You Can Pay for a Gay Escapade
Defunding the police, "Top Chef", the ideologies of social media, and more
Pay to Prey
America has, and has always had, a particular genius for self-obfuscation. It is only fitting that the most capitalist country in human history would quickly abandon its pretense of self-governance and hand the whole thing over to public relations; this, more than anything else, explains the existence of the pundit class.
A stellar example of this has floated to the rim of the toilet of discourse over the past week as people who are paid to explain why positive change is not possible dug their hooks into the phrase “defund the police”. As a primary demand arising from the insurgency against white supremacy, expressed through the medium of police brutality and in aid of the ongoing attempt to protect the vast wealth accumulated by cheap and plentiful labor, it would seem to be irreducibly simple; none of the words are complex or ambiguous, after all, and there are only three of them. And yet the talking heads and typing fingers of the opinion industry, whether on the right, left, or center, have been working overtime to convince their fellow citizens that there is something ‘confusing’ or ‘difficult’ about the demand, or that the phrase itself is so hard to wrap one’s head around that it undercuts what they assure us are the good intentions of the protestors, with whom, of course, they would wholeheartedly agree, if only they had chosen their words more carefully.
The reason for this is obvious, of course; these are people of status and property, mostly white, who owe their own good fortune to the exploitative system. Their wealth and prestige have come from defending capital, and they cannot be seen to be mistreating its guard dogs. Hence the attempt to pretend that a sentence so simple a middle-schooler could understand it is going to cause nothing but befuddlement to Mr. and Mrs. America.
Part of this stems from the fact that they correctly suspect that “defund” is adjacent to “dismantle” when it comes to the police, a concept they believe is as terrifying to us as it is to them. It isn’t, of course; most working people of all races can count on one finger the number of positive interactions they have had with the police and tend to think of them as neutral at best and malignant at worst. For them, the cops are the people who send their brothers to prison, their daughters to court to pay fines that mire them perpetually in debt, their sons to the morgue. It is the pundit class who believes the myth of the police as protectors of the innocent; they are the class that needs the cops to protect their property, that calls the cops to chase away bothersome drunks and vagrants, that understands the cops properly as a goon squad to keep the underclass at bay; it is this purpose in which the shockingly violent police riots of the last few weeks should be understood.
What is curious, though, from the viewpoint of the kind of class-ignorant political analysis that serves as the dominant form of ideological understanding in this country, is why so many self-identified liberal and leftist commentators are so leery around the phrase “defund the police”, and why they attempt, through the kind of linguistic alchemy that transforms brutal reality into genteel theory, to change it into “police reform” or “police reimagining” or “police reinvention”, as if they are talking about the reboot of an aging film franchise instead of the last-ditch attempt to defang an out-of-control state security agency before it falls into even more unaccountable hands. (It’s odd indeed that so many liberal observers make hay of calling Donald Trump an incipient fascist, but bristle at the suggestion of doing anything about the hundreds of potential Schutzstaffeln roaming around every major city in the country waiting for someone to point them in the right direction.)
Really, though, it’s not hard to figure why we’ve arrived at the current pass. America long ago decided to trade away every other conceivable value for money, and it never looked back. We have commodified everything; we have declared nothing—from the essential elements needed to live like food, water, shelter, and medicine, to the loftiest abstractions, like the concepts of privacy, personal integrity, public space, and bodily autonomy—to be immune to the influence of the marketplace. And once you’ve decided that the only thing that matters is money, you’ve also decided that money is the one thing that should never, ever be taken away. From those who already have it, anyway.
And so we see and hear gouts of toxic gas being released in every form of media about doing anything possible to control the uncontrollable cops except the one thing that would truly limit them: taking away some of their money. Citizen review boards? Sure; it doesn’t matter if they’re handpicked by governments for maximum lack of impact. New rules and regulations? Of course; it doesn’t matter that these already exist and are widely ignored. Sensitivity training? Absolutely; it doesn’t matter that cops joke about these the second they leave the room. More non-lethal weapons? Definitely; it doesn’t matter that the problem isn’t the ability to kill, but the intent to kill. Body cameras, better incident reporting, and other such technocratic fixes? Without a doubt; anything, indeed, as long as we get to keep deepening the real problem of making the police richer and richer, and thus more immune to any kind of real change.
We see this from the lowest levels of civic government, where police funding works as an efficient means of bribery and traffic of influence as does defense spending in the military, to the highest levels, where Joe Biden’s ‘solution’ to the police problem is to give them even more money, to the tune of an additional $300 billion they will use to build up their paramilitary potency, fund their impenetrable unions, and make themselves even more immune to consequence. There is absolutely nothing hard to understand about ‘defund the police’; it is the best first step towards breaking the ugly power of the cops. The only thing hard to understand is why anyone believes such a self-serving lie.
