More Stupid Than Nature Made Them
Voting, "Ratched", crime, and more.
I voted today.
There’s nothing unusual about that; I’m fairly sure that I’ve voted in every election I was eligible to vote in since I turned 18. My first vote was in the 1988 presidential election, and I have never since failed to vote; I have cast a ballot for hundreds of judges, dozens of mayors, governors, and senators, and an uncountable number of local initiatives, amendments, and binding and non-binding resolutions. I am not the kind of person who needs to be lectured about how all politics are local, or about how every vote counts (hot tip: they absolutely do not), or about how important down-ballot races are. Despite being a communist since I was a teenager, I have taken my responsibility as a citizen to participate in electoral politics as seriously as they deserve to be taken.
This might come as a surprise to many of my liberal friends, who have spent the last six months (or four years, depending on how depressingly faithful they are to the Democratic Party) excoriating me for my laziness, entitlement, smugness, elitism, selfishness, and uncaring nature. Any of them who bothered to ask might learn that I have an unbroken record of doing my civic duty, and any of them who bothered to find out might learn that I spend the majority of my free time doing political organizing, often in very poor nonwhite communities. But part of the appeal of modern liberalism is assuming that you know better than everyone else about everything, including their own lives, so according the them, I am a selfish ungrateful punk who will be single-handedly responsible for Trump’s re-election and the ensuing misery.
The simple thing to do here would be to just post the “Hit those phones, libs!”, but I have never been one to take the easy way out. “The easy way out” is actually the best way to describe the liberals who spend their time being mad at me and everyone else who doesn’t vote the way they prefer; for the most part, their definition of politics is “voting for President every four years”, possibly including local elections and the odd donation to an already-bloated incumbent war chest from time to time. For them, the government is not a thing that is made up of people, but a more or less self-actuating machine that runs smoothly until a bad operators—someone with malicious intentions who deliberately throws a shoe into the gears, or someone to incompetent or ill-educated to know what levers to pull—sits down at the controls.
In fact, though, government is not a machine, but a collection of people, and it runs exactly as intended by those people. Most people, who are poor or struggling financially, do not perceive government as acting in their interests or performing functions that benefit them in any way, and so do not express much interest in who is at its controls; for some reason, this causes liberals to become angry and hurl invective at people who are merely behaving rationally according to their correct impressions of who is the primary beneficiary of government largesse. A better approach might be to question why the number of nonvoters has steadily increased as their party has moved further to the right, but self-analysis is not one of their strong suits.
Neither of the two parties who have constructed an electoral system designed to exclude everyone but themselves wants to fundamentally change the government. The Republicans want to shut down most of its functions to keep poor people desperate and weak while maintaining its power as a way to funnel money to the private sector, while the Democrats want to maintain it as a sort of technocratic public university for social experiments provided their people are placed in positions of management. Both are elitist at heart, in the sense that they both worship capital and believe the wealthy are their natural constituency; neither is especially fond of actual democracy, as the Republicans fear the empowerment of nonwhite minorities and the Democrats worry about the ascent of the rabble. Both are essentially laissez-faire and libertarian and do not believe that government has the responsibility (in the case of the G.O.P.) or the capability (in the case of the Democrats) to help working people; Republicans, when in power, steadfastly insist that the majority of the citizens they govern must make their own way, while Democrats, when in power, shrug and say they’d like to help, but there isn’t enough money, or change is too difficult, or the Republicans will block them, or they can’t risk offending the electorate with anything as radical as providing universal health care, free education, or mandatory family leave.
And here is where we reach the crux of it all. Despite their angry accusations of laziness and entitlement, it is really liberals who take government for granted, and who act as if their responsibility for how it operates are extremely minimal and limited to voting, which is the single option (“the choice is binary,” as they put it) granted to them by the system. They cannot seem to conceive of how political power can be wielded outside of electoral politics, or even outside of two-party electoral politics. Even in that system, they bristle at options: They seem offended by primaries, and turnout in primary elections has been steadily plummeting for over twenty years. I’ve lost count of the number of liberals who have assured me that they genuinely want the Democratic Party to move to the left, and that they would have loved Bernie Sanders to be its candidate; but if they showed up in their state primaries and voted for him, he would have been the nominee by a huge landslide. Most are happy to just assume the process will produce the best possible candidate (who must then be voted for lest the nation fall); in fact, as we have seen ad infinitum, it produces a series of disappointing, corrupt party hacks, timeservers, and seat-fillers whose primary qualification for office is having lived long enough.
The kind of political work that many leftists do – organizing in communities, reaching out to the disenfranchised and marginalized, aiding unions, pressuring ‘friendly’ politicians, pushing for systemic changes that the two big parties do not even discuss, and focusing on government entirely from a materialist, class-based perspective – seems to be entirely invisible to them, or at the very least, is work that should be done by well-educated, handsomely compensated people at NGOs and nonprofits. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and if you believe voting for president is the primary way of participating in government, you tend to think of anyone who does anything else as wasting their time. But if all you know about your car is how to work the gas pedal, you’re going to crash.
Speaking of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, I watched Ratched, the new Ryan Murphy-developed series giving us something we never imagined we needed: the Grand Guignol backstory of nurse Mildred Ratched, the heavy from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Though Murphy only developed the show and directed its first two episodes (it was created by one Evan Romansky), it bears almost all the hallmarks of his deeply weird body of work: a bizarrely over-the-top emotional tone, constant escalation of every situation, and an extremely selective historical revisionism. Like much of Murphy’s work, it has a generally strong cast and some arresting visuals, but the plot is such vivid nonsense that it’s hard to tell why anyone would possibly get invested in the narrative.
