Fumbling in the world of hard news

[theironrepository]

The Simpsons And The Squad

(originally written August 22nd 2019)

The Simpsons recently turned out another of their one-off shorts, and it’s another comment on modern politics. It depicts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, the so-called ‘squad’, having a pop at Donald Trump, the so-called ‘President of the United States’, via a reworded version of the musical number ‘America’ from West Side Story. One sighs for the days of Alf Clausen and ‘See My Vest’.

The obvious question is what they hoped to achieve by this. The American right has complained for some time now that the media too often marches in lockstep with the Democratic party – if the writers of The Simpsons wanted to obliviously prove them right, well, mission accomplished. But it is at the end of the day a cartoon. The idea, presumably, was to give its viewers a chuckle.

If there’s one thing sure to kill a joke stone dead, it’s dissecting it, so it’d be unfair to analyse it piece by elaborate piece and pronounce it ‘not funny’. Let us instead consider the broader context – it’s another piece of supposedly comedic work chucked into the public arena which specifically criticises Donald Trump. The concept is not, shall we say, in the first fine flush of youth. Any entry into that crowded marketplace needs to be pretty bloody special, and an old showtune from a show which is a relic of the ‘90s is not that.

Obviously in the show’s glorious heyday it squeezed far better laughs out of politics, the absolute high-water mark being ‘Mr. Kang Goes To Washington’ and the glorious farce of alien invaders stumbling through a Presidential election. But even after the shine had decidedly worn off, the 2008 episode ‘E Pluribus Wiggum’ turned out a rare highlight of the season when they had both major parties unite behind good-natured nitwit Ralph Wiggum.

You probably see the difference – they’re not naked partisan attacks against specific people. Further, they’re not as rooted to a specific time frame. ‘Mr. Kang Goes To Washington’ depicted the 1996 elections, but it didn’t have to be Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, the broad concept would have worked with any candidates.

Clinton, of course, showed up more than a bit, being President at the time of the show’s glory years – as was, in the very early days, George Bush the elder. Bush actually name-checked the show at the time, imploring Americans to be “a lot more like the Waltons, and a lot less like the Simpsons”. How far we’ve come that these attacks no longer happen that way around. Obviously The Simpsons ribbed Bush in response, but they ribbed Clinton too: despite the biases which, over the years, have become quite explicit, they were still willing to make fun of both sides of the aisle.

(The classic-era lineup of the writer’s room, incidentally, wasn’t politically uniform. John Swartzwelder, one of the most talented members of that incredibly strong ensemble, was and is a self-described ‘hardcore conservative’.)

Per example, there was one brief aside in ‘Bart Gets An Elephant’ where a Republican convention flew banners reading ‘we want what’s worst for everyone’ and ‘we’re just plain evil’ and a Democratic convention responded in kind with ‘we hate life and ourselves’ and ‘we can’t govern’. A hair slanted to the left, but there’s not much in it. Even the directest of material in the old days wasn’t directly attacking one side on behalf of the other.

When Homer, having wrung an apology out of Bush senior, added “Now apologise for the tax hike!” it was a straight political jab, but it was at least borne of character. That was the climax of 1996’s ‘Two Bad Neighbours’, the show’s glorious revenge on Bush – and while there was plenty of mocking of his time in office there, he had by that time retired from front-line politics. It didn’t represent the show acting as a liberal mouthpiece.

(In particular, it doesn’t depict Bush as evil – at worst, crotchety. His worst sin, limply spanking Bart, might have raised an eyebrow if the boy wasn’t regularly throttled by his father.)

Given the 2000 episode ‘Bart To The Future’ made an offhand reference to a future ‘Trump administration’, you could be forgiven for thinking the writers are now doing penance for having made this inadvertent prediction. But as early as 2012, the episode ‘Politically Inept, With Homer Simpson’, saw Homer leading a thinly-veiled version of the Tea Party movement - remember those guys? - and fairly explicitly cast as the villain for it.

(Homer was always at least a small-c conservative, having supported Al Haig’s run for President in 1988 and gotten into a fistfight over it. However, this was the old-school conservatism that wouldn’t dismiss him as a communist for being a dues-paying union man.)

