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

  There is a view that one should never be permitted to be criticized for being — possibly, even in the future — engaged in a contributory act that might be immoral. And that type of arse covering is more important than saving people’s lives. That it is better to let 1000 people die than risk going to save them and possibly running over someone on the way. And that is something I find philosophically repugnant.

  These are the words of Julian Assange, the founder of the website WikiLeaks and the most archetypically villainlike villain of the Internet age. His appearance is so Aryan that it seems like he was engineered by the kind of scientist who ends up hiding in Argentina. I assume Assange can laugh, but I have no proof. He’s truly a worldwide irritant: Assange has been accused of sexually assaulting two women in Sweden, applied for political asylum in Ecuador, and had a Canadian academic call for his assassination. His brilliance is impolite and self-defined. There is no one else like him; he is truly a New Thing.

  If you know what WikiLeaks is, feel free to skip this paragraph. (I’m not going to outline anything you don’t already know, nor am I going to take a strong position on its merits or flaws, nor have I seen the yet-to-be released film The Fifth Estate starring sexy British weirdo Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role.) If you don’t know anything about it, here’s a 230-word description: WikiLeaks is a website that publishes classified, present-tense documents from anonymous sources. The site’s abiding premise is that the upside of absolute transparency is greater than the potential downside of publicly dumping sensitive information that might theoretically cause damage. The first noteworthy WikiLeaks release was some 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter killing an Iraqi journalist in Afghanistan (people generally viewed this release positively). The most discussed incident was an avalanche of “diplomatic cables” that went up in 2011; essentially, these were private correspondences American diplomats had exchanged among themselves. Most of these exchanges were more gossipy than meaningful, but it made some high-profile Americans seem crazy and facile. [It also created the impression that WikiLeaks cannot be controlled or regulated, which seemed scarier than the documents themselves.] That same year, WikiLeaks released seventy-five thousand U.S. military documents that came to be known as the Afghan War Diary. The Pentagon wasn’t exactly stoked about this. Obviously, the details of all these fiascoes can be found more comprehensively elsewhere. But the takeaway is this: A very confident Australian (Assange) who’s fixated on the problematic politics of one country (the United States) has created a way to publish information about that country that would have previously remained hidden (sometimes for valid reasons and sometimes due to corruption). It is journalism that attacks journalism, which is an extremely interesting topic to journalists.

  Supporters of WikiLeaks believe it receives the same kind of unjust, reactionary criticism that was once lobbed at the Pentagon Papers (the Pentagon Papers were a classified overview of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War, published by the New York Times in 1971). Those who are against WikiLeaks counter this argument by noting that the Pentagon Papers were vetted by a news organization and only involved defunct military actions that were at least four years old (the study examined activities only through the year 1967). It’s worth noting that the principal whistleblower in the Pentagon Papers (former U.S. military analyst Daniel Ellsberg) has requested a presidential pardon for the principle whistleblower in the WikiLeaks controversy, former U.S. soldier Bradley Manning. I have my own views on this topic, but they’re contradictory and unimportant. What intrigues me more is Assange’s quote at the top of this section: His statement either confronts (and obliterates) the problem I’m trying to describe, or it simply is the problem (described succinctly and expressed with monotone glee).

  Assange comes at the media from a bottom-line, non-theoretical, the-ends-justify-the-means perspective that was (perhaps not so coincidentally) first described in Machiavelli’s The Prince. He’s arguing that people are too obsessed with the arcane ethics of print journalism, and he’s willing to accept that an action that hurts one person is justified if it helps a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand others. It’s an old problem. Perhaps the clearest metaphor for how much this disturbs people is the classic hypothetical of the runaway trolley car: Imagine you are operating a trolley car whose brakes have malfunctioned. You are flying down the tracks at an obscene speed. Up ahead, you see five workers on the track, unaware that this trolley is bearing down on them; if you continue on your current path, the trolley will kill them all. But then you notice an alternate track that will allow you to avoid colliding with the five workers. The only downside is that if you turn onto this alternate route, you will kill a different innocent person (but only one). Do you switch to the alternate track and kill one person in order to save five? [The folks usually credited with the creation and popularization of this dilemma are Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, but I’m roughly paraphrasing how it’s described in Michael Sandel’s wonderful book Justice.]

  When you pose this question to any normal reader, they almost always say yes. It seems insane to kill five people instead of one. But that’s not the true question; that’s just the introduction. The real question is this: Let’s say you’re not operating the runaway trolley. Let’s say you’re not the conductor. Let’s propose that you’re just watching this event from a bridge above the track. You realize this runaway trolley is going to kill five people. You notice another person is watching this event alongside you — an extremely obese man. It dawns on you that if you push this man onto the track below, it will derail the trolley. Here again, you are killing one man in order to save five. Do you push the fat man off the bridge?

