In 1997’s brilliant L.A. Confidential, Guy Pearce’s recently disillusioned straight laced cop explains to Kevin Spacey’s shifty veteran why he wants to do the right thing for once:
Pearce: Rollo was a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty, and he shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I just made the name up to give him some personality.
Spacey: What’s your point?
Pearce: Rollo Tamasi’s the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it.
For a 1997 movie, based on a 1990 novel, set in the 1950s, the idea of a purse snatcher who got away with it makes perfect sense. In both the 1950s and the 1990s, there was a widespread belief that even if things at the top weren’t run perfectly cleanly, they were at least run competently. It was at the bottom that the real injustices took place, mean and ugly crimes that served no purpose other than destruction. Even in a story that involves less than scrupulous public officials of every level, there’s never any doubt that at the very least the assholes in charge are good at what they do, and if the freeway gets built with dirty money, well, at least it got built. Here in the early twenty-first century we can no longer afford such comforting illusions.
The people in charge now, running the gamut from public to private, profit to non, have proved themselves to be both corrupt and incompetent. Large organizations are the pillars of American life, and you’d be hard pressed to find one that hasn’t experienced either a collapse or a major scandal in the last twenty years or so. Utility companies crash the power grid and can barely maintain their plants. Telecom companies spy on and screw over their customers at every opportunity. Churches steal money and rape children. Banks collapse, swindle everyone, and destroy whole industries while they’re at it. Journalism debased itself into a debt ridden farce incapable of policing its own, much less anyone else. And then there’s the government. If there was even a golf cleat’s worth of justice to our political-media systems, Ben Bernanke would be living in a lean-to in Appalachia and Alan Greenspan would have been set adrift in the middle of the Atlantic.
Speaking of our financial overlords (a/k/a the people currently preaching sacrifice in between meals that cost more than many citizens spend on food monthly), on Monday Paul Krugman took them to task in a column that was exceptional even by his towering standards:
The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.
It’s one thing to screw up badly. It’s quite another to screw up badly and then loudly proclaim that it isn’t your fault. It’s a final and altogether more grotesque thing to screw up badly, loudly proclaim that it isn’t your fault, and then demand to be put in charge of the clean up no questions asked. Krugman largely limits himself to the economic catastrophe of the last three years and the budget hysteria currently sweeping the West, but it’s not hard to see the same pattern holding for a far more diverse set of festering problems.
We have an utterly failed drug war, the costs of which are borne entirely by the middle and lower classes but the policies of which are dictated by people wealthy enough to be immune to the laws. We have a looming planetary catastrophe on our hands, and the tiny slice of people in a position to do something about it have been bought (cheaply, it should be noted) by the even tinier slice of people who benefit in the here and now from inaction. We have a financial system that has wrecked the economy several times over the last twenty years, but the people responsible are apparently not only too important to prosecute, but too important even to replace.
And those are just the political and economic failures. Broaden your view a little further and you can see the same foul mechanism at work in every endeavor. Law schools promise their prospective students that a degree will guarantee them a job, when the truth is anything but. Orchestras and newspapers pay management handsomely and then declare bankruptcy instead of just firing management and starting over. Failed school systems keep hiring administrators who failed elsewhere. Hell, the stink of failed leadership blaming others for its own mistakes clings even to the NFL lockout. In that case, the owners unilaterally demanded that the players take a serious pay cut, but pointedly refused to show them the accounting they said made it necessary. Wherever one looks in this country someone who’s already connected and powerful is getting away with it.
More than any of the other faults of our society, our inability – our disinterest even – to hold the powerful to account weighs us down. The same way that nobody deserves to die over a snatched purse, no society deserves to be destroyed so a few thousand well positioned people can keep their cushy jobs and earn a few extra billion dollars.
