Suckers

When you look around the poker table and can't figure out who the sucker is, the sucker is you.

I’ve spent the last few weeks watching Homeland. (In fact, I wrote an ode to that show’s Saul Berenson here.) One of the things that strikes me as being true about the show, although I have no way of knowing this since I am not in the CIA*, is the way in which it combines the hard and messy business of intelligence gathering with the human predilection for pettiness, infighting, and self-delusion. It’s a show about spies, yes, but more than that, it’s a show about the cost to one’s soul of doing business.

Most days, we are all doing business in one form or another. The commodities we trade may not be as sexy as foreign secrets, but all of us are daily forced to trade pieces of ourselves – time, attention, self-respect – in the furtherance of some aim. Often, but not always, that aim is financial. Often, but not always, the cost of doing business is affordable. But the thing that strikes me about Homeland, and that I see reflected in the larger world, are the people for whom no cost is too high. They will happily pay whatever it costs to get what they want - and they usually pay with other people’s money.

I was raised to believe that the world operates with a rulebook. I remember Barack Obama invoking this idea all the time when he used to say, “If you're willing to work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to find a good job, feel secure in your community, and support a family.” It’s a sentiment I suspect most people agreed with, but the reason I suspect the line played so well because those same people were coming to believe that it was no longer true (if it ever was).

Increasingly, it feels like I live in a world of suckers. My business, the business of show, is on strike because the rug’s been pulled out from under us. What used to be a fair trade between the hard work of craftspeople who write and act in film and television, and the studios that finance those ventures, has eroded to the point where union members are having a hard time surviving. They join a long list of workers who have found their hours cut, wages shrunk, pensions disappeared, healthcare eroded. And the people in charge really do not seem to care. What is the cost to their soul of doing business? I suspect, for them, the cost is very low.

Is this you?

The older I get, the more amazed I am at how mendacious, venal, and corrupt so much of the world appears to be. Worse, I find myself wondering whether I’m a fool for not being as sordid as them.

The promise we made to ourselves as a nation in the first half of the previous century – the promise that Barack Obama talked about – no longer seems to apply. To get ahead now, it increasingly feels like you’ve got to traffic in the underhanded. You don’t just have to be smarter than the other guy, you’ve got to be more ruthless.

We see it all the time in our politics: one half of our body politic exemplifies this greedy, “I got mine” mentality. They elevate the worst among us to positions of power because they’ve come to believe that the most brazen among us are the ones we should look to as role models. If they are wealthy, it is because they won. If they get away with their lies, it is because nobody cares about the truth. If they are corrupt, it is only because they are getting what they are due. It’s savagery as civility. It’s breaking us.

There’s a saying in poker that if you look around the table and can’t figure out who the sucker is, the sucker is you. I get that now.

Probably the world has always been this way and I was just too stupid to realize. There have always been grifters and snake oil salesmen and petty thieves. There have always been people willing to push somebody else’s face into the mud in order to cross the street without dirtying their boots. I guess I just thought there were fewer of those people than it turns out there are.

Now look, I’m no saint and don’t pretend otherwise. I’ve done plenty of things in my life for which I am ashamed; the difference between me – and probably you – is that we feel shame. I don’t think the people I’m talking about do. I don’t think they feel much of anything at all.

Do whatever it takes to buy a boat.

Public opprobrium used to act as some kind of deterrent. Now we’ve got an ex-president saying his federal indictments are “badges of honor.” We’ve got a Democratic presidential candidate gaslighting the media by saying his anti-Semitic statement was misconstrued and that the video we watched wasn’t what we watched at all. We’ve got a thin-skinned sociopath running one of our biggest social media sites as a machine of personal vengeance in the name of “free speech.” We’ve got innumerable examples of bad behavior being lauded and feted and treated as a sign of greatness. Our worst pathologies have become our greatest assets.

And for what? Where is all of this leading us? What is the end game? What is the world these people are trying to build? I don’t think even they know. When one rejects the very notion of a “common good” one is left with “every man for himself.” What does that world look like? Feudal Europe but with personal spacecraft? Where are we heading?

I like Homeland because it doesn’t pretend to have any answers about the cost of keeping the nation safe. At least, though, its heroes seem to aspire to something. They are at least able to tell themselves that their ends are noble, even if they acknowledge that their means are not. In the rest of the country, though, it feels like the ends being pursued by a substantial percentage of our countrymen are just that – a dead end. I don’t want to live like that. So why am I the one having trouble sleeping at night?

*This is, of course, something somebody in the CIA would say.