Category: politics

Other means

Early in the federal indictment of former President Trump that was released yesterday, special counsel Jack Smith admits that Trump, “like every American,” has the right to say whatever he wants about the 2020 presidential election—and even has the right to lie about it. But it was a crime, Smith asserts, for Trump to use lies to obstruct and distort the tallying and certifying of election results. Smith goes on to indict Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct the certification of presidential election results, and conspiracy to deprive Americans of their right to vote.

The distinction between lying that is free of legal consequences and lying in order to commit fraud and obstruction isn’t a terribly subtle one, but there are going to be people who will pretend they don’t understand it. If Trump has the right to lie to NBC News, they will ask, why doesn’t he also have the right to lie to Georgia’s Secretary of State about Georgia’s election results? So let’s get this out of the way: If I announce at my favorite local gay bar that Ryan Gosling and I have just gotten married, and I succeed in making all my friends jealous, I’m not committing a crime. But if Gosling and I file our taxes together, falsely claiming on the forms that we’re married, in an attempt to pay less tax than we would otherwise have to, it’s fraud. And it’s still fraud even if we don’t get away with it.

There are probably also going to be people who claim that Trump and his conspirators may not have been aware that the claims they were making were untrue. Smith’s indictment shivs that defense pretty brutally. In paragraph 30 (¶30) of the indictment, to take just one bald-faced example, John Eastman, aka “Co-Conspirator 2,” acknowledges in an email that he and Trump have learned that some of the allegations in a verification they have signed are “inaccurate” and that signing a new verification “with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate”—and then he and Trump go ahead and put Trump’s signature on the new verification anyway.

Yesterday’s indictment isn’t as much fun to read as Smith’s earlier indictment of Trump for withholding classified security documents, partly because a more serious matter is at stake (national security secrets are important, but they’re not as important as the right to vote, and Trump seems to have been treating the secret documents as memorabilia, anyway, a motivation so entertainingly venal that it’s hard to treat the earlier matter with the gravity it deserves) and partly because the way Trump and his allies lied—over and over again, shamelessly—is exhausting. The catalog of their lies in Smith’s indictment is practically Homeric. They lie, are told they are lying, and then tell the same lie again. Remember the years we spent trying to argue in good faith with people who were repeating lies in bad faith? These are those people. “It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership,” (¶25) admits a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, in a private email, dismayed by his team’s repeated losses in court and exasperated that the team’s political strategy obliges him or her to pretend publicly to believe in repeatedly debunked claims.

The particular lie that pushed this senior advisor into venting was about election workers at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Giuliani (“Co-Conspirator 1”) told the lie to Georgia state senators on December 3, 2020 (¶21), the lie was publicly debunked by the Georgia secretary of state’s chief operating officer on December 4 (¶23), Georgia’s attorney general told Trump there was no evidence for the claim on December 8 (¶24), Giuliani told the lie again in a public hearing before a committee of Georgia’s state representatives on December 10 (¶26), Trump’s acting attorney general and acting deputy attorney general told Trump the actions at State Farm Arena had been “benign” on December 15 (¶27), Trump’s chief of staff told him the election tallying at State Farm Arena had been “exemplary” on December 22 (¶28), Trump nonetheless tweeted that Georgia’s election officials were “terrible people” who were hiding evidence of fraud on December 23 (¶28), Trump repeated the lie to his acting attorney general and acting deputy attorney general on December 27 (¶29), Trump signed a verification incorporating the lie on December 31 (¶30), and Trump repeated the lie one more time on January 2, 2021, to Georgia’s secretary of state, during the infamous conversation when Trump said he was looking to “find” 11,780 more votes (¶31).

After Giuliani told the lie in Georgia’s House of Representatives on December 10, “the two election workers received numerous death threats,” Smith observes (¶26). The identities of the people who made those death threats are very likely unknown, but almost certainly neither Trump nor any of his co-conspirators made the threats.

Why are they nonetheless part of Smith’s indictment? If the case ever reaches trial, Trump’s lawyers may try to argue that he shouldn’t be held responsible for threats made by a third party. But keep in mind the distinction that is the crux of the case, between lying for the sake of vanity or entertainment and lying in order to obstruct or impede the workings of democracy. A death threat is not an innocuous speech act. It is a promise to use violence. A public lie about a government employee or official, if a reasonable person would expect the lie to trigger death threats, is therefore a kind of force, applied on a government employee or official with respect to the performance of their duties. “An act of force to compel our enemy to do our will”: that’s Clausewitz’s first (if less famous) definition of war. With good reason, the laws in any well-ordered republic forbid acts of war between politicians and/or citizens. Hobbes writes, in Leviathan, that “because all signs of hatred, or contempt, provoke to fight, . . . we may . . . , for a law of nature, set down this precept, that no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture, declare hatred, or contempt of another.” In a state of war, one isn’t necessarily bound by the laws of nature, Hobbes writes, and we don’t want to be living in a state of war.

