Matt Taibbi on the relentless anxieties of parenthood
This shared experience, perhaps more than any other, should be enough to defang America's culture wars and political divides
Matt Taibbi is among the best independent journalists alive. Most people whose main sources of news narratives are post-liberal Twitter leftists, government mouthpieces with jobs at CNN, or Jen Psaki fan-clubs on Facebook either haven’t heard of Taibbi or know him as an alleged scourge. I know folks who used to love Taibbi but now despise or ignore him; to my knowledge, none of these apostates have paused for one moment to examine the various steps in the chain of “reasoning” leading to their shift in perspective.
Although Taibbi has done stories on every aspect of America’s slide into obeisance, stark nonsense framed as cold science, and undisguised chaos, his coverage of the surreal level of rot in worldwide financial institutions to me represents his best work. This is because Taibbi is a brilliant writer, and I’m among the thousands of subscribers to his Substack publication, TK News, with no formal background whatsoever in finance. I’m barely economics-literate enough to parse anything in the Financial Times; Taibbi uses cheerfully abrupt metaphors that reduce complex concepts to ideas a middle-schooler could understand, and he draws chuckles from his readers in the process. (A thief once tried to subscribe to the Financial Times using my now-deleted PayPal account; you have to appreciate the thriftiness in learning how to save money by using someone else’s to access the information.)
Taibbi gives himself occasional breaks from the grind of deep political and culture-wars dives by writing book or film reviews. On the surface, these are pithy and almost Dave Barry-like in their obvious intent to keep the mood light. But because both Hollywood and most of the corporate media are tentacles extending straight from the Democratic Party’s cancerous guts, Taibbi’s reviews ineluctably represent pushback against bad ambient ideas, some of them arguably if quietly insane.
His recent review of Taken is in a subscriber-only post, “In Defense of Liam Neeson! Conventional wisdom takes a shot at goofy Dad movies.” Non-subscribers can always access audio versions of such TK News posts a few days after their release, but I don’t think I’m challenging any fair-use laws in reproducing this part:
Any parent knows the feeling of limitless vulnerability that hits you at the moment of birth. You can’t believe how much you love them, but you also never stop being conscious of how completely your world would end if anything would ever happen to them. Mothers and fathers both, we all become identical worrying machines, consumed with thoughts of how to protect this beautiful helpless thing.
You wouldn’t trade it, but it’s stressful! All day you scan landscapes with Terminator-esque intensity: here’s an electric socket, there’s a kid on the little league team who doesn’t look before taking practice swings, then you spot how badly designed some jungle gyms are, and there are fevers and the croup and crowds (each additional second in any period of losing track of a small child brings you exponentially closer to stroke) and God knows what else. To keep them housed and fed you would, for a dollar, eat buckets of shit all day long and be happy doing it (you might even ask for seconds before clocking out). Most parents in the moment are thrilled with any job that pays, even under the most loathsome boss, but once they get a free moment to think after six or seven years, they might feel strained there, too.
It builds up, until you’re old and gray, and Taken is the kind of movie you see to let out that stress.
I don’t have kids, and in related news, I flapped my arms really hard for a few moments today and was unable to generate enough lift to rise above the ground. But I read this passage twice, just to warm up. Even though it’s almost a prosaic version of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” tailored for parents, it captures the universality of unconditional, protective love—an emotion I assume everyone besides outright sociopaths has experienced at some point, be the unwitting beneficiary a child, a pet, or an orphanage.
This is a tearjerker, one Taibbi just offhandedly dumps into a sly roast of a dipshit writer at The Atlantic.
For a variety of reasons both deliberate and lifestyle-enforced, I never had kids. There was a period in my early thirties when I probably could have been talked into it, but I had made up my mind pretty early in adult life on this count. Even at a point when I had good reason to anticipate sufficient prosperity, I was convinced that there was no way I could oversee the development of a conscious mind without imparting too much of my own neurotic stamp on it, thereby precluding any real shot at my child or children enjoying what I considered happiness, on balance. Being aware of the ways in which I had already grappled with psychological or mood or mental or adaptive disorders was never going to shield against their transmission.
I can only imagine how I’d feel if I hadn’t had loving and attentive parents of my own, a reality Taibbi’s writing drives home with spectacular force even now. But kids tend to turn out how they turn out.
Making this decision closes a lot of doors in life, especially when you couple them to an itinerant existence and alcoholic drinking. I obviously regret the drinking, but not the things I passed up. It would have been deeply unfair to hijack the ambitions of anyone who wanted to stay in one place and eventually raise a family. I was never going to lie to anyone and say, “Yeah, maybe in a few years after this and that happen.”
I have met some amazing people anyway, the kind of people I was destined to hang with no matter what route took me to them. But the twenty-five or so years that have passed since the “nah” light first went on and stayed lit have, apart from my own experiences, convinced me that my observations were valid. There is evidently almost nothing children can do to avoid reacting to the world, throughout life, in the same ways they saw their parents react to it. I have always reacted to things, inwardly, in ways that make me too uncomfortable too often—just a slow burn of not enough sleep, worrying about bullshit, and ultimately not seeing much of “a point,” especially in world overrun with lies from on high and consequent mass delusion—to justify just making a consciousness from scratch and expecting it to fare well with me leering over its tender shoulder.
All of that omits being viciously prone to substance abuse. Not only is that something I would also be likely to transmit, it’s the main reason my life was too much of a shambles for parenthood to even be visible through the Webb telescope at most junctures, much less on the horizon. But I’ve seen plenty of people have kids under far worse duress, and my never being settled in one place for long into my forties wasn’t the main reason I never did. I just didn’t want to. Being a vagabond was partly a consequence of that mindset, not a contributor.
Taibbi’s piece was moving because it introduces a phenomenon related to the unavoidable anxiety and worry of the child: The expanding suite of neuroses of any parent, even a normal person not prone to excitedly discovering what’s most wrong with the world every day. I experience a version of this with Rosie, who will never, ever be off a leash unless inside an enclosed space because I’m petrified of a repeat of an event that claimed my family’s first dog in 1983. I always know she’s well cared for when I travel without her, but I worry anyway.
I would, without hesitation, also physically attack and probably try to kill anyone or anything who tried to harm her. She has a place in the world, one she seems to really enjoy, and I’m here to make sure she keeps it.
Rosie is a great dog, but she’s a dog. The enormity of the difference in scale between worrying about even the most accident-prone dog and fretting over even the best-behaved, best-supervised child is probably impossible to express unless you’ve experienced both, and I haven’t.
Even some people I don’t stand are striving mightily to shepherd their young ones through life given a labyrinth of increasingly tribalized and balkanized and information-deprived paths. I can’t help but appreciate that.