Matt "Mad Libs" Taibbi: It's Like [A Thing] with [Crazy Other Things]
By now, you will have tried to read Matt Taibbi's latest, which makes the case, which in my book was already made, that there should be criminal investigations at Goldman Sachs. I say "tried" because this is rough going. (And yes: Matt Taibbi, God bless!) And he's not wrong! Many of us have accustomed ourselves over the last few years to reading about regulatory whatnots and tranchey thingamabobs, and while it'll always be an uncomfortable second nature, at least writing about financial instruments follows some rules. But it's not the finance that's hard. For one, there's sentences like this one: "Each of the deals appears to represent a different and innovative brand of shamelessness and deceit." Now, I'm sorry the legal department made you say "appears to," even though it is technically accurate that we only know for sure that there is an appearance of deceit. But the helpful analogies!
Goldman isn't a pudgy housewife who broke her diet with a few Nilla Wafers between meals—it's an advanced-stage, 1,100-pound medical emergency who hasn't left his apartment in six years, and is found by paramedics buried up to his eyes in cupcake wrappers and pizza boxes.
It is not at all like that.
Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.
True-ish: it is indeed a little like that?
When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.
Okay, it is really definitely not like that.
This is kind of like taking all the kids who were picked last to play volleyball in every gym class of every public school in the state, throwing them in a new gym, and pretending that the first 10 kids picked are varsity-level players. Then you take all the unpicked kids left over from that process, throw them in a gym with similar kids from all 50 states, and call the first 10 kids picked All-Americans.
It is maybe like that but now you've mingled sports and finance and childhood shame and I don't knoooowww any more….
Is it okay that Taibbi has moved into the Michael Moore camp for me of people whom I completely agree with that I wish would stop arguing for the same points as me?
Wait, now. That last one actually makes quite a bit of sense to me!
"It's like makin' a soldier drop his weapon, shootin' him, and tellin' him get to steppin'." – Not-Viktor Vaughn
@Matt Sounds to me like that old robbery/extortion.
"It's as if you paid money to hear 'Like a Rolling Stone' on the jukebox but all the damn machine plays is 'Vogue.'"
It's like taking your favorite 5000 albums, picking the lowest 500, and then saying that they were the Best 500 Albums Of All Time.
And then taking the bottom 100 of the lowest 500, and saying that they were the Best 100 Rock Albums Evah.
-or-
It's like taking 500 of your least favorite cats, and picking the 50 with the worst eyesight. Then putting those 50 in an empty room with 1000 ravenous coyotes.
-or-
It's like taking 947 of the worst trees in Central Park, and picking the 38 2/3 that have the most missing bark. Then putting the worst 14 1/5 of the worst 38 2/3 in a blender. And making cardboard boxes out of the pulp. To have the homeless live in.
Am I on the right track with this simile thing?
@gfrblxt No wonder Abba ranked high on the list.
It's like rain on your wedding day?
And Warren Buffet has both feet in the trough.
Damn it, I read "which in my book was already made" and briefly thought "HEY CHOIRE WROTE A BOOK ABOUT GOLDMAN SACHS???" Which is still something I wish had/would happen(ed)!
It's like Vietnam with houses!
Fill in the Blankfein
It's like a yoga mat made of vomit and everything is vomit.
Should we give him the glogin y/y
He's just so mad that he is like a popcorn machine at the movie theater and analogies and insights are randomly popping out in every direction like popcorn spraying out, and the thing is you really WANT this popcorn, but the theater owner has inexplicably removed the glass that would have confined the popcorn in a scoopable format? So you're reduced to scrambling for separate popped kernels.
I just often can't make heads or tails of Taibbi's descriptions of the transactions. (And I once worked with transactions like these, albeit as a litigator.) I feel like he often, though not always, combines some of the worst excesses of the "muscular" strain of New Journalism with often only a passing acquaintance with how corporate finance actually works. Not exactly deeply reported, I guess I'm saying. I'd rather read Michael Lewis even though Lewis tends not to rant.
The first paragraph re-constructed using the Rolling Stone HST Taibbi Template™:
They weren't murderers or anything, just your every day run-of-the-mill greed heads conspiring against The New Dumb; a weird congregation of collateralized savages with an unnatural taste for hookers, math & crystal meth. It's a wiggy little tale, to be sure. For reasons no one will ever fully understand, they merely stole more money than most people can rationally conceive of… from their own customers… in a few blinks of an eye. But so what? They were, after all, The New Dumb, a generation of pie-eyed, slack-jawed rubes who were ripe for the picking. Ye Gods, where will it all end? Not here, Bubba. Not now. ho ho. The fat is in the fire. Here's the nut of the thing. They went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it. Cazart!
@Screen Name Football season is over.
It's like that scene in The Fifth Element, but instead of a blue squid diva there's a guy in a suit and he wants to sell your house to the Visigoths.
it's the holocaust of analogies.
But Choire he gets so angry and that makes us feel so gooooood.
Similes are, like, a crutch for a writer falling down the stairs.