Sight Unseen

Decades ago a one-time Polish actor named Karol Wojtyla sat down in a screening room to watch a new film by Oliver Stone titled “Wall Street.” Wojtyla found most interesting the caricature of a wanton capitalist and corporate raider named Gordon Gecko, who memorably tells a young acolyte that greed is good. While at the time focused on lifting the pall of atheistic communism from his homeland and all nations in the Soviet orbit, the film, he believed illustrated the dangers posed by the opposite extreme — rule by wealth and material excess to the exclusion of all else. He imagined this as a threat to discretion, spirituality, and basic humility, cornerstones of civil society, or so he suggested in countless speeches and tracts. Though a profound conservative, he nonetheless worried that the acquisition of things would become the new opiate of the people, replacing a dependence that the founders of communism ascribed to religion. With Elon Musk dancing atop his boardroom table to celebrate his newfound status as a trillionaire — and there are others like him, including a somewhat-less-wealthy president — the Pole’s most troubling concerns have been realized. Greed is in all shapes good, as is a society mesmerized by consumerism. To paraphrase a leading techno-oligarch, corporations are “kingdoms” that provide the world with a plethora of “beautiful things.” In such a landscape, the standards of restraint and modesty have no meaning. Let greed be greed no matter the eloquent Pole’s warning. He is dead, his last breath drawn in 2005, and if you wish to find his tomb, visit the Vatican crypt and look for the name Pope John Paul II.

I have hit upon my next vocation. Fake outrage, hit me up and I’ll be there for you. Need me to howl in defense of the best president in American history? Gladly. Need me to back you up against those idiots who can’t see the obvious connection between apes and Black politicians? I’m all in. But first tell me where to get my skills. Does the greatest president hold fake outrage classes? Is there an online academy? Like, how do I get the right words, the right voice? I’m already trained in fake news. Will that help? All I’m asking for is a tryout. I already feel outraged that I don’t know what to do. I love hating on people. It comes naturally after listening to the great president. Just help me get to the next level, and I’ll despise you so much you’ll think it’s totally real. Thanking you in advance, I remain hypocritically yours.

In the mid-1970s, a college classmate wrote a novel set in the near future in which everyone suffered from what he dubbed information sickness. Burdened with too many choices and too much data, they would slip into paralytic depression. His book came to mind as I considered the fate of three teen sisters in India who jumped to their deaths from a ninth-floor apartment, suffocated by an addiction to video games. They had all but stopped attending school. Stories such as these are no longer rare as dependence on AI, games, smartphones, and social media deepens. Tech giants are fully aware of this slavery but prefer to steer clear because to warn of it might undermine profits. All know full well that if the web crashed, human identity would be compromised. Even the American president often forgoes speaking in favor of the scrolling language of posts. To me, this is information sickness become reality. Faced with a new world I can neither fathom nor understand, I choose instead to savor memories of boyhood in Washington, D.C., in which I would often secretly climb to the roof of my home and behold the world around me. I was Kid Charlemagne, and all I needed was my imagination and perhaps a "Road Runner" cartoon or two. Those days are gone forever, alas, and any souls poised on rooftops today may be there for an entirely different reason.

Product Defect is the term assigned to consumer goods thought to be either flawed or harmful. Usually, they are swiftly removed from circulation. The designation comes strangely to mind in the wake of a sharp federal court ruling that a five-year-old boy and his father be freed from immigration police custody and allowed to return home to Minnesota. ICE had erred and erred badly. But the judge went far further. Basic human decency had been violated, he said, and the man to blame was a leader who knew only to lust for unbridled power. This is where human product defect comes into play. The leader in question is incapable of understanding the concept of decency. The flaw is at the core of who he is and always has been. It cannot even be called malice because it is intrinsic. He lacks morality and conscience because his self-involved being never absorbed what should be an essential part of character. He should be removed from shelves not in response to his reactionary policies but because he poisons the commonweal. A five-year-old would know to behave more generously toward friends and enemies alike. But not this flawed adult, and the broken beat goes on.