The historical aspects of Murphy’s work are always baffling. Representation is a major aspect of all of his projects, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but his determination to blur the lines of historical realities and aspirational acceptance leads to some bewildering choices. Anyone who watched the ludicrous Hollywood remembers its laughable premise that America was simultaneously so racist that it would burn crosses on the estates of Tinseltown’s elites, and so accepting that, in the late 1940s, they would immediately accept queer and black people if they made a good enough movie. Similarly, Ratched asks us to accept the fact that gay men and lesbians are so marginalized by society that they must hide out in lavender marriages – but that no one would be particularly scandalized at a lavender marriage between a black man and a white woman, even when the woman is the assistant to the governor of California.
The nonstop escalation of everything, even in what is a relatively shot season order, makes for some absolutely insane storytelling and characterization. It’s hard to tell who exactly Murphy and Romansky expect us to root for in this show; there isn’t anything remotely resembling an identification figure here, and everyone from the minor characters to the main protagonists is not just morally compromised, but basically monstrous. Why are we supposed to care about Mildred Ratched and her fateful romance with the aforementioned governor’s assistant when we’ve already seen that she’s an amoral creep who will do anything to further her (oddly low-stakes) ambitions? Why are we supposed to feel sorry about the horrible conditions under which she and her brother were raised when it turned them into maniacs without a single redeeming feature? Why should we have any emotional investment in these people when none of them have personalities, goals, or circumstances that are in any way relatable?
What’s worst, though, is that Ratched, even in the few moments when the performances manage to transcend the tawdry brutality of the absurd scripts, has no reason to exist. The Mildred Rarched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was relatable because she was, despite her brittleness, drive to control and punish, and cold manipulation, an easily identifiable human character, a martinet, a type that most people have encountered at one point or another in their lives. No one needed Mildred Ratched’s origin story; but we especially didn’t need it to be littered with serial killers, incestuous rapists, drug-addled mini-Mengeles, and deformed brutes. It’s similar to the equally misguided Bates Motel; it’s gilding the lily (or, more accurately, soaking a grave in blood. Taking a character that’s already an effective and efficient terror and giving her the most extreme, violent, vicious background imaginable doesn’t make her more interesting; it makes her less so. This is the kind of show that never would have been made before streaming media and its bottomless need for constant content; it should have stayed that way.
Crime is perennially at the top of polls regarding what voters worry about the most. With the upsurge in terrorism, the advent of cyber-crime, and organized crime taking on a new international flavor, people are not only concerned about crime, but they seem to have new ones to worry about all the time. But amongst all the darkness, there is a ray of light and hope: recently disclosed reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation reveal that while criminals are constantly on the prowl for new activities, some crimes have been so successfully prosecuted that they’ve made what the FBI is calling the ‘extinct crimes list’. Here are just a few.
1. REGICIDE. King-killing was already on the decline, with a mere eight in the entire 20th century; that trend has continued into the 21st, with only King Birenda of Nepal slipping through the cracks. Thanks to law enforcement vigilance, royalty has never been more safe.
2. IMPRESSMENT. As the pressing of American sailors into service of the British Royal Navy was a major factor in the tensions leading up to the War of 1812, the crime of forcing people to serve against their will in the armed forces may stand as the only one ever eliminated by a war.
3. SIMONY. Similarly, the buying and selling of indulgences, having been invented by the Catholic Church, remains the sole sin ever completely eradicated by the Catholic Church. Good lookin’ out, Popes.
4. HIGHWAY ROBBERY. Although largely eliminated in its armed-horseman-robbing-coachmen-of-their-goods variety, it remains a persistent problem in its paying-three-bucks-for-a-jumbo-Slim-Jim-at-a-Flying-V-station variety.
5. LÈSE MAJESTÉ. This crime disappeared completely along with the death of the last remaining public official with a sense of decency, somewhere around 1945.
6. RAPE. Though it’s still considered a problem in many Third World nations, our Republican Party is working hard to make sure it’s not a big deal here in America anymore.
7. SLAVE ABUSE. Similarly, by abolishing slavery, Abraham Lincoln single-handedly wiped out the grim perils of slave abuse, and turned it into worker abuse, which is punishable by a fine at worst. The re-emergence of slavery in the form of the sex trade doesn’t count because you can’t rape a whore.
8. MISPRISION, PRAMUNIRE FACIAS & CRIMINAL CONVERSION. All three of these were stricken from the criminal codes when, during a 1979 FBI conference, no one could adequately explain what any of them were.
9. DRESSING UP IN A BLACK CLOAK AND HAT, GROWING A HANDLEBAR MUSTACHE, AND TYING A YOUNG WOMAN TO TRAIN TRACKS. This is still technically illegal, but thanks largely to a shrinking dependence on commuter rail travel, it is almost never committed.
10. CHICKEN THEFT. Thanks to tireless efforts by the law enforcement community to get the word out that chickens are in great supply and that there is, consequently, no market whatsoever for black market chickens, chicken theft rates are down an astonishing 280,000% in this century.
This week’s links: game designer Kenneth Hite discusses The Fall of Delta Green and the similarity of mystics and spooks; Chicago alderman Carlos Rosa argues that socialism won this week’s presidential debate; Jon Bois speculates about the (far) future of college football; Gene Weingarten demolishes Errol Morris’ book on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case (currently the subject of an FX documentary); and yours truly reviews Kent State, Derf Backderf’s graphic novel about the 50-year-old college shooting.