You don't wanna know

Willful idiots

Thanksgiving’s over, so who cares about whatever controversies people endeavored to stir up around it for clicks. But I want to spend a moment on Matt Taibbi’s especially obnoxious column because I think it has wider significance.

We’re used to conservatives snarling about liberals trying to spoil their Thanksgiving by talking politics — or rather by taking a different view on it than the MAGA shitheads in their families, whose right to insult liberals at the table is never challenged; as I observed in 2019,  “even if you take a fuck-’em attitude toward your asshole kinfolk, you’re still a loser because you won’t sit there and listen to Grandpa recite ‘The Snake’ instead of grace before dinner.” The year after that, conservatives were mad that their liberal relatives wouldn’t break quarantine to listen to their bullshit.

Here we are in 2021, and Trump is out on his ass — though, one would think from the attitude of the prestige media, we’re all still supposed to act as if his supporters must be pampered and petted just as they were in the glory days of Cletus Safaris, at Thanksgiving dinner and elsewhere.  Molly Jong-Fast wrote a story about “deprogramming” MAGA relatives at Thanksgiving and got death threats for it. (I will note that, since the previous Thanksgiving, many Trumpkin relatives have been radicalized by January 6 and the increasingly insurrectionist rightwing movement it represents.)

Into this breach steps Matt Taibbi who, longtime followers will know, was once the scourge of Wall Street and is now your typical Substack “wokeness” scammer. Being more skilled than Bari Weiss or any of the rest of them, Taibbi has apparently decided to aim for the P.J. O’Rourke slot in modern journalism.

Youngbloods may not know that O’Rourke is a former National Lampoon writer who was the Reagan era’s idea of a great American humorist, though I never saw it myself — his gags tended toward the “you hippies like things that are all-natural, well diptheria is also all-natural [snorts fat line to celebrate his cleverness]” style. He still surfaces from time to time; currently he is involved in a thing called “American Consequences” published by investor bulletin bucket shop Stansberry Research, which uses the venue to push bitcoin. Guess the money’s good, and O’Rourke probably gives the property a real attractive sheen for the kind of people they’re looking to draw; I remember when David Frum, pre-bullshit-resistance, lumped O’Rourke in with rightwing jokesters Mark Steyn and Rob Long as the sort of funnymen who got “the laughs exploding… like artillery shells out of a howitzer,” which is exactly how I’ve always imagined conservatives laughed.

Taibbi’s theme is not that our ancestors didn’t fuck the Native Americans, but that no one should feel bad about it because like who cares what happened to those losers.  (The title is “Thanksgiving Is Awesome,” an apparently deliberate echo of “America, Fuck Yeah!” from that other Who Gives A Shit equity, South Park, after which another obnoxious brand of “fun” conservative was once named.) Taibbi recounts reading about Columbus’ savage treatment of Native Americans in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States when he was a kid and being impressed by all the history he’d been missing. But now he’s a grown-up and, notwithstanding he doesn’t challenge Zinn’s facts, he finds it all so boring now:

[Zinn’s] version of five hundred years of history contains just two characters, pure villains and pure victims…

How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks? When the English forced the Wampanoags off their land and made many convert to Christianity? When Lincoln told Horace Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it”?

How? Maybe because you’re more than three years old, and don’t need fairy tales to be real in order to enjoy dinner with family and a football game?

I’m not sure who told Taibbi he shouldn’t enjoy a nice meal on Thanksgiving, as I and a lot of liberals of my acquaintance did, but whoever it was must have touched a nerve.

Then Taibbi tells us how great it is America exists, albeit atop mountains of martyred dead. Sure, “The Founding Fathers may have been scum, but they didn’t just steal a continent from the indigenous residents, they stole one from a British King, which is, come on, hilarious.” Come on, lady, I laughed when you came in! And besides:

Almost none of us are related to Pilgrims or Founders. Nearly all of us descended from those subsequent waves of weirdos and refugees who came from all over, some not by choice, and forged the real character of our stolen nation. Many of our ancestors had their hands forced elsewhere, from Jews in the Pale fleeing pogroms to Irish escaping famines to Armenians running from Ottoman genocides. Once they got here, they happily planted Sea Pirate flags on their front doors and set about inventing everything from cat litter to alternating current, while mostly refraining from murdering one another. It was an insane setup, but they made the whole thing work, which is a pretty amazing story even figuring in the horribleness, and really what we’re celebrating every November.

So see, it all worked out.

Two things. One, it’s weird for a nouveau wingnut like Taibbi to excuse genocide and celebrate America based on the innovation of our immigrants when currently his allies are actively trying to repel immigrants, and the rightwing idea of innovation is grifts like Elon Musk’s exploding rocketships and non-self-driving cars. (The greatest genuine innovation of our time, mRNA vaccines, has been declared poison by his buddies.)

But mainly what Taibbi’s rant celebrates isn’t America so much as ignorance. And he celebrates that ignorance as a state to aspire to — the truly ignorant won’t even read his stuff; it’s the people who know what he’s talking about and also aspire to ignorance that form his affinity group. Taibbi doesn’t dispute the ugly truth, and it’s not quite right to say he doesn’t give a shit — rather he fervently wishes nobody would give a shit, because clearly the fact that an increasing number of people do give a shit really spoils the MAGA magic for him. It’s funny — at one point Taibbi says that “the high of Reagan-era exceptionalism… has worn off and we’re realizing, in the cold light of sobriety, that we suck every bit as much as other nations.” But his childish essay is exactly “Reagan-era exceptionalism,” which was also borne aloft on print-the-legend self-deception, and like that exceptionalism it requires a whole auditorium full of Tinker Bell clapping to keep it alive.