This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Matt Taibbi is one of those writers whose command of well-toned prose is so good that I would happily slaughter and eat pieces of him in order to attain even some percentage of his skill.  As political reporter for Rolling Stone and as blogger at True/Slant, he has been covering the recent financial crisis and its fallout as well or better than any other journalist in America.  His latest piece is a must read.  In fact, if you read only one thing in 2010, make it this.  

For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media — which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes — is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game.

In just those three sentences Taibbi has distilled the myriad problems our public discourse faces down to their most obnoxious source.  We are all so busy flinging shit at each other that we're ignoring the fact that the monkey house is on fire.  Of course we can spend hours debating/arguing/yelling/loathing the various failures of the consumer, the government, the banks, and everyone between but in our obsessive compulsive desire to stone one or the other to death we aren't doing anything to prevent it from happening in the future.  In order to see this coming down the road again we would have to admit to ourselves that it was not simple.  A complex series of failures (some well intentioned, some merely stupid, some criminal) brought us to the brink, and not the grand design of any one Greedy Republican, Gay Liberal, or Scary Minority.  This country no longer seems to have any capacity for nuance, detail, or the concept that the truth often lay somewhere in the middle.  I say "no longer" because I personally can not fathom how a society might have survived two World Wars, a Great Depression, the Russians, and the 60s without more than a little common sense and intellectual desire for a more complete understanding of things.  Perhaps Americans have always been this intolerant of their own ability to think, but if we want to prevent things like financial collapse and George W. Bush from ever happening again, there must be some way to recognize that some problems are not inflicted by one side on another.  Sometimes when there's shit in your face you have to be willing to confront the fact that all monkey's are capable of flinging it.