Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has in recent years undertaken a layman’s education in high finance, so that he is now able to deliver to readers pungent essays of denunciation. One or two of his memorable epigrams of scorn, especially concerning the investment firm Goldman Sachs, have really stuck, and now appear in the press constantly. The knavery of Wall Street, to be sure, is a treasure-trove for writers with sharp pens, but Taibbi has really excelled at this stuff, most recently in this essay, which ably describes a handful of the more brazen boondoggles that financiers have inflicted on the Republic ever since the generosity of the taxpayers was extended to most every finance firm on earth.
But leaving aside the specific tales of Wall Street swindles, what concerns me here is that underneath all the vulgar bluster and riotous sneers of Taibbi’s treatment of these matters, the careful reader will discern something extraordinary: Taibbi and Rolling Stone have assumed the office of public moralist.
Now anyone familiar with Rolling Stone over the years will not fail to register how discordant such a claim sounds. Therein lies a remarkable irony. This magazine has been at the forefront of cultural antinomianism since its inception. It has marched in the vanguard of every proposed liberation from traditional mores since its founding in San Francisco in 1967.
A personal anecdote will perhaps convey the depth of this commitment to anarchic morals at Rolling Stone.
Around a year I ago, I got word that Bob Dylan would be gracing the cover of the magazine. Being myself an enthusiastic Dylan fan, I went to purchase a copy when the issue appeared — and discovered to my chagrin (but hardly my surprise) that the essay following the Dylan cover story was an unabashedly sympathetic treatment of a female hard-core porn star, who looked for all the world like “Ophelia” of Dylan’s song “Desolation Row”:
Now Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
I instantly abandoned the idea of purchasing the magazine, and went to the library to photocopy the Dylan article instead.
The point is that in any other context besides banking, Rolling Stone would treat of moralists with unrelenting scorn and derision. The magazine has been extolling the irresistibly admirable qualities and transgressive coolness of rebels, thugs and charlatans for several generations now. Were Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, instead of a staid and respectable financier who has worn suits every day for 30 years, a slick mafioso captain, or a scruffy counterculture radical, or a chic academic theorist of anti-bourgeois revolution, Rolling Stone would adore him, and hold him up for the admiration of all right-thinking readers. Would Blankfein only intersperse his Congressional testimony on credit-default swaps with biting jabs at American imperialism, or the oppressive conformity of middle class life, or the imposture of Western literature — or, but this is too obvious, Sarah Palin — Taibbi and Rolling Stone would be fettered and disarmed.
There is a passage at the end of Taibbi’s essay that is so utterly bereft of self-awareness it deserves to be elevated into the pantheon unintentional irony. That Taibbi’s argument is quite irrefutably right only amplifies its almost comical obtuseness. Observe.
The real problem [with Wall Street] is that it doesn’t matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn’t going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it’s also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.
As I say, he speaks the hard truth. No laws or regulations, no matter how wise or vigilant, can, under conditions of liberty, govern a lawless people. Self-government remains utterly dependent on the self-discipline and restraint of the citizens. If men will not govern themselves, there can in the end only be anarchy and pillage, or tyranny. Taibbi’s argument is beyond dispute. It is also profoundly and ineradicably conservative.
As Taibbi and Rolling Stone perceive, at least in this one narrow context, we all depend upon the internal moral structure of a civilized people. “The system assumes a certain minimal level” of internalized ethics. In a word, our democracy, liberty and free markets themselves depend on our culture. And those who seek to undermine the moral content of that culture strike at the roots of everything else we hold dear.
Rolling Stone has dedicated its institutional life to undermining the internal ethical system and “civic instinct” our culture rests on, and whose absence Taibbi only now notices. It has taken dynamite to the mores and inherited assumptions which were the foundation for American self-government. It has sown doubt and cynicism about virtually every aspect of our political tradition. It has treated of imaginary futures with a naïve utopianism; and the past with a witless animosity. It has upheld the most forgettable degenerates and fools as heroes; and ruthlessly and unscrupulously denigrated our true heroes — who, being dead, are safely incapable of rejoinder. In a word, it has put in a solid half-century of work demoralizing America.
And here this magazine, when it comes to the subject of finance capitalism, would pretend to the office of moralist. On this one matter, its anarchic moral code suddenly becomes properly repugnant. On this one matter, it is readily detectable that the brazen mountebank, who crowns plunder with insult, is in plain truth an enemy of liberty. On this one matter Rolling Stone lays hold of the old verities of Christian civilization which its vocation has ever been to ruin and despoil.
To Matt Taibbi and Rolling Stone the rest of us can only say, with a touch of indignation: you reap what you sow, brother.
Paul Cella blogs at What’s Wrong With the World.
