{"id":188792,"date":"2010-07-27T22:44:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T03:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/07\/27\/i-wish-that-i-could-write-like-matt-taibbi\/"},"modified":"2010-07-27T22:44:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T03:44:00","slug":"i-wish-that-i-could-write-like-matt-taibbi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/07\/27\/i-wish-that-i-could-write-like-matt-taibbi\/","title":{"rendered":"I Wish That I Could Write Like Matt Taibbi"},"content":{"rendered":"

He has a post up, The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant<\/span><\/a>, and he notes that the tea-baggers<\/span>‘ fascination with mythical reverse racism mirrors these sick f%$#s: <\/p>\n

Years ago a friend of mine in the media told me a story about an experience he had covering the execution of John Wayne Gacy<\/span> in Joliet<\/span>, Illinois. You won\u2019t find anyone in the world who\u2019d have been sad to see serial child murderer in a clown suit like Gacy<\/span> die, but this reporter friend of mine said the crowd outside the prison on execution night freaked him out almost as much as Gacy<\/span> had. There were something like 400 people outside the gates at Joliet<\/span> and there were people selling commemorative t-shirts and pounding beers and chanting (\u201cKill the Clown!\u201d was a popular one) all night.<\/p>\n

At the moment of truth the crowd cheered and my friend turned to interview a scraggly-looking twenty-something with thinning long hair whom he described as looking like a too-old version of the Todd Ianuzzi<\/span> mean-teenager character in Beavis<\/span> and Butthead<\/span>. The guy was into his second six-pack and smiling goofily<\/span> like he\u2019d just gotten a half-price rub-n-tug from a Thai massage parlor. He says to my friend: \u201cYou\u2019re not against capital punishment, are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not against capital punishment,\u201d my friend says. \u201cI\u2019m against enjoying capital punishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m with my friend on this one. As far as I see it, there are three positions on capital punishment. There\u2019s being against it. There\u2019s being for it. Then there\u2019s putting six-packs of beer in a cooler and driving to a hideous prison complex in the middle of the night with four hundred strangers to cheer like fans at a baseball game for the execution of some fat old child killer. Dude, if that\u2019s what you call recreation, you\u2019re either dangerously bored or seriously fucked up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Taibbi<\/span> notes that these people really<\/span> get off on this, though he is rather more optimistic than I am, he sees them as “Basically see are a bunch of middle-aged white people who spent their teens listening to Eddie Murphy albums and deep down are a lot more worried about their credit card debt than they are about ACORN taking over the government,” but I disagree.<\/p>\n

I see them as a lost generation, and absent a cataclysm on par with the Axis defeats during WWII, I do not see these people returning to normalcy.<\/p>\n

In any case, go and read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He has a post up, The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant, and he notes that the tea-baggers‘ fascination with mythical reverse racism mirrors these sick f%$#s: Years ago a friend of mine in the media told me a story about an experience he had covering the execution of John Wayne Gacy in Joliet, Illinois. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1195,1002,978,1001],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capital-punishment","category-good-writing","category-politics","category-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}