The release of millions of heavily censored documents, photos, and videos regarding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein makes me reflect on the murky nature of voyeurism and moral accountability. Do the many victims of Epstein’s lurid schemes deserve some measure of redress for their suffering at the hands of rich and powerful men? In a word, yes, though the U.S. Department of Justice is unlikely to comply with their pleas. But what then to make of still images of well-known figures cavorting in Epstein’s high-roller orbit? Should men like Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Noam Chomsky, and then–Prince Andrew be detached from their accomplishments and tossed wholesale to the dogs? Are these indictments of their own accord because they captivate the imagination? Good questions, all. I remember being tossed from an 8th-grade class for rebutting the teacher’s characterization of Hitler as the greatest of monsters. I had insisted he should be labeled an evil genius instead. I thought likewise of Stalin. That three Kennedy brothers and a preacher named King had their way with women mattered less to me than their legacies. The Epstein story is graver and more appalling, and yet it too is tarred by boundless voyeurism. Is there a way around so much primordial lust among the wealthy and the potent, almost all of them ambitious men? The answer, I am sorry to say, is no. Call it the human stain.

The late U.S. senator and foreign policy expert J. William Fulbright once stated that no matter how repugnant a regime might be, America should not interfere in its internal affairs or seek to expunge it unless its leadership was blatantly trying to impose its values or system of government elsewhere. That was then, in the Cold War era, and this is a very different now, in which the newly minted chairman of a self-styled Board of Peace seeks to overthrow the Iranian regime, this doing a Venezuelan war dance in the Near East. It is worth remembering, however, that the peace mogul already has Iranian blood on his hands, if only by omission. Inexcusably, he recently urged anti-government protesters to intensify their uprising. If the Iranian Revolutionary Guard shot to kill, he said, his America would jump in to help them. He also encouraged the son of the late Shah of Iran, a longtime Washington, D.C., exile, to cheerlead the protests, and he did. He would soon come home to Make Iran Great again, a hardly original invocation. Emboldened by these pledges, dissenters openly confronted the Revolutionary Guard and were slaughtered by the thousands. Knowing what to say and what not to say is key in dealing with volatile situations. But Mr. Peace simply says and writes what pleases him. Consequences are immaterial. If nothing else, he is good for the morgue industry, and that of Iran will likely be replenished in the days ahead.

The late Italian populist Silvio Berlusconi, a real estate and media tycoon, derived most of his substantial support from the country’s southlands. Its denizens adored his brio. They rallied around his portrayal of Rome as a political capital that stole from the people, they applauded his baiting of all enemies as communists, and, thanks to them, he lorded over Italy for more than two decades and counted Vladimir Putin among his buddies. Those men who could operate outside the law he clutched to his bosom, but even he knew to stop short of renaming concert halls and gulfs. He understood at least the crassness and vulgarity of such actions. Donald Trump, admired by some Italians in the Berlusconi vein, does not. And the existing ‘last laugh’ now belongs to him.

The need by societies to find all-purpose culprits and bogeymen shifts by generation. A century ago the dastardly were Jews, and Nazis constructed a literal Final Solution. But the hatred also had intellectual roots, with T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and French writer Céline making cases for the menace posed by Jews. In the postwar came paranoia toward communists and communism, with America taking the “Better Dead than Red” lead. Countless politicians joined in, and the sentiments gave Richard Nixon his platform. Now the enemy is migrants, in America largely Hispanics, while in Europe they are African and Middle Eastern Muslims. As always, parties have been formed and tweaked to absorb and spread the loathing. In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has come front and center and may soon be a power broker in British politics. He wants migrants deported or jailed and has shrewdly recruited mainstream “legal” Muslims as spokesmen for his purging wants. In January, three senior members of the usually moderate Tories defected into his ranks. His popularity has grown since the reign of a US president who shares his outlook on the rhetoric of exclusion and who has made deportation a bloodsport. Farage led the successful Brexit movement and is not to be trifled with. Elsewhere, in France, the anti-migrant National Rally is favored in many polls as 2027 presidential elections near. Fueled by unfettered social media, anger and resentment are the emotions of choice across the board. The problem with all such talk is that it suggests the recovery of some pristine past is possible if nations just clean house. Truth is, no such past exists. Rage is a social constant, all the more so in a tribal time, and new bogeymen will always and surely replace the old. Purity is a lie of history. And yet there sit Farage, Marine Le Pen, and an American president, avid as vultures with millions of stirred-up purists in their thrall.