On November 11, 2020, Trump disparaged a Philadelphia City Commissioner who had said there was no evidence of voter fraud in Philadelphia, and the commissioner and his family were sent death threats (¶42). And on January 6, 2021, famously, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” and one minute later, the Secret Service felt obliged to evacuate Pence to a secure location. Rioters who broke into the Capitol that afternoon chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!” (¶111–13). If Trump knows anything about himself, and it may be the only thing about himself he knows, it is that he has a gift for summoning and directing the rage of his followers. It is his instinct in a crisis, almost a reflex. Words for him are instrumental, not representative. He knew what he was doing.

The prospect of violence recurs at two other moments in the indictment. On January 3, a deputy White House counsel warned Jeffrey Clark (“Co-Conspirator 4”) that if Trump were kept in power on the basis of false claims of voter fraud, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Clark replied, “Well, . . . that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” Clark, in other words, looked forward to repressing with military force any protest of the power grab he and his conspirators were trying to effect.

In its legal specifics, the scheme to keep Trump in power depended on the theory that Pence had the authority to reject or return to the states their slates of legitimate electors. On January 4, John Eastman acknowledged to one of Trump’s senior advisors that no court was likely to back the theory, and the advisor warned Eastman that by drumming up public fury on the strength of a theory that could never be put into effect legally, Trump and his allies were “going to cause riots in the streets.” Eastman replied that it wouldn’t be the first moment in American history when violence was needed to protect the republic (¶94). Eastman, in other words, looked forward to bolstering with street violence a legal theory he conceded was unjustifiable.

Clark looked forward to putting down rioters, and Eastman looked forward to being backed by them, but both knew that through lies they were welcoming violence into politics. Clausewitz’s second, more famous definition of war is “a continuation of political activity by other means”—the implication being that politics has its own means. To maintain the rule of law, politicians who go beyond them must be kept out of politics, if not sent to jail.

A novelist visits the Trump Presidential Library

On Thursday, 8 June 2023, the Department of Justice indicted former President Donald Trump on charges of willful retention of national intelligence documents, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and lying to the FBI. On Friday, 9 June, the indictment was unsealed. Like many people curious about American politics, I printed out a PDF of the indictment on Friday night and read it a few times over the weekend. Here’s the DOJ’s own version, which has the photographs in color, if you’d like to read it and haven’t yet.

A lot of pixels have been toggled already over the political and legal ramifications, but I found myself thinking about a different angle: If Trump were a character in a novel, what would the scenes recounted in the indictment say about him? Some are quite vivid.

The genre of the indictment is odyssey: banker’s boxes full of presidential papers take a journey into exile, which ends, for some but far from all of them, in an eventual homecoming back into federal custody. Trump helped to pack the boxes in January 2021. When he left the White House, he had them moved to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort. The indictment doesn’t say how many boxes there originally were, but I think I count eighty-one in the photo on page 10 of the indictment, which shows them stacked on the stage of a Mar-a-Lago ballroom (the first four rows seem to be two boxes high, and of these, the front row is eleven boxes across, the second row ten across, the third nine across, and the fourth seven across; at the very back of the stage, there also seems to be one stack of three boxes and another stack of four). According to the indictment, the boxes spent January, February, and March 2021 on the ballroom stage.

Why did Trump take so many papers with him when he left the White House? It seems doubtful he meant to read through them. He doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would want to come to a deeper understanding of the past he had just lived through. “He doesn’t really read anything,” said one of the intelligence officials who struggled to keep Trump informed while he was in office. I suspect that very few of the papers were written by him, or even written on by him, in his childlike black-marker all caps. The best that can be said is that the papers happened to him. Or that they constitute evidence of things that happened to him. In the photo on page 14 of the indictment, where a few of the banker’s boxes have spilled open, what’s visible are front pages of the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times; color print-outs of him speaking to the press on a tarmac; the print-out of a webpage with a headline that reads, in part, “honesty about security clearances” (a nice piece of sortes webiana; it could be this article); and a piece of paper redacted with a long black rectangle at the top that obscures what the DOJ calls “visible classified information.” The last document is the kind that has put Trump in legal jeopardy. According to the indictment, this particular one was labeled “Secret” and “Five Eyes,” was dated 4 October 2019, and was concerned with “military capabilities of a foreign country.” Out of 102 documents labeled Secret, Top Secret, and Confidential that the DOJ seized from Trump, the DOJ has itemized thirty-one that it is charging him with illegally retaining, and the DOJ has assigned this particular document the number 8. In an issue of his newsletter Pwnallthethings, Matt Tait has made educated guesses about the specific contents of the thirty-one documents listed in the indictment, though he hasn’t (yet) made headway with #8.

