Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
By Matt Taibbi
Published October 2007
“Bush in person always strikes me as the kind of guy who would ask a woman for a hand job at the end of a first date. He has days where he looks like she said yes, and days where the answer was no.”
–Matt Taibbi
Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire is the best book I’ve read all year, and that’s not surprising, as it’s the long-awaited follow-up to 2005’s Spanking the Donkey, the book that started everyone referring to Matt Taibbi as “The New Hunter S. Thompson.”
While he may still be perfecting the beautiful art of Gonzo Journalism, Taibbi is, if anything, more focused than Thompson. This may simply be a by-product of the perpetual shit flood pouring out of Washington these days, or it may be an after-effect of Taibbi’s years in Russia, but either way, Taibbi’s reporting hearkens back to the skull-bashing, chop-busting ruthlessness of Thompson’s best work, and you don’t have to stop every five minutes to talk about sports gambling and abusive hotel bills.
The secret to Taibbi’s writing is not simply his abundant candor or his vicious humor, but his genuine and ever-present outrage at the corrupt, greedy, senseless idiocy that will forever pollute the legacy of the Bush administration. It’s the same shocked rage that a mother might find upon returning from a trip to the supermarket to discover that her house is on fire because her five-year-old dropped his crack pipe while her husband was fucking the babysitter. It’s a baffled and appalled “what the hell happened while I was away?” kind of feeling.
Which is understandable, because Taibbi really was out of the loop for a while. In 2002, Matt Taibbi returned to the United States after 11 years of bumming around the remains of the then-newly-collapsed U.S.S.R. Still reeling from culture shock, he jumped headfirst onto the 2004 campaign trail and, with the aid of LSD and a gorilla suit, managed to write Spanking the Donkey, the best campaign book since Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. Throughout Spanking the Donkey, you could tell that Taibbi hadn’t quite gotten his America legs back. After all, he left at the dawn of Bill Clinton, the Internet, and grunge rock, and returned to find it all crushed under the weight of the post-9/11 Bush administration. This is a transition that was scary enough to observe gradually, and for Taibbi to get it all at once, it’s astonishing that he didn’t catch the next flight straight back to Moscow.
In Smells Like Dead Elephants, released last week, Taibbi continues his quest to understand what the hell is happening to the United States. He writes of his paranoid quest to decipher the secrets of the nefarious conspiracy underpinning all the monstrosities of Karl Rove, Enron, and every other stupid, mean mess of the last six years.
“But in the end I understood that there was a good reason that I never tapped into what the hidden truth of the Bush years was, and the reason for that is that there never was anything to tap into. The tragedy of the Bush era is that there was never any depth under its absurd surface — and when the ridiculous exterior washed away, in scandal and indictment and disaster and failure and ignominy, we were left with nothing but emptiness, disorganization, and chaos.”
Here you will find scathing (and completely appropriate) critiques of the 109th Congress, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Joe Lieberman, and the thievery beneath the Hurricane Katrina “reconstruction” effort. And while his analysis is consistently insightful, Taibbi is at his best when he follows the pure Gonzo ethos of throwing himself into the story he’s covering. Particularly brilliant is his coverage of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in which Taibbi teams up with Sean Penn and a black Baptist minister named Reverend Willie Walker to rescue survivors in the Ninth Ward.
“Here we are in the midst of the worst flood in the country’s history and I am in the middle of an armed convy, holding a plunger.”
However, the coup de grace of the entire book is Taibbi’s five-week tour of Iraq in the summer of 2006. Not content with simply riding alongside army caravans, visiting forward operating bases, and investigating the excesses of civilian subcontractors, Taibbi takes things a step further and eventually wanders off with a creepy mustachioed commando who proceeds to lock him up in Abu Ghraib prison for three days.
You want to know how Gonzo Matt Taibbi is? This is how Gonzo Matt Taibbi is:
“The Commando dumped me in an abandoned cell block and shut the door behind me almost immediately upon arrival. […]
“You go where I go,” he said on the first day. “And don’t ask any fucking questions. In the meantime, stay here and don’t move.”
He shut the cell door. I stood for a moment in the middle of my cell, staring at the white concrete walls; it took exactly ten seconds for me to burst out laughing.”
It gets better from there.
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