I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined)

  So this is something to remember: The talking matters almost as much as the fucking (and sometimes more).

  In 2012, Greil Marcus was interviewed at length by Simon Reynolds, originally for an article in the Guardian but ultimately for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Marcus and Reynolds remain significant pop critics, but neither regularly writes about the straightforward sound of music anymore (or at least not in a conventional, blurb-o-centric context). They mostly write about cultural politics, and sometimes just politics. Marcus is the most academically respected rock writer of the twentieth century. His opinions are concurrently predictable and inventive: His values are exactly what you’d expect from someone who studied political science at Berkley during the 1960s, but they’re delivered through a dense, wide-lens model that’s totally unique to him. The postmodern political figure Marcus hates most is Ronald Reagan. The postmodern political figure he seems to appreciate the most — despite some internal confliction — is Bill Clinton. Here’s something he said to Reynolds in that interview:

  For all of [Clinton’s] failings, the way he put all that he’d done that was good in jeopardy and allowed his enemies to derail his presidency by fucking around with Monica Lewinsky . . . the way he just blew it, saying “Fuck it — I want this,” which is very human. For all of his awful compromises and the terrible decisions he made, I really like Bill Clinton. I supported him wholeheartedly from beginning to end. And he made me proud to be part of this country.

  On the surface, this is pretty straightforward: An intellectual born in 1945 supports a liberal president despite that president’s personal failings. You can see the struggle inside Marcus’s brain, but you also see his rationalization and his larger point. It’s a succinct summation of how most pro-Clinton partisans have emotively decided to remember his two terms in office. But it’s still weird. It’s weird that within this five-sided dilemma — within the human pentagon of Bill, Hillary, Lewinsky, Tripp, and Starr — the person who is perceived the least negatively is the person who was the most irrefutably immoral.

  Let’s consider the other four players involved. What, exactly, did Monica Lewinsky do wrong? Well, she knowingly had oral sex with a married man, and she lied about it. But she was unmarried, very young, and operating from a powerless position. Yet people still hated her and joked about the size of her ass. What did Hillary do wrong? Absolutely nothing — but the takeaway was still damaging to her iconography. [There’s a scene from the third season of The Sopranos in which Edie Falco and three of her friends discuss Hillary in 2001, ultimately concluding that, “She’s a role model for all of us.” This seems like a compliment until you realize that “us” constitutes four unhappy women who are trapped in relationships with philandering criminals.] What did Kenneth Starr do wrong? He did his job so aggressively that it seemed unfair and driven by bias, which it was. His obituary will describe him as a weasel. Linda Tripp? She pretended to be Monica’s friend, taped private phone conversations, deceived those who trusted her, held grudges, and literally looked like a witch (which, I must add, was not her fault). Tripp is the most classically vilified of the five involved parties — she was both the catalyst and the least personally involved. [Here again, we see the bottom line: A villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least.] Even on the far right she has few defenders. Betraying a friend is hard to forgive, but feigning friendship for the sole purpose of betrayal is basically unforgivable.

  This leaves us with Bill Clinton, a man who did many things wrong. He cheated on his wife. He cheated on his wife with a subordinate and used his power as collateral. He cheated on his wife (with a subordinate) and lied about it to almost everyone on the planet. He cheated on his wife (with a subordinate), lied to everyone, and did so while serving as leader of the world’s only superpower. He cheated on his wife (with a subordinate), lied about it, diminished the presidency, and actively convinced a much younger person to fall in love with him while having no intention of ever reciprocating the feeling. Even within the illicit relationship, he was sexually selfish. The magnitude of his recklessness is almost unfathomable — the biggest political scandal of the nineties could have been completely avoided if he’d just disappeared into his bedroom for ten minutes and masturbated. It’s hard to imagine a more self-destructive decision from a person whose decisions matter so much. And yet . . . Bill Clinton is not the villain here. I mean, he is the villain, but no one feels that way unless forced to somehow describe why (or how) he should be viewed in any other context. His defining failure did not define him. There are a handful on the extreme Left who despise Bill Clinton, but that’s because he made economic compromises; there are many on the Right who will hate him forever, but they felt that way in 1993. Bill Clinton got away with cheating on his wife for fleeting, one-sided gratification. There is no disputing this. By the time he spoke at the 2012 DNC convention his Gallup approval rating was 63 percent with women.

  Now, to a certain kind of reader, the explanation as to why we ultimately don’t care that Bill Clinton put the country at risk in exchange for a dozen loveless blow jobs is obvious and easy: “It is because he is a man, and there’s an engrained double standard that allows men to behave in this manner.” It’s hard to discount that argument, although I guess I (kind of) do. It was a factor, but certainly not the central factor. It mattered that he was a man, but it mattered more that he was a handsome man. And it mattered even more that he was a handsome man who never, ever spoke about what actually happened.

