Review of Matt Taibbi's "Insane Clown President"

I just finished reading Insane Clown President and I am planning to write a substantial review of it but it is important enough that I wanted to get a short review out right away. This book is not always easy to read as it channels some of Hunter S. Thompson's maniacal style from his 1973 Fear and Loathing book about Nixon. The channeling makes sense because Matt Taibbi is Thompson's journalistic descendant as political reporter for Rolling Stone.

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Sometimes this book is hard to understand. The rhetorical flourishes get very elaborate and the obscure references can be very obscure. The book is made up of pieces written during the 2016 campaign so we see the author trying to make sense of a rapidly moving train wreck as it happens. This leads to some confusion and contradictory points of view as the campaign unravels. This is a kind of stream-of-consciousness accounting of the most bizarre and maybe dangerous presidential election in United States history.

But in spite of the difficulties in unraveling the meanings in this book it richly rewards every effort at understanding. It did the most important thing a book is supposed to do (contrary to the views of the ignorant who think books are supposed to spoon feed ""facts" into their passive brains), it forced me to think HARD about what the author was trying to say, which means I was also thinking hard about WHAT happened in 2016 and WHY it happened.

It helped me understand how and why the Democrats let down the working class and how those people took their revenge by doing something FAR worse in electing Trump. It also helped me to understand a little more about the "post-fact" world we seem to be lurching into, where presidents still lie, as they always have, but now they do it openly and shamelessly, because their followers don't seem to care anymore.

And that makes this a very good book indeed.

Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway