Mal-motivation on the “Left”
A frustrated professional is a very dangerous human being.” Vivek Chibber. Not, in case, a golf professional, not a prostitute. A person of training. An educated person.
Michael Shannon played a part in The Bikeriders, called Zipco. A glorious movie about a motorcycle gang in the midwest. A working class movie in that everyone in it does that work. The speech is auto biographical about his life and he says he hates Pinkos. What’s a Pinko, asks the “artist” in the story, or the journalist, the observer the opinionator etc etc, who is mercifully not at the center of the movie. I say so without irritation, some very good movies are made with a character among the barbarians to speak for “us.” Michael says a Pinko is someone who doesn’t make anything with his or her hands. Actually he says he doesn’t trust them.
Well I thought: they don’t trust themselves either.
I have long listens to Vivek Chibber who talks about this stuff, this schism in us. He unfortunately observes from afar, talking about not us, but them. As if they were horses. Being a horse is no knock, to me, on average they are much more laudable and interesting to me than humans. But Vivek is saying there is no horse in Vivek. None. To Shannon’s point. Perhaps he doesn’t even cook, an issue, I have noticed, for the professional management class in general: the poor dears really do need servants.
I watched the Company Men too. A good ole romanza, three superrich execs get down loaded: they are fired by Craig T Nelson in that good ole evil Capitalist way we are so goshdarned angry with but continue to allow as if it were a natural law, and we’re off on a misery ride of how they deal with this shattering experience. They are our point of pity. Chris Cooper, Ben Affleck and Tommy Lee Jones play the “Men.” Zipco would have had a field day. Kevin Costner shows up as the grumpy tetchy maker of things with hands, I guess, to show the dangers of imagining the non Pinko among us has some secret to enlightenment. Vivek might have done a good job watching this mythology.
Well, Chris kills himself: typecasting, Tommy Lee has the revelation we Pinkos all wish fer. And Affleck displays oodles of charm as he winds his way through the pointless arrogances of the “executive” humbled.
I kept thinking these are some of my favorite actors, who might even have agreed to play in it because of the earnest attempt of the story. In the end the two surviving lads combine resources and decide to start a ship building operation and give work to the thousands of Shannons out there drinking away their sorrows in baas, it is set in Boston, and the film ends. The Pinkos win. In the last scene Ben swaggers on set full of his old boss bravura brandishing the best smile in Hollywood since Barak Obama left office: yes that is Hollywood!
I royally enjoyed the film, excuse the pun, and dug up Moneyball to cleanse the palate.
All of which is a long way round to examine the Pinko heavy world we live in, where Vivek has his they, saying they should be respected and not treated so unfairly by whom. You guessed it.
From Eddy Glaude to Charles Blow, other greatly admired men, we are to understand that the vote for anyone other than their vapid sister or her fading teen ager boss was evidence of racist misogyny. One almost expects to hear: well they didn’t go to Harvard, they didn’t write for the New York Times! Heck they don’t even read it! Pinkos unleashed!
The fun and profound part is the rage. “No I don’t make things with my hands, I make stuff up in my head, I have opinions, I am a thought leader, evidence? Look at my twitter account! Goddamn you!”
And were I to be classified I am one of them or Vivek’s us. The only difference is I know my Hamlet was no better than a good carburetor. Or it was as good as, high praise indeed.
With all this toxic ego flooding the Valley Silicon, all this musty superfluity, all this projection from the most hate filled class on to it’s many nemeses Vivek opens a door. This is not evidence of talent but of the hard work it takes to write books and the toughness to know propaganda when he sees it, putting him in the Boxer contingent in Animal Farm: the interesting one. Far far better and more useful than 1984, but ignored by the pigs that serve us our daily gruel of myth. It is fascinating, the collegiate insistence on 1984: the result to rage at, not the reason that implicates us.
It won’t last: they all eat pork and one day Boxers descendants will run free, where the wind blows, the river flows and the grass grows!