A Vague Hope of Finding Advantage
Bad-faith actors and how to spot them; "Kajillionaire"; Ronald Reagan's anecdotes; and more.
One of 2020’s great losses, and there were many, was that of the brilliant magician, insightful skeptic, and unparalleled debunker of nonsense James Randi. When he first contrived to introduce deliberate frauds into laboratories where scientific experiments on parapsychology were being conducted, he encountered great resistance and criticism from the community. He defended himself by noting that scientists operate under a sort of naïveté, an innocence in which, for all their knowledge and expertise, they are easily deceived simply because they do not expect to be deceived. Randi believed that all scientific inquiries into the nature of the paranormal should involve people like him – conjurers, confidence tricksters, professional liars – for the very reason that they are trained in what scientists are not: the ability to sniff out falsehood and trickery from those who, for whatever reason (and knowingly or not), are trying to game the system.
So, too, it often is on the left. We know all too well that the difference between a citizen and a criminal is an arbitrary and often meaningless one. We know that living under capitalism trains us to distrust and accustoms us to deceit. We know that policing is a brutal, racist endeavor that serves less to ensure public safety than it does to ensure the compliance of the underclass through violence and injustice. We know that our society blurs the lines between being a crook and merely being poor, and that it forces many of the latter into becoming the former through desperation and cruelty. We know that the bosses make illegal whatever they do not control, and they make legal any crime that will be of benefit to them. There is no political formation more trusting, because we truly believe in the decency and honesty – the perfectibility – of humankind. And trust in one’s comrades is vital! We can never win until we learn to throw off the cloak of distrust and paranoia that capital’s constant competition instills in us.
But there is a peripheral effect of this kind of openness, trust, and belief in our fellow man. It makes us vulnerable. It makes us susceptible to the kind of practiced deceit that our enemies engage in as a matter of course. In short, it makes us easy prey to bad actors, because it is intrinsic to the whole socialist project that we show good faith and have confidence and trust in our comrades. It is one of the great ironies of politics that this is both a key to our victory and an instrument of our defeat, but it is also a historical truth the plays itself out time and time again. Like Randi’s scientists, we are fooled not because we are stupid or weak or lacking in knowledge; we are fooled because we do not expect to be fooled.
This tragic dynamic is a matter of record in revolutionary politics. Our trust has been repaid over and over with betrayal. While it seems to take a different form with every generation of organizers, the presence of grifters, frauds, and finks is a near constant; the left finds itself fighting the same battles every few decades against the same enemies: predators, frauds, turncoats, finks, and egotists. There’s no need to rehash the constancy of informers in our spaces, which has been as eternal a quality as exists in liberation movements. The specific details of what motivates these wreckers and phonies varies over time and place, but until we achieve our aims, they will always be with us, always pulling some new hustle, always drawing the shades in front of our eyes, always selling us out to whoever is buying.
It’s for this reason that it can be useful to develop a very particular resource: the experienced criminal. Rarely respectable and often marginalized, they are still to be found everywhere on the left, because many of the people who have truly seen what it’s like to be on the wrong side of the law – to suffer police brutality, to be unjustly accused, to spend time in the nightmare world of jails and prisons – are drawn to organizations who want to remove those ugly realities from existence. Such people, too, do not share the same qualities, the same motivations, or the same characteristic details as any other left cohort, but they possess one extremely valuable skill: they can spot their own. Because a con knows better than to believe everything she hears just because it comes out of the mouth of someone saying the right words in the right way, she is less easy to con herself. Because a grifter understands how easy it is for someone with bad intentions to prey on someone with good intentions, he is not as easy to prey upon. They know the game because they have played the game.
We may not want to elevate such people to leadership in our organizations, but we ignore them at our peril. They know things other people don’t: they know that the truest believers are the most likely to defect to another belief if they can be convinced that it’s true. They know that addictions and obsessions are a greater master than any boss. They know how cops will exploit any weakness and make any threat if they’re on the outside of something and need to buy a presence on the inside of it. They know that being downtrodden and oppressed confers no particular moral quality on the sufferer. They know that abusers and creeps hide in plain sight by simply reminding us how much chaos will rain down if they’re ever caught. And they know that if you’ll snitch for free if it gives you some advantage or influence, you’ll sure as shit snitch for money when money comes calling.
These are not decent or noble things to know, because they show us our own fragility, and they remind us of how far away we are from that perfect world where trust need not be earned and there is no reason to be suspicious of a stranger. But they are useful things to know, because the swindlers and smoke-blowers, the brand-builders and splitters, are already inside the house. We let them in, and we gain nothing by pretending they aren’t here while they prepare to dynamite the foundations. It is not pleasant to understand the nature of our enemies, but it is necessary; and after such understanding, what forgiveness?
Cinema, as a going concern, took a pretty massive nosedive in 2020, as did, well, just about everything else. Perhaps no other industry took such a brutal beating from COVID-19; theaters both large and small teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, filming on major releases was delayed, festivals were canceled, and the ability to access streaming media – and only streaming media – conspired with all those other factors to threaten the whole idea of going out to the movies, one of my very favorite things to do. (Not that I’ve done it. Despite it being one of the purest pleasures in existence, I’d rather eat poison than go to the movies right now.)