Maybe Trump thought of the documents as trophies. That could be a powerful motivation for a personality like his. After all, what O. J. Simpson went to prison for, in the end, was not murder but the theft at gunpoint of pieces of memorabilia that he felt belonged to him.

Whatever the nature of Trump’s attachment to these papers, it’s safe to say that people close to Trump saw through it. By April 2021, some of the boxes had been put in Mar-a-Lago’s business center, and on 5 April 2021, according to the indictment, “Trump Employee 1” asked “Trump Employee 2,” believed to be a woman named Molly Michael, if it would be okay to move the boxes out.

“Woah!!” Molly Michael replied, using the internet’s preferred spelling. “Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his ‘papers.’ ”

Note the scare quotes. In another exchange later the same day with Trump Employee 1, Michael’s contempt for the “papers” is even more pronounced. When Trump Employee 1 asks if he can put into storage a few things stored in the business center that aren’t paper, Michael replies, “Yes, anything that’s not the beautiful mind paper boxes can definitely go to storage.”

“Beautiful mind paper boxes.” It has been suggested that she is alluding to a scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind in which the hero, a mathematician who has descended into schizophrenia, is revealed to have covered the walls of his study with newspaper clippings and connected them with dark lines while diagramming his conspiracy theories. But I think it’s more likely that she’s using the movie title as shorthand to refer to Trump’s habit of praising his own intellect; he has famously called himself as “a very stable genius” who has “a very good brain.” Michael could be deploying both possible meanings, of course. In any case, she’s not fooled.

I don’t think anyone is ever fooled by Trump. The Dunning-Kruger effect notwithstanding, I think even his ardent supporters know he isn’t literate or well informed about the world, and that his only accomplishments are in the dark sports of bullying, misleading, and emotional manipulation. They like it that he’s mediocre and seethes with grievance about it; that he wasn’t even able to live off an inheritance in a humane, damage-limited way; that despite being given great wealth and opportunity, he has remained small. The better to represent resentment with, my dear. The psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion wrote about “the hatred of learning by experience,” that is, the wish that people harbor for magical, instant solutions, for shortcuts that bring the rewards of development without any of the tedium and effort that are customarily required: the dream of becoming rich by winning the lottery, of becoming strong by joining an armed militia, of becoming intelligent by having intelligence reports given to you. In Trump, the hatred of learning by experience had an impossible triumph. He wouldn’t mean the same thing if he had become the leader of the free world by working for it.

Trump’s supporters probably like it, therefore, that he doesn’t understand how the documents he collected function in a bureaucracy, and that he is willing and able to use his ignorance to distort the testimony that the documents do offer. For example, on page 15, the DOJ’s indictment quotes from a meeting at Trump’s Bedminster club on 21 July 2021 between Trump, a writer, a publisher, and two Trump staffers, one of whom, believed to be Margo Martin, recorded it. At the time of the meeting, Gen. Mark Milley, formerly chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had recently told the press that during Trump’s last days in office, he had taken steps to stop any attempt by Trump to start a war. During the interview at Bedminster, Trump brandishes a plan to attack Iran that was prepared by the Defense Department, claiming that the plan was Milley’s and that the document detailing it proves that it was Milley not Trump who flirted with war. “This totally wins my case, you know,” Trump says. In fact, the plan had been drawn up earlier, when the chair of the joint chiefs was Joseph Dunford, and even if it had been produced under Milley’s chairmanship, it’s the responsibility of the Defense Department to draw up such contingency plans—there are almost certainly detailed plans for an invasion of Canada on a hard drive somewhere in the Pentagon at this very moment—and there’s nothing exceptional about the document itself. What’s exceptional is that it ended up in Trump’s hands, because that means that, while Trump was President, he asked to see it. In other words, if the document is evidence of anything, it’s evidence that Milley was right to be anxious that late in his regime, Trump might have been considering war. (This recorded conversation more or less proves the Justice Department’s case against Trump, by the way, because during it, Trump acknowledges that “This is secret information,” acknowledges that “as president I could have declassified it,” and acknowledges that “Now I can’t [declassify it], you know, but this is still a secret.” As the indictment drily comments, “At the time of this exchange, the writer, the publisher, and TRUMP’s two staff members did not have security clearances or any need-to-know any classified information about a plan of attack.”)

Though in this one instance, Trump seems to have tried to use a classified document as a political weapon, the primary meaning of the papers seems to have approached the sentimental. On 24 June 2021, Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, texted Molly Michael two photos from the Mar-a-Lago storage room, showing banker’s boxes spilling their papers onto the floor. Two texts came from Michael’s phone in reply: “Oh no oh no” and “I’m sorry potus had my phone.”

