Taibbi also seems less beholden to the crippling parabolas of Thompson’s canon. To Taibbi’s credit, he tends to see people, even if they’re animalistic people, where the Good Doctor saw only animals. He drags his beast up from the depths like Tennyson’s kraken.Ī case has been made for Taibbi being a more overtly socially conscious (and slightly less Gonzo) version of Hunter S. The author synthesizes all of this into one tentacled, beaked monstrosity. He begins with tales from the Wall Street crash and white collar crime, and moves on to stop-and-frisk (so called “broken windows”) statistical policing, then into the cruel banality and Sisyphean toil of urban courtrooms and finally to the nearly unfathomable riches of financial pillagers and the definitely unfathomable complexity of their crimes. That most gentle characterization of the Divide comes well over halfway into the book, in a section that draws together all Taibbi has discussed before. The two systems, Taibbi writes, run “…on bureaucratic autopilot-and autopilot turns out to be a steel trap for the losers and a greased pipeline to money, power, and impunity for winners.”
It results inevitably from two separate bureaucratic systems-Taibbi characterizes them as two different actions of one system, but they may be easier seen as two. It sucks them dry before tossing aside the shell.Ī condensed form of Taibbi’s conceit: The wealth gap turns out to be about far, far more than allocations of wealth. The pit waits for a savage bureaucracy to push erstwhile victims into its ant-lion mandibles. The wealth gap has become less a gulf dividing the upper echelons of society and those toiling near or beneath the poverty line and turned into more a maw, an infernal mouth, a massive, institutionalized pit dug into America and stocked with perhaps the most vicious and awesome beast known to man: The System. He created the “vampire squid” moniker for financial giant Goldman Sachs in a July 2009 Rolling Stone article, “The Great American Bubble Machine.” This reviewer will honor such ingenuity by sharing a few beastly names in the same fashion.) Really, Matt Taibbi, Journalist-here embellished with the capital J to acknowledge those classic journalistic ideals, e.g., castigating the powerful, throwing bright lights down black halls, providing voice to the voiceless and, refreshingly in this work, not adhering cravenly to objectivity-outlines something far less benign, a beast with many names. The Divide, as a title, strikes me as something of a misnomer.
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