  This second scenario always troubles people more: The most common answer tends to be, “I know these things are basically the same, but I could never push a man to his death.” The reason people feel different is due to how the two scenarios position the decision maker. In the first problem, the decision maker is accepting the existing conditions and trying to choose whatever solution hurts the fewest individuals. In the second problem, the decision maker is injecting himself into the situation and taking on the responsibility of the outcome. The first scenario is a reaction. The second is a self-directed choice. What bothers people about WikiLeaks is that it creates a world in which the second scenario is happening constantly, and what bothers people about Assange is the way he makes that choice seem so stupidly self-evident.

  Assange’s belief is that everyone would be better off if all information was equally (and immediately) available. His critics say, “That’s irresponsible. If you just release information — and particularly military information — without considering its sensitivity, someone will get killed.” And that’s probably true. If WikiLeaks continues in its current iteration, I’m sure it will (eventually) contribute to someone’s death. But Assange makes us consider the larger value of that troubling possibility. What if the relentless release of classified information makes every nation less willing to conduct questionable military actions? Will this force all society to become more honest (and wouldn’t that future reality be worth the loss of a hundred innocent people in the present)? Or would it actually make things worse? Will the fear of exposure simply prompt political figures to resist creating any paper trail at all? Will everything become hidden? I really have no idea. No one does, and that’s the discomfort: We don’t know if the old way is better (or worse) than the new way. But Assange does not let us choose. He possesses a sweeping technological advantage, and he knows that released information cannot be retracted. He can make us accept his philosophy against our will. Once a document is released, how we feel about the nature of its existence becomes meaningless; it’s instantaneously absorbed into the media bloodstream as pure content. This is why Assange can make an argument that openly advocates actions that (in his words) “might be immoral.” Those actions are going to happen anyway, so he doesn’t have to pretend that they contradict the way we’
ve always viewed morality. He doesn’t have to convince us he’s right, because our thoughts don’t matter. His view of everything is like Perez Hilton’s view of gossip or Kim Dotcom’s view of entertainment: He believes everything longs to be free. And he will make that happen, because he knows how to do it and we don’t know how to stop him. He’s already beaten everybody. It was never close.

  THIS ZEITGEIST IS MAKING ME THIRSTY

  There’s a passage in the documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology where dialectic Marxist superstar Slavoj Žižek goes on a tangent about how to properly satirize institutional power. His point, in essence, is that you can’t successfully erode an institution by attacking the person in charge. [I suppose it’s possible that this wasn’t exactly what he was talking about, because sometimes Žižek can be hard to follow. But this was my takeaway, and my interpretation is valid, even if it’s wrong. Misinterpretations can still be accidentally true.] According to Žižek, attempting to satirize the public image of a powerful person inevitably proves impotent; this is because positions of power are designed to manipulate and displace a high degree of criticism. You can mock the president with impunity — nothing will really happen to him or to you. Part of the presidential job description is the absorption of public vitriol. It’s a rubberized target. A comedic assault doesn’t change perception in any meaningful way. [“It’s not the respectful voice that props up the status quo,” Malcolm Gladwell once noted. “It is the mocking one.” Gladwell was subsequently mocked for noting this so respectfully.] Clear, unsubtle political satire on TV shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report can succeed as entertainment, but they unintentionally reinforce the preexisting world: These vehicles frame the specific power holder as the sole object of scorn. This has no impact beyond comforting the enslaved. Power ­holders — even straight-up ­dictators — are interchangeable figureheads with limited reach; what matters far more is the institutional system those interchangeable figureheads temporarily represent.

  So what does this mean, outside of an academic discussion about power? Well, maybe this: If you want to satirize the condition of a society, going after the apex of the pyramid is a waste of time. You need to attack the bottom. You need to ridicule the alleged ideological foundation an institution claims to be built upon. This is much, much more discomfiting than satirizing an ineffectual prime minister or a crack-smoking mayor. This requires the vilification of innocent, anonymous, working-class people. If you want to damage the political left, you must skewer the left’s bedrock myth — the idea that all people are equal and that people want to be good (which implies enforced fairness would make everyone’s life better). If you want to damage the political right, you must likewise skewer the right’s bedrock myth — the belief that the human spirit is both sacrosanct and irrepressible (which implies unfettered freedom allows all people to prosper equally). To illustrate how either ideology is flawed, you must demonstrate how those central notions are moronic. And this requires the satirist to present the average citizen as a naïve sheep who fails to realize the hopelessness of his or her position. The successful social satirist must show a) how the average liberal is latently selfish and hypocritical, or b) how the average conservative fails to comprehend how trapped he is by the same system he supports. A world-class satirist knows the truth about his audience and does not care how exposing that truth will make audiences feel.

  This is a difficult task (and if you need proof, just ask the tortured corpse of Machiavelli). Deep satire is a collision sport. It’s a little cold and a little antihumanist, so most of its potential purveyors don’t go for the jugular. But they went for it on Seinfeld, and they did so relentlessly. And they did it so well that most people barely noticed, no matter how often the writers told them directly.