“Oh no oh no”: an immediate, almost instinctual response. Was the injury inflicted on Trump by the sight of the spilled papers so sharp that he forgot whose phone he was holding? Or maybe he’s just in the habit of casually overwriting the identity of those around him. In the second text, Michael distances herself from the expression of dismay that Trump sent through her phone. She wants it to be clear to Nauta that she, at least, knows it’s not a tragedy if a box neglected in a storeroom has tipped over. Solicitude for things is embarrassing, especially when the things are being used to prop up vanity. Or maybe what’s embarrassing is when vanity so baldly takes a place in the psyche that should be reserved for emotions felt for people. In a text exchange reported on page 23 of the indictment, a “Trump family member,” probably Trump’s wife, Melania, also shows little patience with Trump’s investment in the boxes. “Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane,” this family member writes on 30 May 2022. “We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.” The papers are just stuff, to the people around Trump. In a kind of self-defense, his intimates deny the papers have any larger import.

They know he doesn’t understand the papers, that the papers have no meaning for him beyond the greatness he thinks they reflect on him. In January 2022, Trump returned 15 boxes of papers to the National Archives, which, after the archivists found classified material in the boxes, triggered the DOJ’s investigation—and if you’re keeping score, left about 66 boxes in his keeping. Between 23 May 2022 and 2 June 2022, Nauta moved roughly 64 boxes from the Mar-a-Lago storage room to the rooms in Mar-a-Lago where Trump and his family live, at Trump’s request. Then, at around lunchtime on 2 June, Nauta and another employee returned 30 boxes to the storage room, in anticipation of a visit from “Trump attorney 1,” who has been identified as Evan Corcoran, who was arriving that afternoon to look through the boxes for government documents marked as classified, in response to a subpoena from the Department of Justice.

For the DOJ’s purposes, what’s telling here is that 34 boxes were withheld from Corcoran, deliberately and at Trump’s direction, so that Corcoran was never able to inspect them. For an understanding of Trump’s relationship to the papers, however, it’s perhaps also telling that Trump thought he could meaningfully sort through so many boxes in just a few days. Of the 64 boxes brought to Trump before Corcoran’s visit, 50 were brought to him on 30 May, and 11 on 1 June. In less than three days, therefore—and he probably didn’t spend the entirety of any of the three workdays on the task—Trump made a meaningful selection from more than sixty boxes of papers? On what basis? If he had been scanning only for security markings, maybe he could have grabbed most of the papers so marked, but if that had been his goal, why not let Corcoran see everything? No, Trump’s time with the papers was more personal. “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” Trump told Corcoran, according to Corcoran’s notes. What kind of selection was Trump making? Was he deciding which pages he could bear to surrender? There’s a hint here that he felt some mystical connection to the papers. During an earlier sorting, in January 2022, in advance of Trump’s surrender of fifteen boxes to the National Archives, Nauta seems to have helped Trump with the sorting; toward the end of the process, Nauta had to ask a colleague for “new box covers,” explaining that “They have too much writing on them…I marked too much.” The markings probably had to do with the contents of each box; it’s possible that the markings made it dangerously obvious that Trump and Nauta knew they were playing with classified material. In late May and early June, however, Trump seems to have done his sifting alone. Maybe his work was sped up by his having previously worked through the boxes with Nauta in January. Still, not even a crackerjack professional archivist at the top of his game could process more than sixty banker’s boxes of paper in less than three days. At best what Trump was doing, I suspect, was childish magic. A sorting by touching: one for me, one for them.

The odyssey of Trump’s papers doesn’t come to a neat conclusion. The indictment reports that on 3 June 2022, “NAUTA and others loaded several of TRUMP’s boxes along with other items on aircraft that flew TRUMP and his family north for the summer.” Presumably these boxes contained the papers most precious to Trump. Had these boxes returned south by the time the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago on 8 August 2022? At the time of the raid, Trump was in the New York area. If the precious papers were with him then, they would have escaped the FBI’s trawl. Perhaps they were seized by the FBI in a search of a Trump property in New York or New Jersey that hasn’t yet been reported. But they might still be in his hands.

Information hygiene

[This post is also available as an issue of my newsletter, Leaflet.]

In the early onset of adulthood, one often samples reckless hedonism—drinking away weekends, maxing out credit cards, counting peanut butter swirled into spaghetti as “dinner,” punctuating relationship conflict with cigarettes—but the obverse of utterly unimpeded freedom is that one is free to die alone in a cancer ward if one really wants to, and at some point, there is usually an accommodation with prudence and fear, and one sets about acquiring boring, sensible habits. Never drink juice or soda, for instance. Just buy baby shampoo, because then you don’t have to find a new brand every six months. One even becomes grateful for habits like brushing one’s teeth that come as it were pre-installed.

