Is there a word, maybe from the German, that means both outraged and nauseated at the same time, a sort of smash-barf response that's more volatile than just throwing up in your mouth a little bit? Because that's how I feel after reading Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, which is not, I hasten to add, a reaction to Taibbi's prose, but to his subject matter -- the financiers and politicians who are on the path to ruining our country, if not the world.
In a quick, 250 pages, Griftopia combines a solid layperson's explanation of several current financial crises with an indictment of the systems that perpetuate them. It's often funny, if you enjoy cynicism and making fun of Randians (which I do), and there's a certain informality of diction that you might expect from a Rolling Stone contributing editor. For example, here's Taibbi on Objectivism:
"To sum it all up, the Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools."
It's also often flat-out depressing, as we're reminded of the real people who have gone bankrupt, and lost jobs, homes and savings, because our government is either failing to protect us from corporate predation, or, more likely, in cahoots with the predators to bleed us dry.
The majority of the blame for the various (commodities, real estate, stock market) bubbles bursting is laid on the banksters and their cronies, but Taibbi reminds us that this is happening in part because we are allowing ourselves to be distracted by red/blue ideologues, by the (corporate-owned) media, and by our own greed: "...in a country where every Joe the Plumber has been hoodwinked into thinking he's one clogged toilet away from being rich himself, we're all invested in rigging the system for the rich."
Taibbi goes through a lot of unflattering metaphors trying to fully convey the nastiness of the situation as he sees it, but the ones he keeps returning to are all from the true crime genre. Grifters, mafiosi, crack dealers -- imagine that America is D'Angelo Barksdale. Sure, we get to be one of the protagonists of the story, but maybe not for much longer. The king stay the king.
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