Curiously, depicting real political figures positively wasn’t necessarily a stumbling block. ‘Mr. Kang Goes To Washington’ had Clinton and Dole prepared to work together to beat the aliens. More strikingly, 1991’s ‘Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington’ (the limited pool of referential episode names becomes more apparent over the years) had Bush the elder depicted in an unambiguously positive way, proudly overseeing the arrest and impeachment of a corrupt congressman. As the man himself was knee-deep in the Iran-Contra scandal, there was an open goal there if they’d wanted to mock. Stranger still, it was only after this that Bush gave his anti-Simpsons stump speech.

This, perhaps, is the giveaway. At one time, The Simpsons really did have its finger on America’s national pulse far more than their floundering one-term President. Given that the cast and crew are seemingly contractually obliged to insist (despite the evidence of their own eyes) that the show’s as good as it ever was, it’s possible they’ve started to believe their own hype. But even if their squad-based puff piece was done with all the wit and verve they’d once had – hard to imagine, but stay with it – when they turned their ire on Bush the elder, who got it in the neck worse than Clinton, he’d drawn first blood.

Despite Trump’s loose mouth, The Simpsons hasn’t been one of his targets, certainly not in the same way as Barack Obama or Omarosa. And frankly, he’d need to start personally killing people to rival the level of bile that’s been thrown in his direction – by contrast, the squad short wasn’t even particularly pointed. This isn’t even the crowning turd in the water-pipe. This is another piece of indistinct human offal, an undifferentiated patch in the long tail of slurry our species has produced.

[theironrepository]

The War Of Davies’ Ear

You know Alan Davies? Not personally, obviously, but you know of him – Jonathan Creek, progenitor of all those mildly autistic Scandinavian detectives, and otherwise that bloke cackling away off to one side of Stephen Fry. Yeah, you know, QI’s in-house butt-of-joke.

But did you know he once bit a tramp’s ear off? Because I didn’t! Not until I read a throwaway reference to it in an old issue of Viz. No, you wouldn’t expect it from him, that’s why it’s so remarkable. And without wishing to turn this into an outright condemnation, he did it outside the Groucho club, the upper-crust luvvie venue where Fry, in his day, snorted up half of Bolivia.

Davies himself is far from coy about the incident, having publicly stated “He called me a cunt several times. Or if it wasn't him, it was his mate. And, yes, I went for him and, yes, I did it in what turned out to be an amusing way.” Not quite ‘are you looking at my bird?...Why, what’s wrong with her?’, but not near as far away as you might expect.

So it begs the question, how did this not become the first thing everyone thinks of when they think of Alan Davies? Think of ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson, a man with plenty of lurid stories to his name – there’s the rape conviction, going bankrupt from spending too much money on keeping pigeons, the face tattoo, that immortal line “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot”, and not forgetting that he was the undisputed world heavyweight champion for three years – and yet biting Evander Holyfield’s ear is above all else what he’s remembered for.

It’s not to defend Tyson (who, unlike Davies, later apologised) when I say a man who punches people for a living being prone to violent tendencies shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. It should be far more of a shock to see the exact same behaviour coming from a frothy light entertainer.

How much more alarming would Davies’s assault have to have been to generate more than the gentle ripple it did? What if he then changed his name by deed poll to Fleshrender Davies? What if Fry, coked to the gills and already angry with society’s homophobia, had joined in and gouged the tramp’s eyes out?

Funnily enough, the one other reference to Davies’s bite I’ve ever found was in Stewart Lee’s book ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’, in which Lee noted “I am sure there are mitigating circumstances in this story – perhaps the tramp had an especially delicious ear – but it is too good an event not to use as a mile-high metaphor...once (alternative comedians) stood shoulder to shoulder with society’s outsiders. Now we view them as a late-night snack”.

The irony here is that Lee has a stand-up routine about the classic Top Gear lineup of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond kicking a tramp to death on the South Bank in a fit of high spirits, when it seems that of all the BBC’s various light entertainment bods, it’s far more likely that the QI dream team of Alan Davies and Stephen Fry would be the ones to engage in a late-night tramp-kicking. Should Davies get out of his depth with a particularly tough or volatile tramp, he would presumably bray for Fry – a large, hefty man and former jailbird – to wade in and rescue him.

Such an idea is reminiscent of the Paris exploits of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway – Joyce would provoke a fight, probably by the simple nature of being Joyce, and then cry to his much larger drinking buddy “Hit him, Hemingway, hit him!”. So it’s not impossible that they would have engaged in a tramp-kicking of their own – and given that Joyce and Hemingway were tearing up Paris in the 1920s, there’s an outside chance that the tramp in question could have been a young, penniless George Orwell, in the midst of the traumatic lived experience which would go on to become the basis of ‘Down And Out In Paris And London’.

