From Russia With Malice

Sean McMeekin from the January 2001 issue

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The argument animating the pair's shared outrage over American anti-drug propaganda may be somewhat difficult for those who never experienced the decadence of 1990s Moscow to follow, but it goes roughly like this: Communist Russia may have lost the ideological battle, but her resilient losers, far from becoming productive clones of workaholic, pleasure-deferring Americans, have instead tumbled into self-destructive orgies of sensual satisfaction. From its macabre mafia violence to its innumerable dens of debauch, Moscow is not for the faint of heart. Once-unobtainable drugs such as cocaine have been taken up with the same exuberance Russians have always displayed while downing vodka. Previously unknown holidays with party-going potential, such as Halloween and Valentine's Day, have been embraced one after another with almost ludicrous abandon. Ames and Taibbi defend their beloved hedonistic turf against those imperious avatars of cultural correctness, from the World Bank to President Putin, who are trying to tame it.

Though Ames and Taibbi are often explicitly anti-American, there is something uncannily American about their mixture of brutal intellectual kickboxing and shameless self-promotion. Instinctively they must realize that only the America they love to hate has ever really enjoyed the unabashed freedom of expression they continually abuse with malicious glee. That they venture so far beyond the pale of public decency should be seen as a sign of their desperation over what they consider America's increasingly rigid orthodoxies.

Ames and Taibbi often remark that their paper would be shut down in a minute if it were published in New York or Washington, if not for unlawful slander then by armies of enraged feminists, anti-obscenity activists, and sexual harassment lawyers. In light of the heat generated by the eXile just among the expatriate community of Americans in Moscow--where the editors have repeatedly endured blackmail, petition drives to boycott the paper's advertisers, and even death threats--such a scenario is not hard to imagine.

In Moscow, by contrast, Ames and Taibbi are free to go on smearing rhetorical mud pies over the Clintonian New World Order. Fleeing the unwritten speech codes of their native America, Ames and Taibbi have found a First Amendment haven in the former capital city of International Communism, of all places. Small wonder, then, that their rhetoric is so extreme. Only by shouting fire in a crowded theater, the eXile would have us believe, is it possible to wake up the numbed, complacent citizens of our once-vaunted democracy.

Whether or not Ames and Taibbi are justified in this bleak assessment of American civic life, their explosive new book is sure to stampede its way into the argument one way or another. And for politically incorrect Americans longing for an antidote to the bland, unquestioning triumphalism of our current national consensus, I have a feeling the eXile will go down like an ice-cold glass of lemonade--laced with vodka and a melange of potent narcotics--on an unbearably humid summer day.