XI. This post is now offline, but Will has a screenshot.
XII. Ezra Klein, “The Health of Nations,” American Prospect, April 22, 2007.
XIII. Ezra Klein, “Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Plan Isn’t a Plan at All,” Vox, January 17, 2016.
XIV. Matthew Yglesias, “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK,” Slate, April 24, 2014.
XV. Ezra Klein, “Mistakes, Excuses and Painful Lessons From the Iraq War,” Bloomberg View, March 19, 2013.
XVI. Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, “A Really, Really, Really Long Post about Gay Marriage That Does Not, in the End, Support One Side or the Other,” Asymmetrical Information, April 2, 2005, http://archive.today/DL3ja.
XVII. Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, “How Much Is the War Going to Cost?” Asymmetrical Information, March 23, 2003, https://archive.is/GSvUm.
XVIII. Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, “Bring It On,” Asymmetrical Information, February 13, 2003, https://archive.is/Yitep.
XIX. Megan McArdle, “There’s Little We Can Do to Prevent Another Massacre,” Daily Beast, December 17, 2012.
XX. As of publication, McMegan has failed upward again, this time at the Washington Post.
CHAPTER FIVE
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CULTURE
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
—OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Why Donald Trump and Jeb Bush Should See Hamilton
—REBECCA MEAD, THE NEW YORKER
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For a long time people had a crude but basically correct understanding of culture’s relationship to politics: Marx’s idea that the “superstructure” of society—law, morality, and culture—arises out of the economic meat grinder hidden underneath, the “base.” This rough version of the theory gets criticized as simplistic, and to be fair, it is: there are all kinds of inputs and outputs that determine culture, and there’s plenty of good criticism of this bastardized version of Marx. Still, as far as we’re concerned, it’s always better to err on the side of this crude theory than to go in the opposite direction, the For Dummies version of Antonio Gramsci: the idea that a nation’s culture is self-reinforcing and affects all other walks of life, so if you change the culture, you can change the political reality. To quote the Italian Communist himself, “Ingredienti migliori, cultura migliore, Papa John’s.”
The taste of Gramsci-lite won a lot of people over during last the few decades, trading away material and economic analyses for an overwhelming focus on culture. But this approach comes from the generally bad side of 1960s radicalism (incidentally, the only part that survived). It was embraced by middle-class hippies whose demands were not material and collective but aesthetic and individualist—which, once you smooth off the edges, is just libertarianism. We know this because almost all those baby boomers grew up to become square, greedy marketing consultants for UBS who also happen to smoke weed while they binge-watch Westworld.
That’s because capital has no problem assimilating pop-cultural rebellion and antiauthoritarian imagery. In fact, that stuff creates all kinds of new markets, new consumers, new suckers. All the cultural modes of resistance slowly turned into marketing categories, and the brave hippie dipshits of the sixties left us with an even more powerful money machine, totally compatible with social liberalism and openly unafraid of the militant but always shrinking left-wing movement. In the absence of real political power, liberals and lefties stumbled into a pathology where we only hold power over—and wage struggles for—the realm of fantasy.
That would be bad enough, but ever since The Incident in 2016, some of us have tumbled through the looking-glass. People have fallen victim to the same forces that so addled James Woods’s character in Cronenberg’s Videodrome: having become obsessed with the hypnotic imagery inside the TV, they began to hallucinate in their waking hours, confusing fiction for reality and vice versa. They went beyond fighting over TV and film and fantasized that they were, in some form, fighting inside the world created by TV and film.
Hillary became Khaleesi. Trump became Voldemort. And as the Videodrome synthesizers hummed along, some dark conspirators took a giant videotape and shoved it into Lawrence O’Donnell’s pulsating chest and said, “death to Trump, long live the new flesh.” Along with him, wide swaths of the liberal and left spectrum have become the video word made flesh, the evil wavelengths of the TV eating away at their brains until they believe not only that culture is the way to achieve social justice but that Game of Thrones or Harry Potter itself is social justice.
This is not to say people shouldn’t seek comfort in art, in TV, in movies. It’s the only way to not go mad! But, in our view, do it knowing what you’re doing is fun and aesthetic, not militant and subversive—it’s never going to substitute for real political action. It may make you feel better to watch a show that’s calling out Trump, or oppression, or our podcast—but if you stop there, you’re demobilized as a political actor. Again, between half-assed Marx and half-assed Gramsci, it’s better to go with the former: of course being in control of what is “cool” in our culture is a kind of power, but it’s one that liberals increasingly rely on in lieu of actual politics, to the detriment of politics—and culture, and cool people.
On the other side, for the culture warriors of the Right, a death grip on power maintained through gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc., will never be enough to give them what they truly crave: popularity, celebrity, and the admiration of the same cultural elite they despise. Despite witnessing a rich pedigree of reactionary artists in the early twentieth century (Céline, Ezra Pound, Leni Riefenstahl, Hanna-Barbera), the contemporary American right-winger is congenitally incapable of being funny, entertaining, or interesting in any of the ways art demands, relying instead on ham-fisted sentimentality and self-abasing ressentiment. The paradox is that the further their liberal enemies get from holding real power—the more they rely on the symbolic and pop-cultural—the worse they get at the very things that built liberal cultural hegemony in the first place. Libs find themselves aping the shittiest habits of their right-wing culture-war opponents. As this war on culture progresses, both the general public and cultural elites ask less of art and reduce their interests to a checklist of “good points” or “progressive portrayals” while ignoring anything that doesn’t superficially conform to the immediate political conversations of the day.
