to praise infamous men
It’s possible for a society’s death drive to get the better of it.
For enough people to reject this world and choose the fantasy of its inverse.
For enough people to insist that their Reality TV king come to life.
Such a suicidal tendency is an age-old problem.
What is new, however, is our attention economy and how it aids and abets such disastrous nihilism.
My Hollywood Years
My first corporate job was in 2006 when I was hired to create something of a digital business for a cable TV channel.
It was my first direct experience working within a large corporation.
On the one hand, I greatly enjoyed and appreciate having been in the room (albeit a massive hall) when General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt addressed his fellow employees to assure us that he had been in contact with the US Treasury and the company would have the liquidity to survive the bubble burst now known as the Great Recession.
On the other hand, not five days after I joined the company in the Spring of 2006, I had to shelf the YouTube account I had just created for the cable network because Jeff Zucker, and perhaps his direct reports, had decided YouTube would be bad for NBCUniversal’s business.
The same Jeff Zucker had ushered The Apprentice, a show about a washed up real estate mogul in New York City with a public history of financial, legal and sexual misconduct. In exchange for ad dollars, many people were paid very well to falsely portray this man as a competent executive.
“Who could have known?” is to punt the question at hand.
“Who do we celebrate?”
In economics, the charitable description of a business that launders the reputation of liars and cheats is one that suffers from perverse incentives.
But the rot I am describing is far more pervasive than one company’s dubious programming choices.
Les Moonves, the former head of CBS, publicly confessed that pretending Donald Trump is not a degenerate “might not be good for America but it’s damn good” for his compensation package (a function of the company’s profits.)
You, dear reader, may choose to connect the dots between Moonves’ betrayal of his own country to his final days at CBS: he resigned after news emerged that he had abused his position of power to sexually harass, abuse and assault colleagues.
You might deduce that the problem is so-called “Hollywood”, a business that is as much run out of NYC as the westside of Los Angeles.
I wish that it were so. But that has not been my experience.
Not too many years ago, when I was hired by the board of directors of a media company, at the behest of its new private equity owners, I had the opportunity to work directly with the financial industry professionals who manage the commanding heights of the American economy.
The bankers I know personally and professionally are almost monk-like, having ascended to a higher plane that, at best, makes them disinterested participants in our shared reality. But it may well be that the air is thinner in their monasteries.
In 2021, I sat opposite a banker who bristled when I called Elon Musk an asshole.
“Oh, do you know him personally?” he asked, hoping to point out the error of my ways.
History will absolve me.
As a Cuban refugee, I have inherited a very dark sense of humor about what is possible.
Just now I reclaimed the title of Fidel Castro’s essay, “History will absolve me,” to make my point about Mr. Musk and the legions of well-educated men, and women, who empowered him, every step of the way. (Because they thought, perhaps correctly, that they would be rewarded for following in his footsteps.)
But I am now an American, and ours is a country with an even richer tradition of absolutely putrid humor; aka, gallows humor; the jokes you tell over the sounds of screams, when you smell decomposing bodies.
And so I can also quote William Barr, a perfect American monster who now, now, has words for his former liege. When asked by CBS News if he was worried about tarnishing his reputation in service of the former reality TV star Barr responded:
“Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”
If I may summarize my compatriot: “Everyone dies. There are no heroes.”
That is the America I have come to know well.
That is the America that I believe is perfectly captured in the novel Blood Meridian.
That is the America that lurched into a series of “misadventures” in the Middle East because it could; that took the bait it was served on a platter by a Saudi-born terrorist.
That is the America that looked the other way when Cuban democracy faltered and sputtered for a full decade and a half before Fidel Castro came to power.
A lot of ink will be spilled electrons will be moved over the “low information voters”, the “voters with false consciousness” who are bringing this country to the brink of absolute ruin, following the footsteps of so many great empires before it.
But it’s the people who know better we should blame.