  America is a looks-based, superficial society. Everyone accepts this, and only the naïve disagree. Yet we still (somehow) underrate its cultural persuasion. Physical appearance is the most important element of almost every human interaction we have (not the only element, but the one that is most fundamental and expansive). One of my deepest fears about democracy is that — for the rest of my life — presidential elections will be dominated by whichever candidate is more conventionally attractive (in the last six presidential elections, the younger candidate has won five times, a stark contrast to the historical record). This is the knowable consequence of a mediated universe. We have a black president, and we could easily have a female president; I think we could have a black female president, if Oprah Winfrey got into politics. But could there ever be a dwarf president? No way. Tyrion Lannister couldn’t carry New Hampshire. Could a modern-day Thomas Jefferson win a primary if he also had a severe skull deformity? Nay. Such a scenario will not happen in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of this book. And remember — the presidency is (normally) a totally nonsexual job. It’s a situation in which there’s no biological imperative to gravitate toward the more attractive candidate. It’s not difficult to project the unconscious impact the president’s charisma and appearance had in a scenario that actually was about sex. It mattered way more than logic, and it was amplified by something else that mattered almost as much: Clinton, a man who never seemed able to stop talking about anything, remained forever silent about the only thing everyone wanted to know.

  Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, is 1,056 pages long. Within those 1,056 pages, the word Lewinsky is mentioned seventeen times (nineteen if you include the index). By comparison, the word football is somehow used thirty-five times. He fleetingly references Lewinsky like a policy problem that’s too complicated for any layperson to comprehend; if an alien attempted to understand who Lewinsky was from everything Bill Clinton said or wrote about her, the extent of the alien’s data would be that Monica was, in fact, a woman. It has become clear that this situation is something he is simply never going to explain. We will never know his personal view of the events. Most of the other parties have caved. Monica talked on HBO (in the documentary Monica in Black and White, she allowed an audience of strangers to ask how she felt about being “America’s blow job queen”). Tripp talked to Ken Starr, and Ken Starr talked to everybody. Hillary would talk if she had anything to say. But Bill Clinton talked to no one, and that
saved him. Either by accident or to his credit, he understood the awkward paradox of human sexuality: Everyone’s obsessed with it, but no one wants to hear about it. All it does is make them hate you.

  As I type this essay, I find myself dwelling on two specific memories, both of which seem as if they should be reconstituted into some kind of symbolic conclusion. But whenever I try to make this happen, I realize they are only connected because of me.

  Still, I have no way around this. There is no way around myself unless I become somebody else.

  The first memory is a phone call from 1998. I was working at a newspaper, avoiding whatever it was I was being paid to do. I was killing time on the telephone with an outspoken Democrat I barely knew; she was expressing histrionic disappointment with Bill Clinton, because the news of his affair had just broken. Neither of us was trying to prove anything. I was not interviewing her. We were just talking. But she casually said something I will never forget: “I could almost understand this if he’d done it with Sharon Stone,” she told me, “but not with this fat pig.” I was not offended by this opinion, even though I know I should have been. I intuitively understood what she meant. I thought it was a terrible argument (especially coming from a self-described feminist), but I could tell it was her honest reaction. And there was something about the way she said those words — and the way they didn’t affect me — that made me wonder if perhaps this is how people think about almost everything (and that maybe I thought this way, too, against my will). Whenever someone says something that’s both realistic and abhorrent, it makes me suspect everyone else is lying about everything else.

  The second memory starts the way most of my Clinton-era memories start: I was in love with a woman who was not in love with me, even though we spent all our time together. Almost arbitrarily, she became attracted to one of my lifelong friends; she appreciated his brain and loved his car. She asked him to take her to Basic Instinct, which had just opened in theaters (a scant ten days after Clinton had wrapped up his party’s nomination on Super Tuesday). Now, this particular friend really goes for the jugular. He is a high achiever and a natural-born objectivist — he believed everything in Atlas Shrugged long before he knew such a book could even exist. That might explain what happened next. Two days after seeing the movie, he asked me a difficult, practical question: “Since you are not having sex with this woman and she has no intentions of having sex with you, is it okay if I have sex with her, since that is what she obviously wants?” [I’m paraphrasing his words here, but just barely.] I suppose I could have said no (or at least said “yes” in a way that would have seemed like “no”). But that’s not what I did. I assured my friend it was totally okay, and I unsuccessfully pretended not to care while successfully drinking eighteen Busch beers. It was the closest I’ll ever be to understanding Hillary Clinton. What I thought at the time is the same as what I think now: “Well, go ahead. You might as well have sex with her. You’ve already seen Basic Instinct together. You’re halfway there.”

  It’s never about the lying. It’s about those rare things that are actually true, just like everything else.

