Taibbi - Smells Like Dead Elephants Dispatches from a Rotting Empire Matt Taibbi

Smells Like Dead Elephants

Also by Matt Taibbi

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season

The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia

Smells Like Dead Elephants

Dispatches fro m a Rotting Empire

Matt Taibbi

Black Cat

a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

New York

Copyright 2007 by Matt Taibbi

Cover Design by Michael Dudding

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Excerpt from The End of the World, from Collected Poems, 19171982 by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright 1985 by the Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Published simultaneously in Canada

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FIRST EDITION

ISBN: 978-0-8021-7041-5

eISBN: 978-0-8021-9211-0

Black Cat

a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

Contents

Introduction

I missed the beginning of the Bush years. When the Gore-Bush electoral mess blew up in the news I was living in Moscow, Russia, editing an English-language paper called the eXile and also writing for a mudslinging Russian tabloid called Stringer . While America was busy counting hanging chads and careening toward a constitutional crisis, what I mostly remember is sitting in the Stringer offices pounding vodka with Russian colleagues Leonid Krutakov and Alexei Fomin, and listening to them howl with delight at the news that the mighty U.S.A. was now officially as fucked up and directionless as the Russian state. Lets see you bastards try to lecture us about our elections now! I remember Leonid saying, shaking his head with contempt. We may be a third-world country, but at least we know it!

Nearly a year later, when 9/11 happened, America was still far away enough for meI had been gone from it for most of ten yearsthat I still couldnt quite relate to what was going on back home. In Russia, and in particular in Moscow, terrorist bombings were sort of a regular event. I had twice been within a football field of massive explosions on Tverskaya Avenue, the capitals main drag. In one, a bomb blew up the twentieth floor of the Intourist hotel in what apparently was an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Iosif Kobzon, a wig-wearing mobbed-up crooner often described as the Russian Sinatra. I was eating an ice cream cone and walking toward Red Square when that one hit; I was close enough to see glass shards landing on the street. Not long after that I was on line at the original Russian McDonalds when the Pushkin Square Metro station exploded; I remember that scene well because so many of the McDonalds customers used the confusion after the blast as an opportunity to cut in line. Terrorist attacks were a part of everyday life in Russia, a regular annoyance to go with industrial disasters, coups detat and currency collapsessomething to joke about, like the weather.

As such my response to 9/11 was typical for a Muscovite of that period. My paper, the eXile, covered the bombings by running a cover photo showing a businessman bending over his naked secretary high up in a World Trade Center office. Bent over and looking out the window, she sees a plane approaching fast. The headline read: OH GOD, ITS SO BIG!!!

At the time, I thought that was funny. My clients did not, howeverwe lost pretty much every corporate advertiser we had because of that goddamn cover. Business decisions like these left me increasingly impoverished and as I steamed toward my mid-thirties I began to recognize the necessity of getting my head screwed on a little straighter, and perhaps even coming back to America to try to earn an actual living.

So in early 2002 I returned to the United States for the first time in nearly a decade, repatriating in the red-hot vigilant period of the Bush years. At first, the culture shock was so intense, I might as well have been on Mars. The post-9/11 war hysteria and paranoia, drummed up on the airwaves by absurd fascist-mouthpiece caricatures of the OReilly and Hannity ilk, struck me at first as ridiculous comedy, some bad directors half-baked, overdone rendition of an Orwellian dystopia, as dumb and unbelievable as V for Vendetta .

But as I traveled the country taking up my first freelance assignments on the campaign trail for a project that would eventually turn into an election diary called Spanking the Donkey, it slowly sunk in that this was not a joke, that a great many people in this country were taking this campy, goofball conservatism seriously, that the so-called Bush revolution was for real.

By the time the 2004 election ended I had fairly settled in to life back in the States. Like many returning expatriates, my readjustment period came at a cost of a nervous breakdown and the near-total disintegration of my personal life. Once those things were out of the way, however, I emerged transformed into more or less a typical American bourgeois geek, with a huge-screen television, a Gap credit card, a mild hydrocodone habit, no friends, and... a job.

Having gone for nearly a dozen years without a bossmy last experience with regular employment had been a study in incompetence as a bumbling assistant at a private-eye firm in Boston in the early ninetiesmy first response to being hired to write regular political features for Rolling Stone was sheer terror. Among other things, I was still totally mystified by the whole Bush phenomenon and had serious doubts that I could find anything intelligent to say about it.

On the surface, Bush looked to me just like a stammering dipshit with a third-grade education barely equal to the task of playing the president on television. I felt sure that there had to be some more sophisticated hidden force behind his presidency, some kind of powerful evil brain behind the dumb face, but the people my new colleagues in the American press were touting as geniuses and Svengalis and visionaries behind the regime turned out to be half-bright slobs like Karl Rove (whose genius was that he was mean enough to accuse his opponents of having a drug addict wife or an illegitimate daughter) and the presidents famed circle of neocon advisers, a group of people so stupid, they could only have been bred in expensive graduate schools.

The Wolfowitzes and Cheneys and Feiths who were the alleged brains behind Bushs Iraq campaign were intellectuals in the same way that Koko the signing gorilla is a linguistin a technical sense, sure, they used their brains to come up with these silly ideas about spreading democracy in the Muslim Middle East by dropping bombs and marching in to welcoming parades, but the idea that anyone, much less the majority of the country, could be impressed by their erudition struck me as totally amazing.