Just imagine it – two of the greatest names in English literature, cursing voluminously in French as they put the boot into a third. By this equation, there’s a non-zero chance that the tramp Davies bit could successfully host a long-running panel show.

[theironrepository]

Dave Chappelle: The Fourth World War

So, it's official - Dave Chappelle's been cancelled. How funny it is that these days to be cancelled often means that somebody has returned to our screens after a long hiatus.

Doubtless you've already seen any number of articles wailing and gnashing their teeth over Chappelle's new Netflix special, Sticks & Stones. Vice (who, if you'll credit it, actually published interesting stuff once upon a time) literally exhorted people not to watch it. And, predictably as a sunset, all this fury from the bluechecked reviewer elite encouraged people to watch it in their droves.

This quickly turned into yet another example of the apparent disconnect between the fourth estate and real people. A screengrab from Rotten Tomatoes puts the story in simple terms - professional reviewers in aggregate put it at a sickly 30-something-percent. Meanwhile, the great viewing public's score briefly touched an unblemished 100 percent, and, at the time of writing, is still on fully 99.

But simplified stories can be deceptive, and this one is. The Tomatoes’ aggregated total is drawn from a mere sixteen reviews - comparatively slender in an age where anyone can spew their guts up onto the internet. I'm Rotten Tomatoes-approved, for instance, and I can promise you this doesn't immediately translate into Vice handing you large cheques to bitch about your drug problems or your torrid love life. Further, to rate something 'rotten' can be anywhere up to a rating of 49%, and even within the paid-up critics this was by no means the universal consensus, simply the majority.

So what gives? How did the opinions of sixteen people, barely enough to fill a bus, become another story about how you can't say anything these days? There was something similar at work with the latest retread of the Shaft franchise, where the unreconstructed masculinity of Shaft, as played by Samuel L. 'And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee' Jackson, is contrasted with the millennial softboy image of his estranged son. That work, too, has an alarming discrepancy between the critics' scores and the audience scores (again, 30-something to 90-something).

Much like Sticks & Stones, reviewers from a good number of established outfits (including, to my disgust, Rolling Stone, where Dr. Hunter S. Thompson spent his salad years) launched a broadside against Shaft's blatant lack of political correctness. Obviously I have some terrible news for them about the history of the Shaft franchise, and the blaxploitation genre as a whole. The point is, though, as with Sticks & Stones, this predictable response just encouraged more people to watch it. Why, it's almost as if they were doing it deliberately!

And they were. It's obvious they were. By the time I actually saw Sticks & Stones, I'd seen a good portion of those angry headlines - but I'd also seen how Netflix had tagged the special, and before even calling it 'comedy', they'd called it 'politically incorrect'. In other words, that's the exact brand it's chasing, and the journalistic class fell for it. Not all of them, but more than enough to whip up a narrative that those awful, censorious PC thugs are having a go at good old Chappelle.

This has been tried the other way round with less success. Most notably, there was the all-female Ghostbusters remake in 2016, whose audiences felt they were literally sticking it to the man - that is to say, the various sexists and traditionalists whose knees jerked at the very idea. Columbia Pictures wound up losing $125 million on that project, getting their fingers burnt so badly they declared it damnatio memoriae and now plan to reboot the series right back to its original continuity.

Ironically, the gender-flipped Ghostbusters’ approach was at bottom a reactionary thing - trying to make the best of the anti-PC opposition it received. Chappelle's new show, meanwhile, was clearly playing on this angle from the start. Even the name's a giveaway: 'sticks and stones', as in 'will break my bones but words will never hurt me'. That's the thesis that's thoroughly rejected by your archetypal ‘social justice warrior’, those of the mythical callout-culture mob, who, despite their alleged ubiquity, have done precisely nothing to hurt Chappelle's bottom line, and in fact probably helped the viewing figures.

The usual name for an entity like this that can only feign a threat is a paper tiger, so it was curiously on-the-nose to see Bill Burr come out with a Netflix special of his own literally called 'Paper Tiger' not two weeks later. Burr, too, attacks the right-on faction - if anything, more loudly and aggressively than Chappelle ever did. So the same audiences that lapped up 'Sticks & Stones' eagerly sucked this down too, awarding it fully 97%. But the critics loved it too, and as I write this their Rotten Tomatoes rating for 'Paper Tiger' sits prettily on 86%.