  ELECTRIC FUNERAL

  If you’re reading this book in order, you’ve just finished a section about Bill Clinton, the forty-second president of the United States. Unless this book has survived far longer than I anticipate, most readers will picture Clinton as a living, breathing mammal. You remember where you were when he was elected in 1992 and the condition of your life during his two-term tenure. His time as POTUS might feel more recent than it actually is (and perhaps that makes you feel strange). But there’s another chunk of readers who had a different experience when they read that essay (and the size of that chunk will get progressively larger for the rest of eternity). Those in the second camp recall Clinton only vaguely, or not at all. You know he was once the president in the same way you know Woodrow Wilson was once the president. It feels like something that happened long ago. That makes you different from those in the first camp (and for a lot of different reasons). And there’s one specific divergence that matters more than most people think: If you’re in that first group, your parents worried about how you were affected by the media — and what they worried about was the content you were consuming. If you were born in 1960, your parents worried about Black Sabbath; if you were born in 1970, they worried about Porky’s; if you were born in 1980, they worried about Beavis and Butt-head. Their fear was that you’d be changed by the images you saw and the messages you heard, and perhaps they believed that content needed to be regulated. Their concern was tethered to the message. But if you were born after 1990, this is not the case. Instead, your parents were (or are) primarily worried about the medium through which all of those things are accessed. The medium is far more problematic than the message. When a father looks at his typically unfocused four-year-old hypnotically immersed with an iPad for three straight hours, he thinks, “Somehow, I know this is bad.” Is does not matter that the four-year-old might be learning essential skills on that device; what matters is the way such an intense, insular, digital experience will irreparably alter the way he’ll experience the non-simulated world. It’s normalizing something that was once abnormal, and it’s distancing the child from reality. It will transmogrify his brainstem into the opening credit sequence of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void. And the worst part is that there is no other option. If a father stops his son from embracing the online universe, he’s stopping him from becoming a competitive adult; it’s like refusing to teach him how to drive a car or boil water. You may worry about all the ancillary consequences, but you can’t take away the experience. Avoiding the Internet is akin to avoiding everything that matters. This is even true for adults. An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: “The biggest problem in my life,” he said, “is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.”

  The future makes the rules.

  The future makes the rules, so there’s no point in being mad when the future wins. In fact, the easiest way for any cutthroat person to succeed is to instinctively (and relentlessly) side with the technology of tomorrow, even if that technology is distasteful. Time will eventually validate that position. The only downside is that — until that validation occurs — less competitive people will find you annoying and unlikable.

  The future will retire undefeated, but it always makes a terrible argument for its own success. The argument is inevitably some version of this: “You might not like where we’re going, and tomorrow might be worse than yesterday. But it’s still going to happen, whether you like it or not. It’s inevitable.” And this is what people hate. They hate being dragged into the future, and they hate the technocrats who remind them that this is always, always, always happening. We tend to dislike cultural architects who seem excited that the world is changing, particularly when those architects don’t seem particularly concerned whether those changes make things worse. They know they will end up on the right side of history, because the future always wins. These are people who have the clearest understanding of what technology can do, but no emotional stake in how its application will change the lives of people who aren’t exactly like them. [They know the most and care the least . . . and they kind of think that’s funny.] Certainly, this brand of technophobia has always existed. As early as 1899, people like H. G. Wells were expressing apprehension about a future “ruled by an aristocracy of organizers, men who manage railroads and similar vast enterprises.” But this is different. This is about the kind of person who will decide what that future is.

  Early in the third season of The Sopranos, there’s a two-episode subplot in which my favorite character (Christopher Moltisanti) sticks up a charity concert at Rutgers University (the musical headliner is Jewel). What’s most interesting about this robbery is the person who hands over the money: The role of the terrified box office clerk is portrayed by an unknown actor named Mario Lavandeira. He has only
two lines, but the scene — when viewed retroactively — is more culturally significant than everything else that happens in that particular episode. This is because Mario Lavandeira would soon rename himself Perez Hilton and become the first authentically famous blogger, which (of course) made him the most hated blogger of his generation.

  [There are no famous bloggers who aren’t hated.]

  Perez Hilton once claimed that 8.82 million people read his website within a twenty-four-hour period in 2007. The magnitude of this number was disputed by competing gossip sources, but those critics came off like the type of person who wants to argue over the specific number of people killed during the Holocaust: They missed the point entirely. Even if Hilton was tripling his true traffic figures, the audience for what he was doing was massive. And what he was doing was terrible. It was objectively immoral. The crux of his publishing empire was based around defacing copyrighted photos of celebrities (often to imply they were addicted to cocaine). Other central pursuits included the outing of gay celebrities (Perez himself is homosexual) and publishing unauthorized photos of teen celebrities who may or may not be wearing underwear. The apex of his career was when he broke the news of Fidel Castro’s death, a report mildly contradicted by Castro’s unwillingness to stop living. Hilton was also a judge for the Miss USA Pageant, a referee for a WWE wrestling match, and the star of a VH1 reality show I never actually saw. [I realize Mr. Hilton would likely disagree with my overview of his career and insist that I failed to mention how he’s also been involved with numerous sex-positive, pro-youth, anti-bullying initiatives. But I suspect he will totally agree with much of what I’m going to write next, mostly because it makes him look far less culpable than he probably is.]