  Seinfeld debuted in July of 1989. Considering the limitations of what network television was (or could be) in ’89, it has proven to be the most imperative live-action sitcom of the modern era. Nothing else comes close. Like the music of Zeppelin or the teen archetypes of Salinger, its subsistence in the culture scarcely dissipates. Its four principal characters are so engrained in the American consciousness that there’s no need for me to name them or describe who they are. Seinfeld will live in syndication forever, partially because the show exists within its own evergreen reality: a version of New York that’s obviously based in Los Angeles, populated by a collection of impossible personalities who are caricatures of actual people. Like traditional sitcoms, Seinfeld emphasized character over plot; unlike traditional sitcoms, the audience was never supposed to empathize with any of the characters they loved. When describing the program’s brilliance, it became common (in fact, cliché) to say Seinfeld was a farcical “show about nothing.” But that description was lazy. It was not a farce. It was social satire. And to nonchalantly claim it was “a show about nothing” erroneously suggests that its vision was empty. Seinfeld was never a show about nothing, even when nothing happened. Seinfeld simply argued that nothing is all that any rational person can expect out of life. It was hilarious, but profoundly bleak. By consciously stating it had no higher message — the creators referred to this as the “no hugging, no learning” rule — it was able to goof around with concepts that battered the deepest tenets of institutionalized society. It was satire so severe that we pretend it wasn’t satire at all.

  Most episodes of Seinfeld circuitously forward two worldviews: The first is that most people are bad (and not very smart). The ­second is that caring about other people is absurd (and not very practical). It is the most villainous sitcom ever made, particularly since its massive audience never seemed to fully grasp what it was literally seeing. This was true from its inception. There’s an episode from the first season (“Male Unbonding”) in which Jerry reconsiders his lifelong friendship with a self-absorbed man he hates. The relationship is based on nostalgia; as a child, the despised man’s family owned a Ping-Pong table. Jerry longs to sever this relationship and resents that the man still desires his company. “I would have been friends with Stalin if he had a Ping-Pong table,” he tells George (a different self-absorbed friend Jerry actually likes). All of this is funny, because Jerry Seinfeld is funny; it’s also relatable, because adolescent familiarity sometimes lasts longer than it should. But consider what this premise is really doing: It is satirizing the notion that relationships matter. It suggests that healthy friendships are disposable, and that the commitments we make to nonessential acquaintances are absurd extensions of social politeness. And this is not the subtext. This is the text. Like The Prince, the collected Seinfeld teleplays generate an ironic instruction manual for not caring about other people. Kramer expresses a few altruistic feelings, but Jerry, Elaine, and George do not. They sometimes exhibit qualities of loyalty, but mainly to “the vault.” What they call “the vault” is the tacit agreement that they can tell each other anything, without fear that the information will be leaked to other involved parties (they stick the information “in the vault”). Their deepest loyalty is to the art of keeping secrets.

  Certainly, most of the retrospective credit for this weltanschauung is directed toward Larry David, the bald misanthrope who created Seinfeld in orchestra with its namesake star. As noted by virtually everyone who has ever written about this program in any context, Jerry’s fictional friendship with George is a simulation of Seinfeld’s real friendship with David. But that connection is only a fraction of the influence. David’s deeper contribution was the injection of his solipsistic morality (which ended up becoming the whole enchilada). Smarter critics had suspected this throughout the nineties, but it became undeniable once David’s improv exhibition Curb Your Enthusiasm premiered on HBO in the fall of 2000. Curb Your Enthusiasm was everything understated about Seinfeld, amplified into aesthetic totality. David will even use random episodes of Curb to directly point out incidents from Seinfeld that were based on his life, almost as if he wants to make sure everyone knows he was the wizard behind the curtain. At tim
es, this preoccupation can almost seem petty. But it’s never invasive, because that pettiness is just about the only emotion we see from anyone in this universe.

  Most of the time, television depends on emotion. Emotion is the intangible drug that passive audiences crave; we immerse ourselves in fictional drama to feel something we want (or miss) from real life. But not in the faux reality of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and not in the pseudo-reality of Seinfeld. On Seinfeld, the characters express contempt for emotion. It is the weakest quality a human can possess. This could be demonstrated in roughly half of the show’s 180 episodes, but one does so overtly: In an episode titled “The Serenity Now,” Jerry’s thirty-minute girlfriend (ex–Full House star Lori Loughlin) pushes him to get angry, simply to see if he has the ability to express any kind of emotion in any given scenario. This is both a commentary on Seinfeld’s fictional character (who doesn’t empathize with anyone) and a meta-­commentary on Seinfeld’s technical ability as an actor (which borders on non­existent). When the girlfriend’s plan succeeds, the floodgates open. Jerry becomes an emotional wreck who cries constantly, much to his own confusion (“What is this salty discharge?” he wonders aloud). His emotional instability makes him creepy and annoying, ultimately prompting him to propose marriage to Elaine for no rational reason. By the end of the episode, his hysteria has passed. Jerry returns to his former uncaring self, and everyone (including the audience) is relieved.