Information hygiene is one such regimen. It was probably easier in the era I grew up in. Sources of information then had distinct edges and well-known, widely agreed upon reputations, in part because information was almost always delivered in a physical form. By and large, in those days, the only way to read a news article in, say, the Evening Gazette of Worcester County, Massachusetts, was to read it in the ink-on-paper Evening Gazette. In a pinch you could catch the bus into Worcester and read an old article on microfilm in the library downtown, but in general if you were reading an Evening Gazette story it was because you were holding the Evening Gazette in your hands. And well before that, you knew—either because you grew up knowing or because you had quizzed the neighbors when you moved to town—that the Gazette was ever so slightly more liberal than the Worcester Telegram, the only local alternative, which was the morning paper in the area, and you knew that both papers were pretty reliable about facts and a little stodgy. (Not perfectly reliable, however. When the Gazette ran a candid photo of me one spring day, sitting on a swing in our backyard reading a collection of short stories about vampires, I was shocked to see my name misspelled, our address garbled, and the vampires miscategorized as “homework.”)

Nice people didn’t read the flimsy magazines for sale in supermarket checkout lines. (By the way, these were not the glossy perfect-bound tomes you find in supermarkets today, blandly commemorating World War II, or vegetarian recipes, or a pop star who has through death recently achieved embourgeoisement. These were more ludicrous, meaner in spirit, and much cheaper-looking.) This wasn’t because nice people thoughtfully upheld the values of curation and fact-checking. It was because of class war. It was understood to be a little soiling to be seen even leafing through such magazines. It was understood that Tom Brokaw delivered real news, and that the Evening Magazine TV show that preceded him didn’t (despite that one segment on Chippendales dancers that did have some special news for me in particular, one fateful Thursday). At 5:30pm we knew that what was coming out of the television wasn’t serious, and at 6pm we knew that it was.

Channels of information are not so sharply delimited today. A talk-show host you follow tweets a line from a Washington Post story: you can’t simply say you learned about it on a talk show, or that you learned about it by browsing Twitter, or that you learned about it from reading the Washington Post. It’s all mixed up. And partly as a corollary, the reputations of channels of information are no longer so clearly demarcated, either. Even people like me, who consider The Washington Post to be reliable in matters of fact, have to keep in mind that a line from one of its articles that’s been cherry-picked by a media personality might acquire a slant on Twitter that it didn’t have in its original context—that the line might even have been selected with the intention that it will be misunderstood. Moreover, nowadays there exists a community of readers in which the consensus is that the Washington Post is a duplicitous lackey puppet of some dire neoliberal conspiracy. A third novelty of our environment: the consumption of information is for the most part invisible. Is it déclassé to read TMI Feedzweb? Who cares! No one sees you reading it. And even if they could, the shame and scorn that once enforced information hygiene have been so overthrown that nowadays reading downmarket sleaze probably qualifies you as edgy, in a downtown, post-moral kind of way.

What’s a boring adult to do? As I see it, there are two desiderata here: not to have your time wasted, and not to have your mind poisoned. I immediately, humbly confess that I have let a lot of my time be wasted over the past decade or so of Twitter use. My husband and I have print subscriptions to more than a dozen periodicals, but whole issues of these have been recycled unread into sock fibers and Patagonia jacket liners while I was clicking through to try to figure out why someone I was a little scared of on Twitter was so indignant about the intellectual misprisions of someone else on Twitter whom I kind of liked. I didn’t want to get attacked someday myself, you know. Was it worth it? Sometimes it felt like it was, at the time. I got to be a spectator at the front lines; I got to see the bayonets going in, to hear the flump of the bodies falling into the mud. But sometimes it didn’t feel worth it. Even hot takes that feel urgent while you’re reading them usually evanesce a minute or two later. I’ll never get back all those hours I spent reading about why it was unforgivable/imperative to call out as fascist politicians who up to that point had only gotten as far as openly longing to become fascist. In retrospect, what if I had just read the stories in each week’s New Yorker that looked interesting to me, instead of scrolling slack-jawed until I could tell which ones were being either denounced or overpraised by my disembodied frenemies?

I have a pretty good b.s. detector. While a denizen of Twitter, I prided myself on never having retweeted that picture of the shark swimming down the street during a hurricane, or, for the most part, any of its text equivalents. I don’t think my own mind ever got poisoned, in other words, but I did see minds poisoned. (“Who goes redpill?” is an article I would like to read someday.) The thing is that on Twitter there’s always a hurricane, and a shark is always swimming toward you through its chum-filled waters. Repeatedly batting it on the nose takes effort, and is that how you want to spend your one and only life? I love my friends, but it isn’t by and large for their news judgment that I love them, so why should I let them choose what I read instead of trusting the professionals at the New York Times, the Atlantic, n+1, the New York Review of Books, and so forth? I’m actually pretty happy when I find a site like Four Columns that is willing to send me a small number of smart review-essays on varied topics once a week. I wish Bookforum’s Paper Trail came out as a newsletter, but as a certified internet old, I know how to plug its feed into my RSS reader.