Were I being flippant, I'd put the difference there down to flat racism. But the two specials and their two frontmen are, despite everything, far too similar for that. Both are well-established figures on the comedy circuit, who've had TV shows of their own, and who are now good family men, who presumably forbid their own children to watch their material.

So why'd the critics prefer Burr's output? Dare I say it, he failed to rile the PC vanguard simply because Chappelle had beaten him to it. It's unlikely those journos figured out Chappelle had tricked them. Far more probable that they considered villainising another comedy special quite so soon would be getting dangerously samey. It’s called ‘news’, after all. And, indeed, the contrarian audiences who so delight in defying the nanny-press probably weren't in the mood either - they probably still watched Burr's one, just not out of spite.

Alternatively, it's because the critics didn't expect anything different from Burr. He's been on record and on stage many times before about his dislike of PC culture. It's not that Chappelle has previously been particularly PC himself, but - and here the flat racism raises its ugly head again - there is perhaps a feeling of wounded betrayal in seeing such sentiments coming from a gentleman of colour. Identity politics have always cut both ways, and there is a natural assumption that anyone in that sprawling, seething mass of people labelled 'minorities' must defer to a certain way of thinking.

The real irony of it all, though, is this: while 'Sticks and Stones' and 'Paper Tiger' weren't made by and for the PC party line, they aren't so very outrageous either. Speaking as a fan of Doug Stanhope and Pete and Dud's notorious Derek & Clive records, these contenders are by comparison family-friendly. Which is perhaps no surprise. Tweaking the noses of groups who are universally held to be over-sensitive and thin-skinned? Hell, that's easy mode...no wonder both Chappelle and Burr seem so cheerful.

[theironrepository]

Devvo Did Nothing Wrong

It recently emerged that Christian Webb, longtime collaborator of cult internet figure David Firth, lost his job as a primary school teacher when it emerged that he was the man who portrayed joke rapper MC Devvo, a sort of one-man Goldie Lookin’ Chain.

The reasoning cited for this decision was Devvo’s vulgar lyrics – that is to say, nothing Webb did while on the clock, acting in his capacity as a teacher. Are we to believe that this is reason enough for a man to lose his livelihood? When the likes of Marshall ‘Eminem’ Mathers, Kanye West, and Nicki Minaj, vulgar lyricists all, tell children to stay in school and study, it’s usually seen as a fluffy feel-good thing. Webb actually put something behind those words – or at least, he did, before some pearl-clutching official sent him his P45.

(Further, unlike the works of Em, Ye, and, um...Min, Devvo’s brand of vulgarity was always so ridiculous that nobody could construe it as sincere.)

One might suggest the vulgarity is compounded because Devvo is an offensive stereotype of the British working class, which he is – but so too were Ali G and half the characters Matt Lucas and David Walliams portrayed on Little Britain. Sacha Baron Cohen, Lucas, and Walliams have, to my knowledge, faced no negative consequences in their careers or otherwise for what was, when all’s said and done, greater displays of bigotry than anything Webb ever turned out.

(Lucas and Walliams, in fact, regularly blacked up – in the 2000s – and Cohen is likewise no stranger to a touch of boot-polish.)

I mention Sacha Baron Cohen with good reason, since a pupil’s parent was quoted as saying  “Everyone always said he was a brilliant teacher and I can see why people will stick up for him, but at the end of the day you wouldn’t want to have Ali G as your kid’s teacher”. A fairly naive argument – Jon Hamm, star of Mad Men, briefly worked as a teacher, and by all accounts didn’t spent that time drinking, smoking, and whoring.

Had Webb taught classes in character as Devvo, he’d have been fired long ago, and would probably be in prison. But, and I don’t know how this eluded the parent in question, he did not do that. Reality and fantasy remain as separate as ever. It’s curious that it’s usually children we reckon have trouble telling the difference, since the people who get worked up over works of fiction are almost invariably well over the age of majority.

A better argument would have been that this revelation could reflect badly upon King Edward Primary School, and upon Webb as a teacher. This sort of thing has always been applied very arbitrarily. For instance, when Henry Kissinger, the man behind the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile, gives a speech at a university it’s usually seen as a badge of honour. Put old Super K’s misdeeds in verse form, and apparently it’d be a different story.