It’s also not been a great year for movies in general. Sure, the massive disruption of every aspect of life by the pandemic played hell with making films, but a lot of hotly anticipated releases have turned out to be massive duds. Hillbilly Elegy was as bad as its source material; Music was a misbegotten mess; Wild Mountain Thyme was a muddled effort with a bizarrely out-of-place concept from an otherwise reliable director; and Malcolm & Marie is just an utter failure that should never have been made. (I’m still holding out hopes that its politics won’t be a complete disaster, but I have a huge sense of dread about the upcoming biopic Judas and the Black Messiah; can you imagine what Fred Hampton would have thought about that title?)
One of the few bright spots on the film calendar for me was Miranda July’s quirky, meandering psychological crime flick Kajillionaire. It had the bad luck to premiere at Sundance early in 2020, before the widespread COVID-19 lockdowns; it ended up being lost in the general confusion of the industry for almost a year before securing a streaming deal in late October of last year. July is one of the most divisive figures in the American arts scene; talented across a wide range of media but extremely precious in an easily mockable way, she creates work – visual art, film, music, and literature – that truly defines the concept of ‘love it or hate it’. There are no neutrals about Miranda July, and I wouldn’t dream of convincing anyone who has the familiar visceral ugh reaction to her work to reconsider. But if you have even a hint of goodwill towards the provocative, unpredictable, and, yes, extremely self-reflexive nature of her work, you may agree with me that Kajillionaire is a work of rare beauty and maybe of genius.
The plot revolves around a socially awkward young woman named Old Dolio (an otherworldly and nearly unrecognizable Evan Rachel Wood), whose parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger, both tremendous) are dropouts and small-time grifters who raised her to be an accomplice rather than a daughter, and who are forever on the make for some penny-ante scam or another. In the course of perpetrating an airline ticket con, the family meets Melanie Whitacre (a terrific Gina Rodriguez), and their whole creepy dynamic is thrown into disarray. By turns, it’s a goofy piece of whimsy, a sharp and surprising comedy, a tender love story, and an utterly dysfunctional family drama, and it keeps you guessing until its final scene, taking a number of very unexpected turns along the way. It’s easy to stereotype July’s artsy mannerisms and idiosyncratic touches, but it’s been a long time since a movie kept me guessing as much as Kajillionaire did. It may not be your particular cup of tea, but it doesn’t taste like anything else out there, and is the best of an unexpectedly bad crop.
This week, America celebrated the 110th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Wilson Reagan, one of America’s shittiest presidents and a national disgrace that the Democratic Party has been inexplicably bullied and shamed into pretending was a great national leader. Reagan, who was a direct precedent of the allegedly unprecedented Donald Trump in many ways (coming from the entertainment industry, being extremely old and stupid, providing cover for a gaggle of bilkers and frauds to get rich running the country into the ground), would have made the following joke, had he lived to see the day and somehow reversed the senile dementia that consumed his brain from his mid-50s on: “It’s just the 72nd anniversary of my 39th birthday.”
Hilarious, I know. That’s the sophisticated charm that won the hearts of millions of dipshits. How do I know he would have told this joke? Because Reagan, a consummate showman of the old school by which I mean he incessantly repeated every single gag and gimmick his people could come up with, told that same joke every birthday every year he was in the White House. It wasn’t his only go-to bit; he had an arsenal of others. Do you think it’s funny to hear someone respond to the publication of something that makes them look bad by saying “I don’t read fiction”? Then you would have loved Ronald Reagan, who said this roughly one billion times. Are you drawn to the edge of your seat by the story of a grown man cutting his finger while trying to carve a turkey? Then you would have been thrilled by Ronald Reagan, who told this joke literally every Thanksgiving for eight years. Do you think it’s a sick burn on the commies to point out that the Russian language does not have a word for “freedom”? Then laugh it up with Ronald Reagan, who demonstrated over and over again in front of cameras that he was unaware of the word “svoboda”.
Why am I mentioning all this? For one reason only: Another one of Reagan’s unbelievably tedious go-to anecdotes was to tell reporters that he sometimes felt isolated in the White House, and wished he could “just walk down the street to the corner drugstore and look at the magazines. I can’t do that anymore.” The phrasing is not memorable, and the story is as dull as the Reader’s Digests he no doubt used to peruse, but I always remember it, because to my personal knowledge, he told this story at least five times. And the hell of it is, as we enter our first full year of coping with coronavirus, I can relate! I do miss walking down to the corner drugstore to look at magazines, God damn it! I’ve been expected to put up with an awful lot as we cope with this deadly plague, but I never thought even COVID-19 would make me agree with Ronald Reagan.
This week’s links: Micah Uetricht delivers a powerful summary of the stellar career of leftist writer Mike Davis; Time looks at innovative chef Ángel León’s attempt to harvest rice from the sea as ocean levels rise; Dan O’Sullivan on how corporate capitalism has co-opted organized crime; the Washingtonian goes deep on the racial hustle of Jessica “Jess La Bombalera” Krug; and the New Yorker examines the rise and fall of “the QAnon candidate”, Marjorie Taylor Greene.