I wish I could say that I logged out of Twitter last week because I finally started listening to all my own arguments against myself on this topic. The truth is, I logged out because of disgust. Musk had recently been carrying water for Putin, so when Musk took possession of the site, I logged out on a wait-and-see basis. I had promised myself that I would quit if he let Trump back on, as he has signaled he will; I can’t face swimming in unmediated sewage again. The end came sooner, as it happened. A few days ago, Musk tweeted (and then deleted) a link to a conspiracy theory about the violent assault on Paul Pelosi that was so nauseating that I couldn’t bear to contribute even my tiny and insignificant content stream to a media company that he owns. I’m logged out indefinitely now. (Not deleting, yet; things are changing too fast.)

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a podcast discussion about artificial intelligence (AI) between the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose and the podcaster Derek Thompson, who believe we’ll someday look back on the text-generating and art-making AI released this summer as epoch-shifting. Quite possibly! Some of the dystopian side effects that Roose and Thompson foresee may already be with us, though. Roose imagines, for example, that writerless news websites will spring up, full of articles penned by text-generating AI. In fact, the internet is already overrun with sites that pose as trustworthy sources of local news but have ulterior, usually political, motives—one such site was the source of the vile story linked to by Musk—and though these sites are not yet written by AI (as far as I know), they might as well be. AI could hardly be worse than low-rent paraphrases of wire stories, republication of corporate press releases, and rightwing dog-whistles. Roose also wonders how the nature of art will change once machines are able to replicate technical facility in any medium and any imaginable style, but much the same reckoning was forced on art by photography more than a century and a half ago. At the high end of the art market today, mere craft is already of rather little value. Donald Judd structured his whole career as an artist around being hostile to craft, deliberately designing artworks that could be manufactured to specification without any special skill. At the higher levels of the market, art now consists mostly of innovations in the idea of what art is, or the way it is understood. Recruiting AI into that project won’t slow anyone down even for long enough to hiccup.

This morning, Tiffany Hsu reported for the New York Times about fears that manipulated videos and photos are spreading unrecognized on Tiktok. Again, to some extent, we’re already there, and we’ve been there for a while. When I watched a recent Tiktok of a deepfake Tom Cruise flirting with a person who seemed to be Paris Hilton, it was not at all clear to me that Hilton was real. I googled, and had to resort to an Entertainment Weekly article that explained what I had been looking at. In other words, I determined that Cruise was fake and Hilton real only by means of trusting Entertainment Weekly. This is startling for someone who grew up when fake photos were almost always too clumsy to fool anyone, but it isn’t a situation that exceeds humanity’s epistemological capacities. It’s photography that’s recent, after all; unreliability has been with us forever, and has been accelerating ever since printing presses became widespread. Welcome to the 17th and 18th centuries! How to distinguish truth from fake news was a major concern during the Enlightenment, and the answer philosophers came up with then was not to try to stop the spread of newsprint but to set up laws, institutions, and protocols that would make trust reasonable in a world where anyone was capable of ventriloquizing anyone else thanks to new technology. (Spoiler alert: Copyright was quite useful.) Maybe at the moment you have sharper eyes than I do and can see that Fake Tom Cruise’s head doesn’t attach to his neck at quite the right angle, but in another few iterations or so, AI will defeat even the sharpest human eyes. The only anchor to be found will be in regimens of information hygiene. In such a world, people in positions of authority who spread disinformation knowingly, or even just with reckless disregard for the truth, will have to be sanctioned as untrustworthy—or else we’ll all drown in an AI-generated video swamp. Or rather, they will have to be identified as untrustworthy and stigmatized as such by any community—by any subset of society—that is willing to adopt measures that further the spread of truth. There’s some bad news here: if you’re Diderot, you don’t really even hope that someday everyone in France will want to, much less be able to, distinguish truth from falsehood. All you’re aspiring to is a self-limiting network of fellow philosophes willing to adhere to a sufficiently rigorous information hygiene protocol. Your hope is that truth will be discoverable to the happy few.

It’s always been a mistake to think of news organizations as manufacturers of a product called news, and it’s a mistake, therefore, to imagine that AI might be able to manufacture the product more cheaply. What you are paying for, when you subscribe to a newspaper, is trust. Trust that the newspaper’s reporters will tell the truth about what their sources have said. Trust that they are doing their best to unearth and share all sides of each story. Trust that the editors will not suppress evidence that is unflattering to the rich and powerful, including the newspaper’s owners. Trust that if the newspaper does fuck up, it will publish its errors and leave intact a record of its mistakes. You are paying for a relationship, but it isn’t a personal relationship—when individuals fail in this department, alas, they tend to fail catastrophically—it’s an institutionalized relationship. Musk’s approach to Twitter so far gets basically everything wrong. He’s reckless with the truth, he believes in the myth of individual judgment while having terrible judgment himself, he erases his mistakes instead of going public about his errors, and he seems poised to gut what little mechanism Twitter has had in place for content moderation up to this point, which wasn’t great to begin with. Oh well! Parts of it were fun while it lasted.

