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

  So we begin, I suppose, with a question: What’s scarier — a villain with a motive, or a villain without one?

  Machiavelli poses a problem for any historian hoping to reconcile the gap between personal psychology and social memory. He is both famous and unknown — a polarizing figure regularly referenced by people who know nothing about his existence, or even his first name. Born in Florence, Italy, in 1469, Niccolò Machiavelli had lived a relatively full life long before he did anything truly memorable: For fourteen years, he served as a key diplomat for his native city until he was (wrongly) accused of conspiracy against the Medici family government (who had come into power around 1512). Machiavelli was subsequently imprisoned and tortured by means of “the strappado.” This was gravity-based brutality: The victim was hoisted into the air with both hands tied behind his back and repeatedly dropped onto a stone floor. Having nothing to confess, the forty-four-year-old Machiavelli was eventually exiled to a farm, where he became a writer (and the accidental inspiration for Tupac Shakur). Machiavelli died on June 22, 1527. Every so often, someone will suggest that he faked his own death, although that rumor exists only because it retrospectively seems like something Machiavelli would support.

  The one thing we all collectively understand about Machiavelli is the eponym Machiavellian, a catch-all term for the attainment of power through cunning. It’s almost a compliment, but only to an especially self-absorbed criminal (or, in the case of hip-hop, to those who aspire to a criminal reputation). This perception can be inferred through much of his writing catalog, although the only book that really matters is The Prince, a treatise on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships within the political sphere. It was published five years after the author had died. There are some undeniably radical ideas in The Prince; the ideas might seem self-evident in the present day, but they exploded minds in the sixteenth century. The biggest idea reconsiders the reality of motive: Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, monarchies operated (or at least pretended to operate) from a bizarrely optimistic perspective. They believed (or at least claimed to believe) that the best way for any ruler to succeed was through virtue; if the populace saw their leader as righteous and noble and pure, they would be more likely to support and follow him. To be a good king, you had to be a good person (or so the thinking went). The Prince argues that this kind of principle is ridiculous and naïve; instead, Machiavelli suggests that the essential key to attaining and holding power was being powerful. It’s an umbrella philosophy that informs every detail. According to The Prince, the traditional definition of virtue is at best a nonfactor and potentially a detriment; to Machiavelli, the only true virtue is craft. Being feared is better than being loved. Laws are essential, but they’re nothing more than constructions (and they work only if the populace cowers to the concept of state domination). Instead of allowing life to happen by chance, whatever one desires should be pursued and taken. If you have to slay a bunch of your enemies, do so on the first day of the job; that way, you’ll seem nicer in the future (since killing will no longer be necessary). A prince “must not have any other object or any other thought, nor must he adopt anything as his art but war,” the author plainly states.

  Now, before I go any further, I need to note something important: It’s entirely possible (and perhaps even probable) that Machiavelli was being sarcastic. In fact, that seems to be the ever-encroaching consensus. The Prince was very controversial for a very long time, but those who have studied the writer most tend to believe it was intended as a criticism of human nature. For example, Salman Rushdie adores Machiavelli and views him as a pragmatist: “I just think Machiavelli has been maligned by history,” he said in 2008. “To put it simply, Machiavelli was not Machiavellian. His name has come to stand for cynicism and deviousness and ruthlessness and power politics, all because of this little book, The Prince. But this is a man who was a profound democrat . . . he wrote not about how he would like things to be like, but how power actually worked, through what he had observed. It’s a classic case of shooting the messenger. Here’s a man who understood the nature of power and made the mistake of writing it down too clearly.” It can be further argued that The Prince is a clever way of satirizing the very idea of monarchy by exaggerating its darkest impulses — if power is simply the exploitation of sinister schemes and amoral thinking, then anyone who acquires it is therefore unworthy of respect. It’s possible that Machiavelli should be universally beloved — but that’s a different argument for a different book. What matters to me is why Machiavelli’s connotation will always, always be pejorative, no matter how much unconventional wisdom suggests the opposite. It feels as if it’s the central question about his import. So why is this perception unchangeable? What was his mistake?