Further, it’s been about ten years since the height of Devvomania. This is not some cold case, or Operation Yewtree-style investigation into historic sex abuses, this is a man who appeared in silly videos on the internet. Any reasonable statute of limitations on that expired long ago. Nonetheless, Webb himself kept his stage persona quiet, which raises the question of exactly which employee of King Edward Primary School recognised their colleague as MC Devvo – and how, exactly, they then introduced the subject to their superiors.

This is a fairly clear case of the Streisand Effect, that curious paradox where attempts to stifle a story expose it to a much wider audience. Nobody knew King Edward Primary School was employing the man who was once Devvo until it came out that they’d fired him because of it. Had they done nothing about that revelation, it would have generated barely a ripple, because the idea that people will settle down a bit and get a real, non-rapping job when their twenties are over isn’t particularly controversial. ‘Where are they now?’ Well, in Devvo’s case, he is (or rather, was) a well-liked teacher, good for him.

The broader point here is the chilling effect this has upon freedom of speech. Being a UK resident, Webb is perhaps lucky to not be facing actual criminal charges for having created material people found offensive (although those laws only ever seem to be used against the working classes – had Devvo not been a character, he would likely have received a hefty fine). This is at least not the actual legal system clamping down on speech. Nonetheless, it’s the sort of creeping authoritarianism that is the death of free and open societies.

In its way, this is even more insidious than state censorship. The justice system, at least, is open to the idea that people can change. The administration at King Edward Primary School appear to believe, against the evidence of their own eyes, that Webb could not – that his time as Devvo should hang around his neck forever, as a mark of Cain.

Many have condemned this kind of non-state censorship, although the focus in that regard is usually on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, neither of which have been at all shy about trying to stamp out stuff they disapprove of. With bodies both public and private trying to effectively regulate our personal lives, it begs the question: where does it end? In an increasingly politicised world, will we see banks freezing the accounts of anyone whose opinions they dislike? Will trains and buses refuse to stop for anyone who whips up too dank a meme? Laugh if you like, there’s probably a long list of these being circulated in the halls of power in Beijing.

Most great art has the potential to offend. The last thing we need is the artists behind it hesitating to create or publish it, with the fear of it coming back to ruin their life years later in the back of their mind. Even if it’s not great art they’re creating – even if it’s downright awful art – forcing them to not do so carries a far greater and more terrible cost.

[theironrepository]

The Ongoing Tragedy Of Michael Swaim

(originally written 21 ‎July ‎2019)

If you’re a writer, or even have that one idea you reckon would be a shit-hot novel and keep meaning to write down one day, you probably know that unique sting of seeing someone else do your idea back to you. The only way this can be worse is if it’s someone you sent a script to, now announcing a near-identical script with another name on it will be going into production, as Michael Swaim (who wrote for Cracked.com and its series After Hours back when it was good) alleges MoviePass Films has done.

The facts are these: Swaim claims that he and Abe Epperson were asked by Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films (now MoviePass Films) to write a ‘revenge-based’ screenplay featuring an ‘ex-Marine or ex-police officer’. They turned out a screenplay titled ‘Force of Nature’, a Die Hard-esque piece taking place in the aftermath of a hurricane. Shortly thereafter, Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films announced they had greenlit a film called ‘Force of Nature’, a Die Hard-esque piece taking place in the aftermath of a hurricane, with Cory Miller’s name attached as screenwriter.

Swaim responded with a Youtube video (since taken down due to legal threats, but mirrored elsewhere), in which he claimed that it’s Emmett/Furla/Oasis’s “MO to rip ideas off of young writers, and hand them to cheaper writers”, and went on to rag on them for casting Mel Gibson in the lead role instead of Nicholas Cage, which he considers “the greatest insult”.

As Swaim noted in his video, punch Emmett/Furla into Google, and one of the autocomplete options is ‘lawsuit’ - the company has a fairly colourful history, including a $6 million lawsuit in 2016 where they were accused of, of all things, racketeering and violation of the RICO act (a statute introduced for the prosecution of high-ranking Mafiosi). While that case was ultimately settled, at the time the opposing attorney stated that their “unlawful and intentionally unethical conduct follows a pattern that they have established over the past few years with numerous independent producers, whom they have swindled into doing business with them” - a summation which appears to tally with Swaim’s impression of the outfit.