Don’t get us wrong—we’re not against state censorship, as long as we’re in charge of it. After Chapo Year Zero, we’d probably leave most film, literature, music, and television alone and focus instead on censoring things that are truly evil, like TED Talks; Malcolm Gladwell books; the study of economics, philosophy, and journalism; and the just plain boring things like poetry, dancing, and plays. After all, Soviet Russia and Communist China kept a close watch on artists, while our own CIA funded plenty of literary magazines and writers’ workshops to nudge the culture in the right direction—so if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
It’s time that we turned the tables on the ruling class and prescribed our own correct Chapo cultural revolution. Hopefully you, too, can become a Chapo-certified Free Thinker™ or at least understand the references that form the broad outlines of our cryptic inside jokes and long-winded “ironic” remarks that allow us to get away with making so many Polack jokes.
Film Products
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The legendary Soviet film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein once said that “American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.” This remains as true today as when Sergei made his classic film about the most powerful and biggest battleship ever. Film remains a potent vehicle for ideology. However, if film can be harnessed to transmit capitalist ideology, then it stands to reason that it can also be used to send more subversive messages. Indeed, the revolutionary p
otential for film is limitless, and movies have played an integral role in firing our imaginations and forming our worldview. Here are a few of the most important.
THE MATRIX
All we can say is, “Wow!” 1999’s The Matrix is probably the most important movie ever made. Even if it was just the film’s badass gun murders and high-flying kung fu, it would have its place in the Western canon. But at its heart is a moral more valuable than possibly any work of art ever: that being on the computer is cool, sexy, and important. Instead of reverting to the trope of computer users as sedentary slobs who avoid the real world, the Wachowskis showed us that the only way to see the truth is to be so online that you could die from it. Simply put, take the red pill and get back on the keyboard and mouse!
THE MATRIX RELOADED
They say you have only one chance to make a first impression. Well, that may be true, but you also have two chances to make a second impression, and it’s twice as important, because it’s like a first impression times two. That’s doubly true for The Matrix Reloaded. The sequel may actually be more important, as we’re introduced to three major characters who show us the sexy dark side of the computer. First is the Merovingian, a French pervert who represents all French people who are online. He makes some sort of chocolate cake that makes a woman nut, which is a metaphor for mutual masturbation on Skype. The next two, of course, are the Twins. Let’s put it this way: You’ve seen albinos. You’ve seen white guys with dreadlocks. You’ve seen identical twins. You’ve even seen white three-piece suits. But have you seen them all together? The Twins shifted the realm of what was possible in the minds of viewers. It’s no mistake that only six years after Reloaded and the Twins, George W. Bush stepped down as president of the United States. Good art makes you think. Great art makes you act. Enough said.
THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
All good things come to an end. But they live in our minds forever. Coming out the same year as Reloaded, the third installment completed this biblical fable. Honestly, we don’t remember this one too well. There were some new robots. The Merovingian is there, but doesn’t cause any nutting. The important thing is that Neo dies doing computer stuff, becoming a hero forever. This is a metaphor for doing a dangerous stunt on a livestream that kills you.
THE ANIMATRIX
If The Matrix series constitutes one whole Koran, The Animatrix is the definitive hadith. While the films focus on knocking viewers’ socks off with sick action set pieces that act as amuse-bouches for the main course of philosophy and even cooler action scenes, The Animatrix does not ease the viewer in, for this simple reason: for all the Matrix series’s revolutionary ideas and concepts, it was still trapped within the confines of Hollywood films, which are produced by degenerates and idiots who think filmgoers are as stupid as they are. Series-defining features like the Twins and the Colonel Sanders guy were put off till much later, as the repulsive freaks who constitute Tinseltown’s leadership could barely handle them.
Their powerful ignorance, however, did not extend to the art of anime. Producers like Joel Silver found the medium too complex and powerful to dig their hideous claws into, allowing The Animatrix to flourish. In The Animatrix, viewers are treated like adults and shown vignettes about a guy who runs really fast, a robot who’s a slave, and other ideas that would simply be too much for Hollywood to allow in a conventional film. If you think you can handle it, dive in, and Dōitashimashite (Japanese for “you’re welcome”).
Television Products
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We all love our stories. They give us something to look forward to at the end of the day and something to talk about with family, friends, and coworkers. Television is the younger cousin of film, but one that has perhaps even greater power to shape minds, as we invite it into our very homes. Long gone are the days when an entire family had to gather ’round the tube to watch Amos ’n’ Andy or the Kennedy assassination. Now there are so many channels, so many content providers, and so many damned good programs that it’s hard to know where to start. Since we like to think of America as one big family, and the TV as the thing that unites us all, here are stories about a couple of criminal families that represent America while remaining fiercely united.