  His mistake was consciousness.

  The Prince can be read like a self-help book for someone who openly aspires to be depraved: This is what’s important to believe, this is how the powerful should act in public, this is how you need to behave in private, et cetera. It’s a clinical dissection of how to be tyrannical. Whether Machiavelli believed these things is beside the point — what matters is that he presented them as pure stratagem. It was not an emotional reaction to a specific circumstance; it was a calculated design for life, usable by anyone, applicable anywhere. He turned an autocratic template into entertainment. This is what makes Machiavelli culturally unlikable. It makes him cold. The mere fact that he could conceive of these strategies — even if he’d never have used them himself — is what makes him sinister forever. And he is not the only one.

  So this, I suspect, is where we really begin: In any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

  “Whatever the details of the investigation are, this much is clear to me: There is a villain in this tragedy that lies in that investigation, not in Joe Paterno’s response to it.”

  These are the words of Nike CEO Phil Knight, speaking at Paterno’s funeral in January of 2012. The room gave Knight a standing ovation. The world did not.

  All funerals are sad, but Paterno’s was sad for an uncommon reason. Paterno’s funeral was sad because just about everyone who cared about him secretly wished he had died six months earlier. It was sad because it was impossible not to imagine Paterno’s final moments, when the only conclusion he could have drawn was that everything he’d done with his life was somehow not worth it. It was sad because the final weeks of his life were far sadder than the literal end of it, and not because of what was happening to his body.

  It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure. In the case of Paterno, that supposition does not go far enough. He was, by almost any subjective or objective metric, among the two or three greatest college football coaches of the twentieth century. He finished his career with the most wins in NCAA history, including five undefeated seasons and two national championships. Yet those victories represent only half the equation: For the first forty-five of his forty-six years at Penn State, Paterno was seen as the single-most honorable member in a profession not known for honor. He legitimized collegiate football in the Northeast without jeopardizing the region’s academic reputation (a seemingly impossible dream when he took the job in 1966). If you wanted to cite an example of a major college program where the players still went to class, you used Penn State. If you wanted to argue that you could challenge for a national title without bending rules, Penn State was the silver bullet in your rhetorical revolver. This was almost entirely due to one man. Yet all of that will become a secondary memory, solely because Paterno knew something he didn’t care about enough.

  There’s no reason to rehash the details of what happened to Penn State’s football program. The story is simple — the team’s longtime defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, was a pedophile and a rapist. We’ll never know how many adolescent boys he molested during his time at PSU, but he was convicted on forty-fi
ve counts. Sandusky was so brazen about his depravity that he forced a ten-year-old boy to have anal sex in the showers of the Nittany Lions’ locker room, which is how he was finally caught by a Penn State graduate assistant named Mike McQueary in 2002. The day after a dumbfounded McQueary witnessed the assault, he went to Paterno and told him what he saw.

  This is the point where Paterno ruined his own life.

  He did not go to the police, nor did he go to Sandusky and demand that he turn himself in. Instead, he followed the letter of the law: He informed his direct superior, athletic director Tim Curley. Paterno’s explanation: “I didn’t know what to do. I had not seen anything. Jerry didn’t work for me anymore. I didn’t have anything to do with him. I tried to look through the Penn State guidelines to see what I was supposed to do. It said I was supposed to call Tim. So I called him.” Here is where the unraveling begins. His analysis of the protocol is highly deceptive; referring to Curley as Paterno’s “superior” is a little like referring to Rebecca Black as Thom Yorke’s “industry peer.” Paterno’s stature at Penn State dwarfed not only Curley’s, but that of the university president. He was more powerful than the totality of the PSU faculty. So even while Paterno followed procedure, he totally failed. He was the only person at Penn State truly accountable for the culture that existed there. He was the only person who could have done anything. And what he chose to do was pretend that this problem did not exist. He coached football for another eight and a half years, until Sandusky was finally busted for sexual impropriety at a high school. The scandal broke and Paterno was terminated. His firing was controversial, because Paterno was deeply beloved (and remains so to all football fans still living in the seventies). Someday, many years from now, the school might rename the Penn State football stadium in this man’s honor. It’s not outside the realm of possibility. Had Paterno been the actual rapist, he’d still have mild support in central Pennsylvania. But the objective world realized he had to pay. He knew too much and did too little. Two months after his firing, Paterno was dead from lung cancer. Those who interviewed him near the end insisted he wasn’t unhappy (in an article for Sports Illustrated, Paterno biographer Joe Posnanski reported that a bedridden Paterno was pleased to finally catch up on old episodes of M*A*S*H, twenty-nine years after its cancellation). I suppose that’s possible, but I’ll never believe it. Paterno cared about his reputation at least as much as he cared about winning. This was a guy who majored in English at Brown. His favorite poet was Virgil. He knew how his obit was going to read.

