Soviet flashbacks.

With his bizarre foot-in-mouth rants about how Barack Obama doesn't love "America" the way "we" do, Rudy — and other "They hate us!" exceptionalist 'Muricans like Eric Erickson and Steve Forbes — are starting to remind me of the frightened, denial-sick communist die-hards I knew as a student in Russia.

Not to go too far down memory lane, but in 1990, I went to Leningrad to study. The Soviet empire was in its death throes and most people there, particularly the younger ones, knew it.

But some hadn't gotten the memo yet, and those folks, usually nice enough, often older — university administrators, check-room attendants, security guards, parents of some of my classmates, others — were constantly challenging me and other exchange students to East-versus-West debates, usually with the aim of proving that "their" way of life was better.

By the time I left Russia a dozen years and a couple of career changes later, a lot of those people still hadn't gotten the memo. They were deep in denial about the passing of the USSR and spent a lot of time volubly claiming ownership of words like we and our and us in a way that quickly became a running joke in modernizing Russia.

U Nas Lusche — roughly, Ours is Better or It's Better Here — was the unofficial slogan of the pining-for-the-old-days crowd in post-communist Russia.

REWIND: Matt Taibbi, John McCain, The eXile, Rolling Stone and the Open Air Museum.

First, the update: Matt Taibbi is leaving Rolling Stone.

I've linked to his articles far less often than I might have, simply because I didn't want it to be a weekly habit. Back on November 23, 2008, it was time to provide some background. Here is the full reprint.

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Matt Taibbi: "A Requiem for John McCain," in Rolling Stone.

My first exposure to Matt Taibbi came from a book called, “The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,” which our on-line book discussion group tackled circa the year 2000. Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say about it.

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect."

The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.)

Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate indset.

Wikipedia adds to the merriment:

Rolling Stone magazine said in 1998 that then-coeditors "Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi take the raw material of this decadent new Moscow and convert it into 25,000 instantly snapped-up issues of The eXile, consisting of misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses, all redeemed by political reporting that's read seriously not only in Moscow but also in Washington."

To be honest, I lost track of Taibbi’s writing for a number of years, and having ceased subscribing to Rolling Stone some time back, it wasn’t until the recent election campaign that I became aware of his work covering it. I still haven’t figured out how the subscription resumed without my paying for it.

Subsequently, I've been delighted to read Taibbi’s political essays. He grafts Hunter S. Thompson’s chemical-addled sneer atop the more urbane (and less overtly aggressive) analysis of mainstream journalists like Frank Rich of the New York Times, leaving me with yet another writing role model to absorb in small doses only, lest I subconsciously seek to emulate too obviously. It’s a quality I formerly admired in P.J. O’Rourke, at least until the ex-Lampooner dove completely off the deep end and abandoned pants-down Republicanism for the genuine non-ironic and fascistic article.

Like Thompson before him, Taibbi thrives in a habitat of surreal absurdity, and his descriptions of the waning daze of the doomed McCain/Palin bid for the nation’s highest offices are filled with sassy but deadly accurate imagery, as in this passage documenting the extent of the Arizona “maverick’s” sell-out to the dark side of the GOP (warning: the following contains brutally graphic figurative language):

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

Seeing as surreal absurdity is also the order of the day in learning-impaired New Albany, it’s a shame we couldn’t bring Taibbi here for a brief time and turn him loose among the ward-heelers, rednecks, underachievers and Luddites. However, the results might hit too close to home, and after all, we’ve been documenting the Open Air Museum’s freaks and foibles for four years ourselves, dodging shrapnel when merited and beginning each and every day with a glance at the prices for one-way tickets out. It isn't a mere coincidence that "The eXile" stands as metaphor for the experience of leftists in New Albany.

Here are beginning and concluding passages from Taibbi’s piece on McCain, and the link to the whole story. Enjoy.

Matt Taibbi: A Requiem for John McCain

It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do …

… When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome
sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.

The "Cardinal Connection" to Wall Street's municipal bond scam.

I'm not sure they should be going to prison, although spending time with an independent small business in Southern Indiana (something few, if any, of the bridges project's stalwarts have ever bothered doing), and subsequently seeing up close and personal how damaging tolls are going to be to Hoosiers might seem like prison.

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  Save Louisville

  Wall St, The CDSmith consulting company, the Bridges Authority, and local and state officials are colluding to commit fraud against the people of Louisville and Southern Indiana. Instead of cashing checks and receiving honorary degrees those responsible for the fraudulent Ohio River Bridges Project financial plan should be going to prison.

  
  

  Cardinal connection? Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi looks at Wall Street’s municipal bond scam … includ
  

  insiderlouisville.comIrrepressible Rolling Stone Magazine writer Matt Taibbi, famous for his description of Goldman Sachs as a blood sucking squid, is back. This time, Taibbi is mining that same Wall Street corruption vein, but with a new angle, covering the just-completed United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg a...

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    Moseley Putney likes this.

Taibbi: "This is where the Republican Party is now."

I'd dearly love to hear Ed Clere and Ron Grooms explain how this analysis is (a) incorrect, and/or (b) does not apply to them, or to their idol, St. Daniels. Perhaps the Urban Enterprise Association might be compelled to fund a forum so that we can listen intently to the inevitable obfuscations.

Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

... Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

Oh, sure, your average conservative will insist his belief system is based upon a passion for the free market and limited government, but that's mostly a cover story. Instead, the vast team-building exercise that has driven the broadcasts of people like Rush and Hannity and the talking heads on Fox for decades now has really been a kind of ongoing Quest for Orthodoxy, in which the team members congregate in front of the TV and the radio and share in the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

The finger-pointing game is a fun one to play, but it’s a little like drugs – you have to keep taking bigger and bigger doses in order to get the same high.

Michele Bachmann: "A religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions."

After reading this article by Rolling Stone's masterful Matt Taibbi, I finally realized that Michele Bachmann has never been a member of the New Albany - Floyd County School Board.

Or has she?

Geez, it's getting really hard to tell the nutjobs without a scorecard. Could it be that New Albany's wonderfully delightful Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness finally has gone national?

By the way, how'd you like that ice-cold Budweiser "down by the riverside" this weekend?

Michele Bachmann's Holy War, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

... In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Matt Taibbi: "A Requiem for John McCain," in Rolling Stone.

My first exposure to Matt Taibbi came from a book called, “The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,” which our on-line book discussion group tackled circa the year 2000. Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say about it.

In 1997, two American college-educated slackers began publishing the eXile, a no-holds-barred newspaper, in Moscow. The paper includes irreverent discussions of Russia's sex and drug scene and off-color humor pieces, such as an article poking fun at a U.S. African-American basketball player who was toiling for a Moscow team after he was kicked out of the NBA following a forced sodomy charge in the U.S. Their attitude toward Russia's expatriate community, including themselves, is clear: "Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi and 50-channel cable delivery" is "motivated by a highly destructive personality defect."

The pranks the newspaper plays are entertaining: convincing an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev that New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells wanted the former Soviet leader to give a series of inspirational pep talks to his team, for example. The eXile also takes on the herd mentality of reporters, managing to convince one of its rival papers that basketball hall-of-famer Wilt Chamberlain was considering a comeback in Russia. (In between its humor and its testosterone, the eXile has reported some important stories, most notably that much aid money from the U.S. went directly into the hands of some top Russian politicians.)

Only those with a National Lampoon mentality will enjoy the descriptions of the editors' sexual conquests and their comparisons of Russian and American women. Like much of the paper itself, the book, which recounts the newspaper's history, is tasteless. There's little doubt, however, that both incisively probe contemporary Russian reality--and the expatriate indset.

Wikipedia adds to the merriment:

Rolling Stone magazine said in 1998 that then-coeditors "Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi take the raw material of this decadent new Moscow and convert it into 25,000 instantly snapped-up issues of The eXile, consisting of misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses, all redeemed by political reporting that's read seriously not only in Moscow but also in Washington."

To be honest, I lost track of Taibbi’s writing for a number of years, and having ceased subscribing to Rolling Stone some time back, it wasn’t until the recent election campaign that I became aware of his work covering it. I still haven’t figured out how the subscription resumed without my paying for it.

Subsequently, I've been delighted to read Taibbi’s political essays. He grafts Hunter S. Thompson’s chemical-addled sneer atop the more urbane (and less overtly aggressive) analysis of mainstream journalists like Frank Rich of the New York Times, leaving me with yet another writing role model to absorb in small doses only, lest I subconsciously seek to emulate too obviously. It’s a quality I formerly admired in P.J. O’Rourke, at least until the ex-Lampooner dove completely off the deep end and abandoned pants-down Republicanism for the genuine non-ironic and fascistic article.

Like Thompson before him, Taibbi thrives in a habitat of surreal absurdity, and his descriptions of the waning daze of the doomed McCain/Palin bid for the nation’s highest offices are filled with sassy but deadly accurate imagery, as in this passage documenting the extent of the Arizona “maverick’s” sell-out to the dark side of the GOP (warning: the following contains brutally graphic figurative language):

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

Seeing as surreal absurdity is also the order of the day in learning-impaired New Albany, it’s a shame we couldn’t bring Taibbi here for a brief time and turn him loose among the ward-heelers, rednecks, underachievers and Luddites. However, the results might hit too close to home, and after all, we’ve been documenting the Open Air Museum’s freaks and foibles for four years ourselves, dodging shrapnel when merited and beginning each and every day with a glance at the prices for one-way tickets out. It isn't a mere coincidence that "The eXile" stands as metaphor for the experience of leftists in New Albany.

Here are beginning and concluding passages from Taibbi’s piece on McCain, and the link to the whole story. Enjoy.

Matt Taibbi: A Requiem for John McCain

It sounds strange to say, but this election season may have done to the word "Republican" what 1972 did for the word "liberal": turned it into a poisonous sobriquet that no politician with bipartisan aspirations will ever again welcome. The Republicans didn't just break the party — they left it smashed into space dust. They weren't just beaten; the very idea of Republican conservatism was massively rejected in virtually every state where large chunks of the population do not believe in the literal existence of a horned devil, and even in some that do …

… When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome
sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.