Cooking on Low
By the standards of reality television, Top Chef is a venerable institution by now, having dragged itself into a remarkable 17th season. It has spawned the usual spinoffs, retreads, and auxiliary products, including the forgiving Last Chance Kitchen (which played a major role in this year’s competition) and the deeply irritating What Would Tom Do?, the answer to which is always ‘wear a loud jacket and be kind of sexist’.
It’s hard to keep fresh after almost twenty years of the same basic concept, especially when you’re essentially an institution of your own, complete with branding and franchising. The cash prizes are getting bigger (a quarter of a million dollars for the winner, to be revealed this Thursday, and quickfire challenges with ever-escalating purses), and the show is getting a bit more gimmicky, with ever more product tie-ins and cross-promotional bullshit, while retaining the same basic format.
This year’s hook is an all-star edition, previously tried in season 8, with all the contestants having appeared in previous seasons. It was probably time for a shake-up given that the 2019 Top Chef was a serious dud, set in the unglamorous culinary demimonde of Kentucky and with the big prize going to the bland and hokey Kelsey Barnard Clark. But nobody likes an all-star game; in every sport they’re overindulgent excuses for the already-successful to fuck around for an audience with nothing invested in the outcome. The addition of a finale in Italy is a positive development, but otherwise, the season hasn’t generated much heat.
Part of this is due to the fact that we’ve seen all these people before, often more than once, and there’s none of the usual enjoyment of getting to know the competitors and determining over time who you love and who you love to hate. The most unlikable of the bunch, Joe Sasto, washed out in the first episode, and while Brian Malarkey stuck around until episode 11, he was always more irritating than unlikable. We already know all these people are extremely competent, so there wasn’t even really the chance for a huge rookie fuck-up, despite a few teases in that direction. The little drama still to be had stems from seeing who’s going to screw up least, which is enjoyable from a strict quality-of-product standpoint, but sadly lacking in drama—and since this isn’t a sport or a game with objective measures of achievement or victory, that lets a lot of the air out of the season.
Of the three finalists, the colorless and peevish Stephanie Cmar is the easiest to root against, but she’s managed to step up her game when faced with elimination. I like Bryan Voltaggio, whose brother edged him out for a win in season 6, for his pure competence and agreeable demeanor, but his lack of daring and tendency to play it safe is likely going to cost him the big prize, and he was memorably heart-punched for those very qualities by one of the Italian judges last week. For my money, the prohibitive favorite right now is Melissa King; after Kevin Gillespie, the likable but overconfident Southerner, took a tumble, she replaced him as the season’s winningest contestant and has been on an absolute tear ever since. Her clever Asian fusion approach and willingness to take huge risks that pan out (like last week’s use of prosciutto in an XO sauce) make her work stand out. She’s got a good personality that balances out her more predictable reality-show tendencies (I could go a lifetime without another person desperate to please a father who obviously doesn’t give a shit about them). I’m hoping for a win for her, but more than that, I’m hoping for a season 18 that goes lighter on the tricks and tries harder to find interesting new chefs.
YouTube is for the Children
Social media has been around long enough now to have developed personalities, ideologies, and generational relationships all its own. Facebook is sixteen years old, old enough to drive if it were a person, but in its characteristics more like an old man who shouldn’t be allowed to drive anymore but still insists on going to the store to buy pint bottles of Kentucky Gentleman. Its primary purpose has changed over time from a way for the aging horny population to track down their old high school crushes to a way for Russians to use spycraft to make people hate Hillary Clinton to a way for the police to exchange clunky memes about how ethnic teens are bad. Twitter, at fourteen, is typically rebellious and like most fourteen-year-olds, often behaves as if it has just read Nietzsche for the first time and not quite grasped his meaning. Tumblr at 13 is, predictably, a moody goth who spends most of its time sulking about how everyone has stopped paying attention to it. NextDoor is only twelve but its dedication to petit-bourgeois terror of minorities and disrespectful deliverymen puts Facebook to shame, while Instagram, only nine, still maintains a toddler’s fascination with pretty colors and a susceptibility to being influenced. I myself am 50, and like most 50-year-olds, there is no conceivable reason for me to hang around with 8-year-olds, so I have no intention of finding out what TikTok or Snapchat are.
This Week in the Eschaton
Links for today are predictably centered on police misconduct (or, properly understood, police conduct): Ramsin Canon, my friend and Chicago DSA comrade, writes about why cop unions are essentially distinct from other labor unions. Claire Downs brings the pain to “I Take Responsibility”, another showy, do-nothing celebrity display of how if whitey can’t play, there’s no goddamn game. At Hyperallergic, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar looks at the colonialist origins of the concept of looting. Here’s a transcript of an Intercepted podcast featuring Jeremy Scahill, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore making the case for police and prison abolition. And while agree with Donald Borenstein that he should out himself in order to make a stronger case, this alleged ex-police officer’s advice about what cops say and how you should respond to them should be printed and posted in every public place.