Their phoenix-like transformation into MoviePass Films hardly covers them with glory either, considering they’re nailing their colours to the profoundly ill-regarded MoviePass film ticketing service. A swift browse of their social media reveals that even the lightest of puff pieces (‘looking forward to the weekend?’) receives a response almost entirely composed of customer service complaints. Like their new child company, they too have been targeted for legal action, the complaint being that, having been promised they could watch a film a day, customers were only able to view three films over ten months. In other words, MoviePass was unable to provide equivalent service to living opposite a drive-in theatre.

Plagiarism is a tough nut to prove, particularly in the media. Not too long ago there was a story going round that Netflix darling Stranger Things was plagiarised from Charlie Kessler’s 2012 film Montauk. Uniquely, this accusation was set to actually go to court, whereas the vast majority don’t even make it that far – so a judge felt there were enough similarities between Montauk and Stranger Things to hear it out. Nonetheless, Kessler ended up dropping the case and subsequently rescinding his accusation, insisting it was all the brothers’ own work, like the defendant at a Soviet show-trial praising the premier before they are shot and bulldozed into a mass grave.

An even more egregious example came with Joe Quirk’s novel The Ultimate Rush, about a rollerblade courier being chased by a corrupt policeman, which Quirk alleged was ripped off to create the forgettable Joseph Gordon-Levitt vehicle Premium Rush, a film about a bike courier being chased by a corrupt policeman. Quirk’s novel had been optioned for a film adaptation by Warner Bros., only for Columbia pictures to go ahead with Premium Rush shortly after that option expired. This, too, ultimately never made it anywhere in court, with the presiding judge noting that by having publicly published a novel, Quirk couldn’t claim that anyone was “impliedly bound to pay for using the ideas” found therein.

But Swaim did not publicly publish his screenplay. By his own account, he and Epperson wrote it at the request of Emmett/Furla, and sent it directly to them, so if one were to wonder just where the studio got the idea for their film ‘Force of Nature’ there is one very obvious option. This is not necessarily conclusive, there is the occasional strange coincidence where two similar projects come to be completely independently. There are unrelated comic strips in Britain and America called ‘Dennis the Menace’, both of which first appeared on the 12th of March in 1951. However, nobody’s ever accused either strip of plagiarising the other, possibly because America’s white-picket-fence Dennis couldn’t be more different from Britain’s surly, proto-punk Dennis. MoviePass Films’s iteration of ‘Force of Nature’ doesn’t come close to passing that sniff test.

Quirk’s case could at least be put down to it being a similar project with a similar name – rather than, in Swaim’s case, an identical project with an identical name. To stave off MoviePass Films’s presumably bloodthirsty lawyers, I will note that their treatment of ‘Force of Nature’ has significant differences from Swaim’s ‘Force of Nature’ - for instance, the lovable animal companion is a large dog instead of a horse. I leave it to the studio to point out any significant differences in narrative and tone, if indeed they can.

Unlike Kessler or Quirk, Swaim has no plans to take the issue to court due to a lack of funds. I need scarcely go into this perennial flaw of the legal system here – truly, it treats all men equally, just as the rich and poor alike are forbidden from sleeping rough under bridges. Swaim has, however, released a reading of his script ‘Force of Nature’ on Youtube, and I for one am, for legal reasons, confident that we definitely won’t see Mel Gibson stumbling through the exact same storyline while resisting the urge to say something anti-Semitic in about a year’s time.

[theironrepository]

So. Farewell Then Jussie Smollett

(originally written 22 ‎February ‎2019)

This January, Justin ‘Jussie’ Smollett – an actor-singer who cut his onscreen teeth as a child in The Mighty Ducks, now best known as a main character in Fox’s Empire – received a letter reading ‘Smollett, Jussie you will die’ in red crayon, accompanied by a crude drawing of a hanged man. A week later, two men attacked him in the small hours of the morning. Smollet claimed they declared ‘this is MAGA country’, used a series of hurtful slurs, and put a noose around his neck. What he didn’t say was that he had paid them some $3,500 to do so – and no, it wasn’t a sex thing.