Time to Let Go

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Top Gun: Maverick opens with Tom Cruise sitting in a chair, out of character. He thanks the audience for leaving their homes to experience the movie on a big screen. When Peter and I went to see Maverick in a movie theater, the other night, I was surprised by how old Cruise looked. He’s much better preserved than most civilians, of course, but in an age of motion capture and CGI, it’s a choice for a star like Cruise to allow his age to be visible. It occurred to me that the movie’s preface might have an ulterior purpose: to give the audience a moment to adjust to what time has done to the man who has long played the hero of their fantasies.

Cruise’s age is decidedly diegetic in the movie that follows. His character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, is still flying planes for the Navy, more than three decades after the fictional events of the first Top Gun movie, and Maverick’s persistence in his vocation is understood, within the movie’s storyline, to be both failure and success. Failure, because Maverick is still just a captain all these years later, having refused to, or having proved unable to, accommodate himself to the military as an institution. Success, because, after three-plus decades of just flying planes, he’s very good at it. The ambiguity shrouds Maverick the way his black leather jacket does. It’s the same kind of jacket he would have worn more than three decades earlier—maybe it’s even the very same jacket—and we remember how in those days it seemed to participate in his virility. On a man in his fifties, however, an article of clothing that was archetypally sexy a generation ago has a certain pathos. (I say this as a man in his fifties.) Cruise looks great, but the jacket and the teardrop-shaped aviator sunglasses that go with it remind us so sharply of what Cruise looked like thirty-six years ago that they accentuate the contrast with his earlier physical self. We’re meant, I think, to feel a little sorry for him for still trying, and to feel bad that we feel that way. Which is, unexpectedly, a gentle feeling.

Top Gun: Maverick turns out to be a longitudinal movie, one that plays on and with the passage of time as it can be seen telling on the bodies of its actors, like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood; François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel movies; and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. In this class of movies, there can be moments of almost unbearable poignancy, exceeding the usual aesthetic frame around a movie. The passage of time can seem to be collapsing as one watches. A great role is a vital moment in the life of an actor, and when an actor revisits such a role, the viewer is aware of watching not only a fictional character’s resurrection but also a real person confronting a work of art that he may have thought at the time that he was the master and creator of, but which, in the years since, he has probably come to realize he was shaped by in ways he could never initially have intended, no matter how consciously he then thought he was working.

The first essay I ever wrote for my blog was about the original Top Gun. Peter and I watched it on a DVD mailed to us by Netflix, in April 2003, neither of us having seen it during its 1986 release, when we were teenagers. Peter now has no memory of having watched it at any time, but I looked my old essay up on my phone the morning after we saw Maverick. I was so angry in 2003! I wrote so knowingly! I seemed so certain of the points I was scoring against my enemy, whoever that was! Maybe a blog can be longitudinal, too? It was all so long ago.

In the spring of 2003, America was invading Iraq for the second time, and Top Gun was already an old movie, time-traveling from an America that hadn’t gone to war for a generation and was on the verge of discovering that it had a hankering to kill again. By 2003 America had consummated that desire, and I was angry, I think, because the Top Gunof 1986 seemed to me to have done what Marxians call ideological work toward that end. My theory seems to have been that the movie had whetted an appetite for violence by manipulating its male viewers’ anxieties about inadequacy and about having feelings for other men that were too strong. It was hardly a reach for me to come up with such a theory. In those days, to justify the U.S. military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, psychologists like Charles Moskos theorized something similar. It was understood that very few soldiers are willing to die for something as abstract as a nation and in practice risk their necks only for the other people in their unit whom they have become close to. Moskos thought open homosexuality would interfere with what he called unit cohesion. The military needed for soldiers to feel close but not in that way. If they started making love to each other, they would stop loving one another.

The year 2022 calls for different ideological work. America has lost its appetite for war. In fact it no longer has the stomach to digest the ones it’s still fighting, and consequently there is little discussion by journalists, and virtually none by politicians, of what we’re doing in Somalia, where we recently increased our military presence, or of our ongoing complicity with war crimes and humanitarian catastrophes in Yemen. In 2003, I thought Top Gun was a movie about short-circuiting mourning in order to induce a mindset more amenable to killing. Maverick, however, is just a movie about mourning. Period. Which isn’t to say it’s honest; more on its disingenuousness in a moment. But despite that disingenuousness, it is, surprisingly, a movie about decline and loss, visible from the movie’s very first frames in Cruise’s weathered face. Val Kilmer also reprises a role from the first Top Gun movie, and Kilmer, who in real life is recovering from throat cancer, is even more cruelly changed by time. His character tells Cruise’s, at one point, “It’s time to let go.” Cruise resists, of course, and the movie’s highs, which are considerable—I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the ride, and I even recommend it—stem from the fantasy that a man in late middle age can have one last hurrah. I think the viewer is meant to experience the hurrah on the screen as fantasy; I think the movie wants the viewer feel that Kilmer is right, that the end is coming, that, in fact, it’s pretty much here.