  [There’s something else here that needs to be mentioned, because it’s critical to how the situation is understood: Let’s say McQueary doesn’t walk into the locker room on that particular day in 2002. Let’s say he decides he’s hungry and goes to McDonald’s instead. He never sees the rape, so he never talks to Paterno. The story still emerges eight years later, and Sandusky still goes to prison. The university is still humiliated. But is Paterno still destroyed? Would he still be at fault? The culture he created at Penn State would still have facilitated the crime. I suppose the question comes down to whether you believe that Paterno always knew something was deeply wrong with Sandusky, even before McQueary proved that there was. There had been allegations against Sandusky in 1999, but the initial investigation collapsed. Still, it’s hard to accept that Paterno did not suspect there was something askew with his defensive coordinator (particularly since Posnanski’s posthumous biography, Paterno, claims that JoePa actively disliked Sandusky). Throughout the 1990s, many believed that Sandusky was Paterno’s heir apparent as head coach, but he mysteriously retired at the conclusion of the ’99 season. Why did he make that decision? Did someone make it for him? We will never know what Paterno knew, but it was certainly more than he admitted. In fact, he might have known everything. He even created an exit strategy: During the same month in 2011 that Paterno learned prosecutors were (again) investigating Sandusky, Paterno renegotiated his contract with the university. This new contract would allow him to stop coaching after the 2011 season for a $3 million lump sum, plus the forgiveness of interest-free loans the school had given him totaling $350,000 and use of the university’s private plane.]

  Sandusky’s role in this affair is easy to define: He was the monster. In fact, he was so over-the-top monstrous that people almost stopped thinking about him (according to ESPN media watchdog Patrick Burns, Sandusky’s name was mentioned on SportsCenter a paltry eight times during the week of Paterno’s funeral). McQueary was marginalized as the scenario’s coward (evidently because he didn’t pull out a crossbow and murder Sandusky in the shower). The children were the helpless victims; the university was the figurehead of institutional evil; the popularity of college football was the atrocity’s philosophical root. All those imperfect denouncements are easy. But Paterno’s vilification is harder. A handful of media bottom-feeders reveled in his fall, but only to play to the trolls. No normal person wants to hate a dead man he once admired. It feels abnormal and cheap. But what’s the alternative? Paterno knew what was happening and chose to intellectually avoid it. He had to choose between humanity and sport, and he picked the one that mattered less. On the day he was finally lowered into the ground, his most adamant defender was the aforementioned Phil Knight, a man who allowed Indonesian children to work in sweatshops so that he could sell $120 basketball shoes to fat American teenagers who didn’t play basketball. And then — six months later — even Knight rescinded what he’d said. It was not a good look.

  The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

  So this is why Machiavelli shall always remain the figure that he is, especially among those who’ve never questioned why that pejorative connotation exists: He understood the dark. It’s not for what he did, because he didn’t really do anything; it’s for what he understood about other people and for what he understood about himself. He didn’t need to commit evil acts. He didn’t have to be evil. That was just how his mind naturally worked, and that’s what discomforts people.

  I realize such analysis sounds a little too easy. It seems like I’m suggesting that hardworking dumb people don’t like slothful smart people, which ends up seeming like a #HUMBLEBRAG (nobody writes about the intellectual class without latently placing themselves in it, somehow). It also creates a problematic reflection: If a villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least, then a hero is the person who cares too much without knowing anything. It makes every hero seem like Forrest Gump. But it’s not the intelligence that people dislike; it’s the dispassionate application of that intelligence. It’s the calculation. It’s someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.

  Take George W. Bush: He was an unpopular two-term president. Three times, his approval rating dropped to 25 percent. [To be fair, he also had the highest approval rating of all time, very briefly. But that was immediately after 9/11 — and in the wake of domestic terrorism, a well-dressed mannequin’s approval rating might have hovered around 50.] During his last two years in office, he was hammered nonstop, periodically classified as the worst U.S. president since Ulysses Grant or James Buchanan. Yet was Bush a villain? No. He was not. He was never, ever calculating. He didn’t know the most (which is not to say he was dumb), and he didn’t care the least (which is not to say he was a paragon of empathy). He was just the guy who ended up with the job. The villain of his administration ended up being Vice President Dick Cheney, a frosty puppet master who radically expanded the powers of the presidency even though he was not the president. He didn’t seem to care about anyone, including himself.

  Republicans are doggedly vilified within the media’s hipper sectors, but not always in predictable ways (and certainly not for their level of malevolence, which seems almost arbitrary). Malleable, forgettable Mitt Romney was the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2012, but he was vilified only by the type of ideologue intent on vilifying whoever fell into that role. [It was more sporting to obsessively disli
ke his running mate, the precocious yet middle-aged Paul Ryan. Ryan admitted that he used to read novelist Ayn Rand, a compulsion now perceived as considerably worse than classifying John Wilkes Booth as an underrated stage actor.] During the race for the Republican nomination, it initially appeared that Texas governor Rick Perry was destined to wear the villain’s cowl. It was almost too easy: Perry consciously embodied the caricature liberals had always wanted G. W. Bush to be. But even Bush saw Perry as distasteful. This was a man who took personal pride in state executions (during a televised debate, he stated that he’d “never struggled” with the possibility that even one of the 234 prisoners he’d killed during his governorship might have been innocent). Perry wanted to be the villain, probably for strategic reasons. But it didn’t take. He wasn’t smart enough; he probably didn’t even know how “Ayn” was pronounced. The low point was when Perry confidently insisted he would immediately eliminate three governmental agencies upon election, yet could not remember what those agencies were. Perry didn’t scare anyone; sure, he might sentence you to lethal injection, but he also might confuse the potassium chloride with Diet Dr Pepper. He was a man without a plan. This is why the 2012 Republican villain became Newt Gingrich, a man with more plans than any human on earth. Gingrich wanted to eliminate child labor laws, which would have seemed extreme had he not also wanted to colonize the moon. For a while, he held all his media press conferences inside zoos (before addressing the NRA, he was bitten by a penguin). He had so many crazy, interesting, quasi-diabolical plans that there was simply no way he could be president. Even when he surged in the polls, he never had a chance; you can’t be that clever and that devoid of compassion without engendering more hate than affection. (Once, when asked to describe himself in one word, Gingrich said, “Cheerful,” which was the cognitive equivalent of “Go fuck yourself for asking that question.”) Even when his most loyal supporters discussed his candidacy, they felt obligated to preface their use of the word “genius” with modifiers like “unpredictable” and “perverse.” And that did not bother him; Gingrich loves who he is. He doesn’t care what other people think of him, because he doesn’t particularly care about other people. This is charming, problematic, and extraordinarily effective — particularly as a means of appealing to committed anti-ideologues who spend their lives worrying about the problem of false authenticity. “I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting Newt Gingrich and having a chat with the fellow on a staircase,” ex–Sex Pistols vocalist John Lydon once told Rolling Stone. “I found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn’t care.” This is both the highest compliment a Sex Pistol can dispense and an incisive description of Newt’s character. He exclusively cares about ideas, regardless of their merits. He would tie a woman to the railroad tracks just to prove he knew what time the train left the station. This is why I always find myself rooting for him, even when I’m against what he purports to desire. I know exactly what he’s doing. It’s like looking into a mirror I do not possess the capacity to smash.