Europeans are also struggling to come to grips with a second fatal shooting of a civilian by Customs and Immigration police in troubled Minneapolis. Partisan finger-pointing aside, it can seem to some that deportation-happy America is, because of a president’s harsh views, at war with its own people. Many no longer recognize the nation they embraced in solidarity after the 9/11 attacks. In Italy, critics of the new mood see parallels to the 1924 Giacomo Matteotti killing, in which Mussolini’s Fascist police murdered an opposition politician and opened the door to more systematic oppression. In any event, the large contingent of would-be tourists to America are beginning to void their plans. They are for the first time in memory afraid of walking into harm’s way. The damage this president is causing to his nation’s global reputation is incalculable, his ICE raping the ghost of Emma Lazarus, RIP. 

Ukraine’s embattled president Volodymyr Zelensky finds himself stuck without recourse between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand is a mean and bullying American president who wants him to sign a peace deal with Russia no matter the cost, in this way garnering credibility for America’s pay-per-view Board of Peace. On the other side are the European Union and NATO, which support Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but have none of America’s military clout. This would once have been an implausible paradox since it was postwar America that engineered NATO and by doing so helped usher in the EU. All that of course is now but a memory as this president — I have dubbed him Strangelove — has time and again expressed his disdain for “horrible” Europe, a continent he sees as contaminated by migrant Muslims and assorted darkies. This ugly collision helps explain Zelensky’s speech at the Davos summit, which despite his White House humiliation of a year ago, saw him talk as if from Strangelove’s lap. Europe was weak and fractured, he growled. It could never become a true world power. It’s no surprise the remarks came soon after a private session with the American don. Saddest in this sad landscape is that postwar Europe was fashioned for two reasons: to confront the then–Soviet Union and to limit European rearmament to guard against a future new Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. So it is that the EU, intended as a federation of economically linked but still sovereign nations, is now mocked for not assuming Nazi-style arrogance. The result, witness the Greenland debacle, is a loss for all involved, a loss that may cost the United Nations its job, just as re-armament and Axis powers fully struck down the League of Nations before it, after which came a detail known as World War II.

A friend advised me recently not to exaggerate the extent of my maladies. I should not “catastrophize,” he said. This word immediately brought to mind how pliant is the English language. One-time verbs become nouns in a heartbeat. A football player who once would have been praised for his toughness is now admired for his physicality. Other somewhat nastier changes are also afoot. Presidents and governors delivering four-letter obscenities in public is now largely accepted, or at the very least tolerated. Unfettered anger is also now commonplace, a subject I will address at another time. Also, America’s love affair with money and profit has made new verbal inroads. To be responsible for something gone amiss is to “own it.” On much of social media, adolescent emotionalism holds the high, or low, ground, with histrionics and hatred often in the scribbled mix. All of which suits an inarticulate president just fine. He can catastrophize at will and delight excited supporters. He’s a straight-talker, and if he wishes to own Greenland (“a very small ask . . . for a piece of ice”) or detain the whole of Minnesota he must be right, and so it is that the New World Order meets new world English. In his social media behavior, the president is astute. He knows how to tap into these raging times, while managing a reality show that never hurts for ratings. His online “Truth” may be anything but, I agree, but oh does he like owning the fiction.

There is little to say about Greenland that has not been said and repeated. It is a sovereign land governed jointly by the people of Greenland and Denmark. But this of course means nothing to the geriatric child who is America’s incumbent president and who I will henceforth refer to only as Strangelove, since he is painfully suited to caricature. He wants porridge and pudding (and the Nobel Peace Prize) served to him in bed. Vex this infantile pettiness, and he will order his ravenous backyard dogs to eat you alive. A child has no pity, only cravings. America brought this spoiled brat upon itself and now the broken world at large must reap the winter whirlwind. As my usually mild-mannered author friend told me recently, “America is done.” First is also last, at least among those postwar Europeans who once deeply embraced the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty.