Running for Your Life: Reading Taibbi

A word for sane social-justice reporting, within the din of Trump outrages.

(Yes, he sold himself as president, but hell, this country was built on the backs of savvy showmen, P.T. Barnum to Ronald Reagan. This current guy is just a less palatable version of the Great American Showman.)

Matt Taibbi, he of “The Divide,” is out next month with a new book.

“I Can’t Breathe,” it’s called, a thorough, unvarnished analysis of the street-killing of one Eric Garner.

Time moves so fast in America. I daresay, in Canada, if such an event that occurred in July 2014 on Staten Island were to happen north of the border, justice would not only be done but be seen to be done. It’s true that New York City did arrive at a multimillion-dollar settlement for the Garner family, but no one has ever been held accountable for what happened to Eric Garner on the street at the hands of “arresting” police officers.

Truth is that so many videos have crowded out Garner’s – the one shot by Ramsey Orta, a key protagonist in Taibbi’s book – since that fateful day. Which is why Taibbi – the junkyard dog of social justice reporters – is so valuable. He tells it like it is.

Can we go back, and that means to the 1960s, in which Taibbi notes, citing the LBJ commission on the fiery urban street protests of those days?  We of the garrison state? Taibbi writes of a time when national commissioners wrote things like this:

“This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

Reaction to [the street] disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.

This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.”

Wow! Imagine an American democracy in which democratic ideals are not something to spout platitudes over but to shape concrete policies to make for real change that would benefit the public good.

Alas, a fantasy.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Life in Letters