ゴンゾーの後継者
このエントリでハンター・トンプソン風だと適当に書いたマット・タイッビ(Matt Taibbi)だが、Wikipediaのエントリにもあるとおり、ゴンゾー・ジャーナリズムの後継者であると広く見なされ、トンプソンともよく比較されているようだ（本人はあんまり喜んでいないみたいだが）。経歴をWikipediaなどから拾って簡単にまとめてみる。
タイッビは1970年生まれ。父はNBCのレポーターのマイク・タイッビ。20代をロシアで過ごし、フリーランスのジャーナリストとしてウズベキスタン、モンゴルなどで活動。
1997年、タイッビは外国人居住者向けの隔週刊の英語フリーペーパー"The eXile"をモスクワで創刊。紙面の内容はロシアの暴力的なナイトライフを扱ったタブロイド的記事と調査報道を組み合わせたもので、「万人に対し平等にクソをたれる」というのがその編集姿勢だとある編集者は表現している。
連載には、娼婦を取材してそのパフォーマンス、体のタイプ、背景、意見などを書き取り、ときにはロシアの売春業の経済的・社会的側面を考察する"Whore-R Stories"、ロシアで起こる血なまぐさい異常な犯罪を記録した"Death Porn"、その南アフリカ版の"Mandela Porn"、戦争きちがいのナードが過去・現在の軍事紛争の解説をする"The War Nerd"などがある。
この新聞が起こした事件は数多くあるが、なかでも有名なのは『ニューヨーク・タイムズ』の支局長にパイを投げつけた事件だろう。タイッビはモスクワの最低ジャーナリストを決定するトーナメントを紙面で行い、『ニューヨーク・タイムズ』モスクワ支局長の優勝が決まると、その顔目がけて馬の精液をトッピングしたパイを投げつけたのだ。ほかの事件についてはwikipediaのエントリに詳しい。
2002年タイッビはアメリカに帰ると、フリーランスのジャーナリストとして『ネイション』、『プレイボーイ』、『ニューヨーク・プレス』、『ニューヨーク・スポーツ・エクスプレス』などに寄稿している。アメリカでも"The Beast"*1というフリーペーパーを創刊しているが、タイッビはすぐ経営から手を引いている。
2005年、タイッビが『ニューヨーク・プレス』に「迫りくる教皇の死に関する最高に愉快な52の事実」と題するコラムを発表すると、ヒラリー・クリントン上院議員、ニューヨーク市長マイケル・ブルームバーグから激しく非難され、アンソニー・ワイナー下院議員はニューヨーク市民に『ニューヨーク・プレス』をニュースボックスから取り出してゴミ箱へ捨てろとまで呼びかけた*2。
2004年のアメリカ大統領選では、ハンター・トンプソンが72年に行ったように、タイッビは選挙キャンペーンに同行、記事をまとめて"Spanking the Donkey"isbn:0307345718の本を出している。抜粋がここで読める。
タイッビは現在『ローリング・ストーン』の寄稿編集者となっていて、同誌のWebページに政治コラム"The Low Post"を週に一度アップしている。
引用
９／11陰謀論について。
スーパーロビイスト、ジャック・エイブラモフについて。
The specifics vary, but the basic gist of what They Say Happened goes something like this:A group of power-hungry neocons, led by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bush and others and organizationally represented by groups like the Project for the New American Century, seeks to bring about a "Pearl-Harbor-like event" that would accelerate a rightist revolution, laying the political foundation for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Your basic Reichstag fire scenario, logical enough so far. Except in this story, the Reichstag fire is an immensely complicated media hoax; the conspirators plot to topple the World Trade Center and pin a series of hijackings on a group of Sunni extremists with alleged ties to Al Qaeda. How do they topple the Trade Center? Well, they make use of NORAD's expertise in flying remote-control aircraft and actually fly two such remote-control aircraft into the Towers (in another version of the story, they conspire with Al Qaeda terrorists to actually hijack the planes), then pass the planes off as commercial jetliners in the media. But it isn't the plane crashes that topple the buildings, but bombs planted in the Towers that do the trick.
For good measure -- apparently to lend credence to the hijacking story -- they then fake another hijacking/crash in the Pentagon, where there actually is no plane crash at all but instead a hole created by a cruise missile attack, fired by a mysterious "white jet" that after the attack circles the White House for some time, inspiring the attention of Secret Service agents who point at it curiously from the ground (apparently these White House Secret Service agents were not in on the plot, although FBI agents on scene at Ground Zero and in Shanksville and elsewhere were).
Lastly, again apparently to lend weight to the whole hijacking cover story, they burn a big hole in the ground in Pennsylvania and claim that a jet went down there, crashed by a bunch of brave fictional civilians who fictionally storm the fictional plane cabin. The real-life wife of one of the fictional heroes, Lisa Beamer, then writes a convincingly self-serving paean/memoir to her dead husband, again lending tremendous verisimilitude to the hijacking story. These guys are good!
トーマス・フリードマンについて。
All accounts point to Abramoff as the prototypically humorless Animal House campus villain. A thick-necked champion weight lifter (he still holds the Beverly Hills High bench-press record) with a square jaw and exquisite hygiene, the man-child Abramoff also had the kind of sadistic jock temperament that impresses coaches and corporate recruiters alike. "The football coach was always afraid that Jack was going to kill somebody if he hit him head-on," Rowen says. By the time he went away to Brandeis, he'd already undergone a conversion to Orthodox Judaism, having found religion at the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles (after seeing Fiddler on the Roof as a youngster, Abramoff says), and so he arrived in 1970s Massachusetts the rarest of East Coast campus creatures: a moralizing weight lifter with short hair and a passion for Republican politics.The Abramoff story, in fact, confirms in the most dramatic way every vicious popular stereotype about campus conservatives. Kids who get involved with lefty politics on campus almost always graduate straight into some degrading state of semi-employment -- the defining characteristic of lefty student movements is how few doors they open for you. Another defining characteristic of the student left is its persistent, unquenchable and irrational suspicion that the campus Republicans hold their meetings in the offices of someplace like the Rand Corporation, where they have their buttocks branded with Sumerian symbols in secret ceremonies that upon graduation will gain all of them entrance to the upper ranks of corporate and governmental privilege.
That was Jack Abramoff. Like those famed USC student "ratfuckers" who went on to hold the ultimate panty raid in the Watergate Hotel, Abramoff and his close friends Norquist and Ralph Reed (the one-time head of the Georgia College Republicans used to sleep on Abramoff's couch) never really abandoned the laughable training-wheel secrecy and capture-the-flag gamesmanship of student politics. His buttocks freshly branded, Abramoff in 1983 traveled to Johannesburg on behalf of the CRNC and immediately parlayed his student experience into a real job as a sort of frontman for South African intelligence services. He was the young progressive's paranoid nightmare come shockingly true: absurd campus Republican proto-geek effortlessly transformed at graduation into flesh-and-blood neo-Nazi spook.
The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase―the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:
As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!
This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting―ironically, as it were―with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.
Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.
参照記事
*1:"The 50 Most Loathsome People of 2004"という記事が原因となって、トム・クルーズから訴訟を起こすと脅されたことで一躍有名になった。
*2:『ニューヨーク・プレス』はフリーペーパー。