The sequel gestures toward rehearsing the neoliberal sermons about masculinity preached in the original. In Top Gun, the danger was that Cruise would feel too guilty about not having saved his fellow aviator Nick “Goose” Bradshaw to make a good soldier. In Maverick, the corresponding character flaw, which the screenwriters have given Goose’s son, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, is a tendency to “overthink,” to delay firing until sure everything will work out. Which isn’t on the same level at all. In an early scene in a bar, a new generation of young aviators mock Cruise as “Pops” in a jolly hazing, tossing him out to the street when he can’t pay his bill. In Top Gun, it was Cruise’s short stature that signaled that he was a beta struggling in a world of alphas; in Maverick, it’s his age. In both movies, his smile encodes his survival strategy—submission without deference. Cruise is able to make being thrown out of a bar look like crowd-surfing. There’s no longer quite the same arousing and threatening scent of testosterone in the air, though, no longer quite as strong a sense that Cruise is the lone dolphin in a school of sharks. This is a war movie for the Ted Lasso era, when, instead of idealizing the free market of male egos, audiences want to see people on screen being kinder to and more understanding of one another than almost anyone in real life has the emotional wherewithal to be. Among the young aviators in Maverick, only one has the full-fledged blond-beast frat-boy assholishness that prevailed when Cruise himself was a student. In real life, that archaic style has been exploded, and in a military context, even rendered nauseating by the war crimes of people like the Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist any more; of course it does, and it’s still dangerous, but in the way of a cornered rat. Viewers know that if such a personality still tends to show up in elite military fighting units, it’s to some extent because it thinks it can take refuge there. And is safe not even there, really. One of the young aviators who makes the cut onto the final mission team is a woman, and another, perhaps even more tellingly, is a man whose call sign, “Bob,” is no more than his real name. The joke is that he isn’t even trying to be something other than ordinary. Maybe he’s gay? It would make a certain kind of metaphoric sense that in a post-closet world, the gay would be the one without an alter ego.

As for that disingenuousness: Ideology’s weapon, in the sequel, is nostalgia. The viewer is meant to sigh a little over the way technology is forcing pilots like Cruise and his young protégés into extinction. A colonel nicknamed the “Drone Reaper” is said to be shuttering the Navy’s dogfighter programs in order to pour more money into unmanned aerial vehicles, and the implication is that Cruise is a John Henry, who can’t help but keep trying to prove humanity’s superiority to machines, which is to say, to capital. “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot,” is Cruise’s refrain in the movie, and his character totals half a dozen fighter jets, with as much abandon as if they were so many Ferris Bueller Ferraris. In reality, even though drones are replacing fighter jets, militaries today are more capital-intensive than ever, which, some economists theorize, is why America’s heavy military expenditure over the past quarter century failed to redistribute wealth the way that military expenditure during World War II did. Now more than ever, a nation may be understood as a population that can be taxed so reliably that you can take out a loan against the taxes; if you want to know who’s going to win a war, figure out which side has access to better (deeper, more continuous) financing.

Of all the reasons to feel bad about drones, the withering away of pilots may be one of the weakest. From the point of view of people being bombed on the ground, jets were never any more sporting than drones are. The nostalgia trip offered by Maverick is one last fight the old-fashioned way—a return to an ignorance that drone warfare has made more difficult. The nationality of the enemy that Cruise and his team are fighting is never named, and when the enemy pilots appear on screen, they’re hidden inside bug-like flight suits with opaque visors. In fact, thanks to drones, soldiers today often watch the people they have been asked to kill for so long that they begin to feel a kind of intimacy with them—and nonetheless still sometimes end up killing innocent civilians. And sometimes also end up becoming aware that they have done so. In a recent New York Times article about the moral injury that soldiers are now subject to, there’s a haunting story: An intelligence analyst working at an Air Force base is asked to take out a target in Afghanistan said to be a high-level Taliban financier. The analyst and his team track the man for a week, watching him tend his animals and eat with his family, and then a pilot on the team kills the man, remotely. A week later the man’s name appears on the target list again. They killed the wrong guy. This happened two more times, the analyst told the Times, before the analyst threatened to kill himself, was talked out of it, and was “medically retired.” In Top Gun: Maverick the fantasy is that it’s still possible to fly over these moral compromises at Mach 10 speed.