As Smollett’s now been charged with wasting police time, it’s fairly safe legally to say that his version of events is a steaming load, especially since his lawyers now have bigger problems. Indeed, it was shaky from the start – the stolidly Democratic Chicago is about as far from being ‘MAGA country’ as it’s possible to imagine, and the inclusion of the noose, invoking the dark history of lynching (usually more associated with the rural south), is a little too on the nose.

This last summarises Smollett’s whole story, in that it proves too much. The threatening letter included a quantity of white powder, although this turned out to be as far from anthrax as it could get, and was in fact paracetamol. The attack itself was supposedly provoked by Smollett being both black and gay (intersectionality!), and the latter-day Klansmen meant to have committed it apparently recognised him from his role on Empire, vindicating the idea that even a deep-blue urban area is full of secret Trump-voting bigots – who, it seems, are avid consumers of black media. It’s reminiscent of a cartoon villain who has no motivations other than being awful, and who wants to destroy the world they’ll still have to live in.

However, the affair has reached further than one man lying to the police. A great number of figures from the entertainment world were quick to defend one of their own – but that’s just self-preservation. What really kicked things off were empty-suit Democratic Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker throwing their weight fully behind Smollett, and proposing an ‘anti-lynching bill’ - a fundamentally useless legislative proposal, seemingly purpose-built to waste time given that most people agree with the underlying principle, but its aims are already covered by the existing law against murder.

There’s plenty to say about the culture which birthed this mess – in particular the forever-woke twitter bluechecks who wanted sight unseen to believe it and clamped down on the dissent, desperate to find some – any – enemy deserving of their eternal scorn, and their bastard cousins, the politicians who sought to make hay from the whole affair but who have now, in a drastically mixed metaphor, ended up with egg on their faces. But to take this a level deeper, both these groups, and Smollett himself, are all products of the same perverse incentive. If one can gain status by defiantly battling prejudice, one does so, and if one has no prejudice around to fight – well, one creates some. Or goes to seek it out, as we saw in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America?, where half of Cohen’s victims were unknown private citizens who’d said something awful on social media.

(There’s the rub – even in these enlightened times, there’s still enough hatefulness around without needing to create any of your own.)

Prejudice, in the formulation above, is just the hot-button issue du jour. Think back a couple of decades to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, in which plenty of people – including future Presidents Richard ‘Dick’ Nixon and Ronald Reagan – made their bones as proud, principled anti-communists by bravely facing up to terrifying bolshevik revolutionaries like, um, Charlie Chaplin. To hear them tell it, the Soviet Union had cleverly installed communist spies in a place they would never be found – incredibly prominent roles in the media. “Why would they lie? What would they have to gain?” A whole lot, evidently.

The Chicago PD have formally claimed that Smollett staged the hoax in order to boost his profile – and you must admit, it’s worked. Had he whipped up a story that withstood a sniff test, it might not even have worked quite so well, as now there’s a plot to thicken – a cut-and-dried hate crime vs. this twisting tale of deception and deceit, which has propelled him from b-list actor to household name. You may have expected the phrase ‘post-truth age’ to bubble up in this article, but in a case like this truth is basically tangential – it’s all about attention, about clicks, that vulgar new currency and modern-day refiguring of putting arses on seats.

‘Currency’ is the key word here. What’s an abstract concept like the truth against keeping the lights on and a roof over your head? In this dog-eat-dog economy everyone needs an edge, and so many people live and breath based on the selling of insane lies – including all those outlets who faithfully repeated Smollett’s story, who don’t even have to suffer the indignity of criminal charges for it. Smollett has become the new public face of this, but in the current climate, you can hardly hold him up as some unique evil. To say his only crime was getting caught is only inaccurate in that he did, in fact, commit an offence – although quite a serious one if the threatening letter turns out to have been his doing too, as the feds really don’t like mail fraud.

The real criticism to be made of Smollett is that, far from being some right-on social justice crusader, he’s done more for racists and homophobes than any number of street lynchings. Indeed, if a street lynching happens tomorrow, the usual dead-eyed right-wing commentariat will be there to pour doubt upon it – and now, that’ll be as simple as them saying “it’s another Jussie Smollett”.

I remember, of course, another minor celebrity who had a stagnant media career, and attempted to breath life into it by putting about racially charged lies, which ended up being taken remarkably seriously by prominent politicians despite being obviously false, and propelled that figure’s profile to levels most of us couldn’t have imagined. Their name? Donald J. Trump. This is MAGA country, indeed.