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The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world He didn't exist.
- Roger 'Verbal' Kint
There were maybe three of us at the bar a couple of Tuesdays ago, one of those quiet past-midnight midweek nights when most people are safely indoors, when the wind blowing around the buildings seemed loud because the sidewalks were so silent, and one last winter snowstorm made even the tire buzz of the cabs on Boylston Street sound like it was coming from miles away. This low whisper of a Tuesday night found me and two regulars trying to keep the bored bartenders from lighting themselves on fire just so they'd have something to do besides stare at us over the taps.
The door blew open suddenly and a swarm of seven loud boozers, nicely tarnished at the end of what had pretty clearly been a long night, came boiling in. Six of them were doing everything they could to make sure we knew they were there, but the seventh fellow in the brown scally cap held the group's center in smiling silence, like an atom at the core of boisterously inebriated electrons. He sat down four stools away from me, ordered a beer, and proceeded to go to work on it like a military school freshman eating dinner in the cafeteria, all right angles and serious business.
I looked over the group before really focusing on the fellow in the cap. And then looked again, and then looked a third time, staring long and hard to make sure I wasn't imagining things. I wasn't. Here, at my bar and almost within arm's reach, was actor Kevin Spacey, who is apparently in town making a movie about those MIT guys who beat Vegas. Here was Lester Burnham, here was John Doe by choice, here was one of the few screen performers who can make me forget about my overarching disdain for celebrity worship and transform me into a starstruck goober.
Here was Keyser freakin' Soze getting his drink on ten feet away from me, 'Verbal' Kint from "The Usual Suspects," the man with the plan, one cigarette lighter (gold), one watch (gold), the man who asked the question: how do you shoot the Devil in the back? What if you miss?
It was a treat. He walked in again the following Saturday, accompanied by an even larger crew, and my friends and I came within an eyelash of convincing him to swing by my apartment for a few after-hours Newcastles. Our sales pitch was foiled by his entourage, however, who were apparently too impressed with themselves to stoop to such meager entertainment opportunities and wound up talking him out of the trip. They seemed a little like pilot fish over-enjoying the ego rush that comes with swimming alongside a shark, but no matter. Spacey, for the record, struck me as a perfectly nice, unassuming guy during our relatively brief interactions.
The rest of that week had all the regulars cracking off Soze jokes with a will, once word got out that he had passed through our insular little clubhouse. Brendan the doorman, as usual, deployed the best line of all. "I could tell he was pretty loaded when he first showed up," said Brendan, "and I really wanted to tell him he was too drunk to come inside." The rest of us, already sensing this joke's payoff looming over the horizon, asked him why he'd bounce Kevin Spacey. "Are you kidding?" he replied. "I wanted to do it so I could tell all my friends I bounced Keyser freakin' Soze."
The random appearance of this actor I greatly admire ended up, some days later, dovetailing into the crushing writer's block I've been wrestling with since February. A shroud of cynical semi-paralysis had been wrapping itself around me every time I even thought about dealing with my keyboard, a what's-the-point fatalism I haven't had to cope with for years. Not being able to write is a lot like not being able to sleep; my mind couldn't take out the garbage, and the whole house started to stink.
I thought about Keyzer Soze, a bad guy for the ages, the Man behind the Man behind the Man whose power is absolute because he is invisible, whose very name inspires the kind of awed terror that makes the rabbit in the road freeze in the harsh glare of onrushing headlights. It's a neat little fiction, imagining an arch-fiend far more frightening than Darth Vader simply because he looks like everyone else, but I realized, after having some sport with Spacey's visit, that the truth of the deal is truly insidious.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, said Spacey in that film, was convincing the world He didn't exist. He's real, though, that all-powerful Devil, real as rivets, and my cynical writer's block was inspired by the fact that devising an effective plan to defeat him, or finding powerful politicians willing to defy him, or even doing something simple like writing about it all, starts to feel like the very definition of "a bridge too far" in these dim and degraded days.
The short version of the challenge: our American socio-economic system has been wired to serve a small cadre of invisible Kayser Soze's, whose awesome power and snug insulation was founded and augmented by three distinct moments in our history. When corporations were given Fourteenth Amendment rights through Supreme Court cases like Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward and Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad; when those newly-minted and vastly wealthy corporate "persons" were allowed to buy and sell all our politicians after the Supreme Court's decision in Buckley v. Valeo; and most especially when Harry Truman's Doctrine put the American economy onto a permanent wartime economic footing, the deal pretty much went down.
It's that last one that really rings the bells, the one that compelled President Eisenhower to deliver perhaps the most ridiculous farewell speech in American history. Can you imagine a post-Vietnam president having the stones to say things like, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex; the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist" on national television? One might as well wait for George W. Bush to avoid snickering like a fart-laying teenager in church whenever he talks about American soldiers dying in Iraq. It won't happen.
Eisenhower said all that for good reason. An American economy nailed to a permanent wartime footing means the preparation for and fighting of wars is as vital to our economic health as consumer confidence, housing sales and the Dow Jones. Having war stand as a vital component of the economy means a river - to the tune of trillions, mind you - of taxpayer dollars has to be funneled into the coffers of those, simply put, who make the bullets and control the oil. One cannot fight a war without bullets and petroleum, both of which cost exactly as much as can be charged, and the ones getting paid to deliver these vital economic interests are both rich beyond the dreams of avarice and powerful beyond all measure.
Politics and politicians, therefore, are mostly windowdressing. They come and go, they write the rules that redirect that river of cash because they've been bought, while all the Soze's remain fixed, fed, permanent, silent and strong. We can yell about fired US Attorneys, howl about an Iraq withdrawal plan from the House that has no chance of effecting any real withdrawal, and pretend that protests in the shadow of the Capitol dome actually make a real difference in the broader scheme. They do, but they don't. Understand that whenever you hear about the "incompetence" of the Bush administration, about "failure" and "fraud," you're also hearing the high ring of a cash register bell.
Someone is always, always, always getting paid for every so-called "mistake" that has been made, and those enjoying that largesse are the most important constituency in American politics. Their ability to put a lot of zeroes on a campaign contribution check guarantees that, no matter what else happens, the bombs and bullets and providers of same will always be taken care of, because it's in our economic interests to do so, don'tcha know.
These are the real Keyser Soze's, and defeating them involves deconstructing a latticework of wink-and-nod politics where everyone is bought and thus no one is to blame, where the system itself is hard-wired to serve they guys who can ink those zeroes. Everyone knows something has gone wrong, everyone is riled up about it, but almost no one comes to the connection between these "mistakes" and the taxes they'll dutifully hand over next month. Someone is always getting paid, and you may as well call that someone Keyser, because he is running your world from soup to nuts and you'll never, ever see him.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world He didn't exist. The other great trick He pulled was making it almost entirely impossible to untangle His influence. Thanks, Kevin. I'll see you at the bar.
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