A literary contrarian, cast from the same mould as Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Ken Kinsey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Kirn is a highly successful novelist and screenwriter. With degrees from both Princeton and Oxford, the man is whip-smart.
Not that he flaunts his credentials; as a born-and-bred Midwesterner he cleaves to the same egalitarian ideals that we New Zealanders still like to think we cherish.
Oh, and the guy is funny — laugh out loud funny.
New Jersey-born Taibbi won his journalistic spurs in Boris Yeltsin’s Moscow where he and a friend published The eXile, a no-holds-barred investigative magazine. What was already a risky proposition in Yeltsin’s kleptocracy very quickly became a life-threatening proposition as Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism hardened.
It was time to go. Taibbi returned to the States and a job at Rolling Stone magazine.
In short, Kirn and Taibbi were the sort of guys a person like me would crawl over broken glass to share a beer with.
Until this week.
This was the week that masked Border Patrol officers pumped 10 rounds into the prone body of Alex Pretti.
This 37-year-old ICU nurse had stepped forward to assist a woman who had just been sent sprawling on to an icy Minneapolis pavement by Kristi Noem’s Homeland Security paramilitaries.
Watching the multiple video captures of Pretti’s murder, I couldn’t help recalling the one and only time I was arrested.
It happened here in Dunedin during the 1981 Springbok Tour. I, too, had stepped forward to assist a woman who had been pushed and fallen hard on the pavement.
But since this was Muldoon’s New Zealand, not Trump’s America, all I got was a few hours in the cells. New Zealand cops don’t shoot their fellow citizens for ‘‘obstructing a carriageway’’.
I tuned in to America This Week on Tuesday morning, eager to hear Matt and Walter’s rage at the second federally sanctioned killing of a protester in the space of a fortnight.
That was not what I observed.
A clearly distraught Taibbi was attempting to persuade his stony-faced co-host that what had happened to Pretti wasn’t just a crime, it was a mistake. That the Trump administration’s defence of the indefensible was causing it to haemorrhage public support.
But Kirn wasn’t buying it. He seemed a different person.
Coldly, without pity, he ran interference for Trump’s immigration policies, faithfully repeating the administration’s talking points: the state of Minnesota was refusing to co-operate with federal law enforcement; citizens were being encouraged by Democratic Party politicians to resist Ice agents; Pretti was where he shouldn’t have been; he was carrying a weapon; what did he think would happen when all those factors came together on the angry streets of Minneapolis?
Kirn had crossed a line. Refusing to buy into the Democratic Party’s elitist virtue-signalling; standing proudly in defence of the Second Amendment; calling out all those who would cancel, censor and shout down the opinions of others — that was one thing.
But mounting a case for state-sanctioned killing, that was something else entirely. Kirn’s Maga cap had tightened like a vice around his brain; he had become a different man.
That Taibbi had reached the same conclusion was written all over his face. In the next few days and weeks I would not be the least bit surprised to discover that the Taibbi-Kirn partnership has been dissolved.
It reminded me of the scene from The Sound of Music when the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, ‘‘going-on-17’’ boyfriend turns into a fanatical Nazi stormtrooper.
Suddenly all the children fall silent, and the hills are alive with the sound of marching music.
Nietzsche said it best: ‘‘Have a care when fighting monsters, lest ye become a monster yourself’’.
Kirn’s behaviour was certainly monstrous. Somewhere in the dark watches of the night he had completed the journey from contrarian to authoritarian.
He wouldn’t be the first boomer to cross that bitter river, but he’s the last man I would have expected to pay the fascist ferryman.
A sad day for boomers.
A proud day for generation X.
■Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
