April 19, 2025

A Nation of Marks

I became an American my freshman year of high school.

One day I woke up a Spanish citizen and went to sleep a US citizen. It has never been an easy sleep.

A year into my American-ness, I wrote a piece of commentary about how Americans were lazy and ignorant.

The teacher I idolized didn’t think much of it. Was I wrong?

Ten years later, a fellow Regian described Americans at the turn of the 20th century as being:

persuaded that their success was owed to their perspicacity, rather than to luck or general trends… Good fortune can lead to the sense that one stands above the common clutter, that one can’t lose, that one’s prosperity can’t help but benefit the rest of society.¹

Con men know how to spot vain idiots, how to gas them up and then take them to the cleaners.

Ours is a nation of marks:

The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp…

The overall picture is a standard one: Come in, take over the data and financial architecture; discredit it by having your media arms dish out mountains of phony stories about fraud and abuse; fire all the employees and hand a cash-drenched, sweetheart contract to yours and your friends company.

Or maybe it’s a start up, which has already raised about $2 billion from the likes of Peter Thiel and the Kushner family, among others, and thus needs a pretty big exit. … And I suspect that’s just a prelude to a vastly bigger prize: contracts to manage payments of the more than $1.5 trillion that goes to Social Security recipients and likely other government programs that disperse money directly to individuals.

Once Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite president had killed off the Native Americans, the immigrants and criminals and loons who settled this geologically fertile continent, naturally protected by oceans, were able to put the Peter principle to Practice – At Scale.

The one blessing this nation has had is its “original sin”: built with chattel slavery, it has been African Americans, or Black people, who have forced the USA to actually deliver on its founding principles.

That Barack Obama taunted Donald Trump is a matter of public record. That Trump and the GOP then questioned whether or not Obama was actually an American is also a matter of public record.

This is how the GOP treated America’s first Black president:

America’s elite looked the other way at this foundational rot. Why?

Because they’re soft and lazy.

“Wow, you don’t have an accent.”

Let me tell you this straight and square.

All of my life as an American, people in positions of power have told me, to my face, how surprised they are at how smart I am.

Now, why?

Why the surprise?

LOL.

My not fully American self is a threat to the tacit understanding that American born white people made this country great and should be given every benefit of the doubt, while outsiders such as myself, let alone people who are not white — as I very much am – will be judged by the footnoted letter of the law.

Or not. Just ask Leonard Leo what the law is this week.

Forgive me for quoting Josh Marshall twice in one newsletter but he really nailed it here:

Trump is hungry to walk through this door of lawless autocracy. But it is the conservative legal movement, embodied in the Federalist Society, organized by Leonard Leo and others, who opened the door. They manufactured the fraudulent idea that presidents cannot be constrained by the law. They imported it from abroad, from the degenerate ideologues of autocracy. They did this.

About 9 years ago I reached out to a high school classmate who made a living socializing with the SCOTUS society. I asked him: don’t you realize what’s happening?

Apparently not.

I was exaggerating. It’s complicated. It’s nuanced.

LOL.

The thing about most Americans, which many of them are now beginning to understand, is they’ve had it so good for so long, they can’t be bothered to risk much. Let alone risk it all.

Recall the 2024 election postmortems and all the focus on “BLACK MEN VOTING FOR TRUMP” "and “LATINOS SHIFT TO THE RIGHT”.

Motherfuckers, look in the mirror. You did this to yourselves.

My apologies for the intemperate words.

I’m sure everything will work out just fine.

We just need to be more centrist, less woke.

We need to reach across the aisle. And tighten our own noose.

At the movies

For the last two weeks I’ve been thrown into moments of sheer panic at realizing just how depraved American elites are, just how ignorant and indolent the average Joe.

To soothe myself, I’ve been watching movies in the best way possible at 12am and 2am and 4am: using our lovely app Theater on the Apple Vision Pro.

Here are three of my favorites.

1) At three hours and 45 minutes, Lawrence of Arabia is a lavish and thoroughly gay epic set against the backdrop of British colonialism.

It’s better than its legendary status. A tragedy in the classical sense. 10 out of 10.

(Americans were temporarily knocked out of their stupor by traveling “Over There”, and this movie is material evidence of the great good it did us. Abu Ghraib? Not so much.)

2) Fritz Lang emigrated to the US in 1934 and became a US citizen in 1935. In 1953 he directed “The Big Heat”, a precise and honest account of a cop who takes on a corrupted state. The hero is aided by a both a “cripple” and a group of veterans.

3) My final recommendation is the “chick flick” Valley of the Dolls, the movie adaptation of the best selling book of 1966.

The critics trashed the novel and the movie. I’ve not read the former but I can tell you a little bit about the latter.

Is it camp? Yes. It is greater than the sum of its parts? Yes. Is camp itself a high art form? Of course it is.

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

The outsider is “that dangerous supplement”.

For as long as I’ve been an American I’ve had to suffer very nice people tell me that my lying eyes were wrong. As a result, I habitually assume the conventional wisdom is wrong. It’s exhausting. But it’s been of instrumental value.

It was expected that I would wait outside. So I could never fall asleep. Thank the fucking Lord. Who, as it happens, awakens us all this Sunday, for those who so choose to believe.

Happy easter.