THE SOPRANOS
To truly understand America in the twenty-first century, one must imbibe the entire run of The Sopranos as it was originally intended to be seen: in one seventy-hour sitting. In The Sopranos, creator David Chase gave us a host of characters who represent the grand archetypes of our culture and where it was headed at the dawn of this new millennium. In patriarch Tony, we have the cheap and nasty criminal sociopaths who would inherit the world, namely Trump and those who voted for him. If you want a vision of the future, just imagine America wearing a soiled bathrobe, sullenly staring at a bowl of Honeycomb cereal in a gaudy exurban McMansion. As a counterpart to Tony’s criminal depressive, we have wife and mother Carmela, who represents the complicit suburban petit bourgeois, happy to live a life of comfort funded by blood money in between charity bake sales held to assuage the phantom pangs of a nonexistent conscience.
Hovering above everything like a black, odious cloud of shit is the sour and berating matriarch Livia, who represents the crushing weight of olds on the American psyche, sapping us of joy, independence, and any chance to escape our history. As a corollary to all our collective efforts to overcome the psychological damage done to us by Livia (i.e., all previous generations), there is Dr. Melfi, Tony’s therapist, who represents the ultimate and final failure of educated, cosmopolitan liberals to meaningfully confront—let alone reform—evil. Throughout the run of the series, Melfi’s attempts to treat Tony serve only to help him manage his criminal empire more efficiently, making her at best an enabler and at worst an accomplice.
Finally, in the Soprano children, we see the two paths laid out for the millennial generation. In Meadow we have the “success daughter,” a high-functioning and ambitious striver with a superficial interest in social justice who is well adapted to the world of neoliberal hegemony. In AJ, we have the great American failson, a figure uniquely ill suited to the times. AJ is lazy, petulant, insouciant, and one Howard Zinn book away from realizing how fucked-up shit really is. He is the ur-figure for what would eventually become the podcast listener and host.
SONS OF ANARCHY
Some hour-long dramas follow great men who walk the line between good and evil, while others show people who are forced to commit immoral acts due to brutalizing circumstances. But only one show is about a hugely stupid man whose good acts always result in evil because the soft spot on his skull never hardened. That show is Sons of Anarchy, and that towheaded imbecile hero is Jax Teller.
The heir to a family of motorcycle dunces, Jax leads a gang of sex perverts, delinquent dads, and murderers known as SAMCRO (Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original). His late father, John, bequeathed him a semi-flattened carton of Kool XLs, a twin bed, and a series of journals that turn out to be unreadable libertarian drivel about how he tried and failed to make a vroom-vroom club for grown men but his vision was ruined.
While this may seem like utter nonsense, it actually has deep cultural meaning: after 9/11, the small and silver screens were dominated by tales of good and evil like The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, and 24. We clutched these simple narratives about highly competent protagonists who exhibited extraordinary abilities, selflessness, and flawless moral compasses like security blankets while being fed easily digestible footage of air strikes and easy military victories. Their stories buttressed our self-narrative as a benevolent empire giving back what we’d gotten from rank evildoers. However, as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars grinded into bloody, unwinnable occupations, the economy sputtered, and everything turned out to be much more complicated than we wanted to believe in our deepest moments of agony. Simple hero’s journeys would no longer do.
We needed a new type of good guy, one who fucked up so badly that everyone around him died, who fought hard despite not knowing what
he was even fighting for. Someone who talked the talk and walked the walk, right into a field of rakes. That man was Jax Teller, a stand-in for both our then president, with his own father issues, and ourselves. SAMCRO’s dusty Northern California hamlet was a microcosm for the world at large, with the good townspeople and the snarling black and brown gangs who sought to upset the Sons’ murder-based economy. American exceptionalism became the bike buffoons’ indecipherable moral code.
You cannot understand America without understanding Sons of Anarchy, and you can’t understand Sons of Anarchy without understanding America.
Literary Products
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Literature—it’s our name for books that are full of emotion and make-believe as opposed to facts and reason. Inexplicably, these works filled with lies, nonsense, incorrect political ideology, and not a single graph or chart are still venerated as vital parts of our culture. Once a book is deemed important by the literary elite, it enters what’s known as “the canon.” You’re probably familiar with the Simpsons parody versions. In many cases, elevator schematics hold up better than these “classics,”I but if you learn the plots of a few of them, you can likely hold your own at Chapo speed dating sessions.
MOBY-DICK BY HERMAN MELVILLE
Roundly regarded as the single greatest American novel ever written—if not the best of any nation’s output—Moby-Dick is about a young man who decides to go whaling for a few years because he’s depressed, and going to sea is an act of self-care. He travels from New York to New Bedford and meets a guy named Queequeg from the South Pacific Islands who practices cannibalism and is really good at harpooning whales. They spend a night together in a hotel room, fall in love, and join up with a ship called the Pequod, which is captained by a madman named Ahab who is hell-bent on pursuing his vendetta against a legendary white whale who bit his leg off.
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 16