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| Left: The Great Book. Right: Sea Troll. |
I read the Great Derangement in college, and the same things that struck me then strike me now. Matt Taibbi is an experiential artist. He doesn't just recount events; he genuinely lives them. Somehow all the newspaper stories in the intervening period between his last book and his new one come to life with incredible characters who had just been mere names in an article before. Previously tedious or mildly disturbing issues suddenly become very powerful and outrageous. The first chapter had me genuinely shouting "It all makes sense now!" on the toilet, and not in a Glenn Beck-style "Obama spelled backwards is Amabo" kind of way, but in a genuine, fire-breathing, life-affirming "Ellen Page is a lesbian" kind of way.
In an extraordinary scene over a year before, on May 31, 2012, [New York County DA] Vance had hauled all nineteen of the Abacus [Bank] defendants into court to face indictment. For the benefit of the press, he had them chained not only at the hands and feet but to one another.
The otherworldly chain gang of bewildered immigrants had been led into the courtroom like a giant, slow-moving snake. It was like a scene out of Bagram or Guantanamo Bay--all that was missing were the hoods.
Incredibly, three of the nineteen people who were put in chains had already been arraigned by Vance and released on bail. Prosecutors had asked them to voluntarily report to court that day ... When they appeared, Vance had had them cuffed and chained all over again, then paraded into court to be rearraigned, purely for the benefit of the cameras. ...
This case had nothing to do with the financial crisis. ... [But] everyone got what they wanted from the Abacus prosecution. The city got to say it was being tough on financial crime. The press got to run a thrilling picture of harsh justice. Vance got a line to add to his resume. The only losers were the public, who had no idea that the real culprits for the financial crisis were being set free, while the bank on trial had nothing to do with the losses that had been suffered by almost every ordinary American in the crash. As one city investigator put it, Abacus was "the Lee Harvey Oswald of banks--a patsy."
Mind-blowing and a little bit crazy, I'm not even quoting the parts that made me laugh at or (as with Hunter S Thompson) love the beautifully characterized real figures who appear in the tale. I'm just quoting the part that made me sit up, realize I had completely misinterpreted a news event, and finally wonder whether the world is OK.
Nor am I adequately summarizing his beautiful summary of the Abacus case, an event that was absolutely touted as a crowning achievement of the State's response to the Financial Crisis, and a trial that was absolutely 100% about perfectly safe mortgages taken on by Chinese immigrant bootleggers.
And the defendants in this case made as little as $30k a year.
It's worth noting, to me, that I am, to me, pretty lenient when it comes to global capitalism. I'm unfortunately resigned to the idea that multibillion-dollar criminals drive the world economy, and without them (and their risk-taking) we'd all be a lot poorer in both the short and the long run. You may not like Henry Paulson, you may think the only thing separating Dick Fuld from a cannibal is his lack of humanity, but dammit these people made mool.ah. And honestly, you made moolah from that. And you still do, until the US government defaults on its loans, but that will be more an expression of the times than anything else, and your newspaper headlines will read 金融危机 anyway.
Read the book! It reads faster than Harry Potter--even early Harry Potter.
