Taxpayer-Funded LARPing

"We have yet to get a full accounting for all the commitments McCarthy made to be elected Speaker. But this decision makes clear that he was willing to sell out the country to get the position."

That’s Marcy Wheeler describing our situation in view of the fact that the Speaker of our House of Representatives has provided the media personality, Tucker Carlson, exclusive access to all security footage from the white supremacist terror putsch of January 6. I read Ms. Wheeler’s reports very closely because she has a way of cutting directly to the core of a story instead of tailoring her prose to assure readers and ad buyers she isn’t tilting the scale in favor of one alleged side or other. When someone she’s observing betrays their oath or behaves abusively to secure or keep a position, Ms. Wheeler says so. She respects the letter of the law, but she isn’t a respecter of personas. She relishes overlooked details and circling back whenever she gets something wrong. I find her sober realism refreshing.

She’s helped me see all the ways disinformation is a business model. Disinformation as a business model need not be a threat to public safety. But it certainly is when people seek public trust, assume positions in public service, and then publicly defer to and even push and perpetuate disinformation as way of holding those positions while on the clock. That creates and sustains a culture in which power is accrued by playing along to get along, by holding very loosely (if at all) to a sense of objective truth, and by curating public appearances in such a way that you’re not never caught on camera (or under oath) refusing to honor the expectations of baseline moral seriousness.

I have examples. Mike Pence has yet to be asked directly if he believes Donald Trump tried to have him killed. Ted Cruz probably won’t be asked if he still endorses my representative, Andy Ogles, despite the fact that he lied about his employment history. Ben Sasse is now the President of the University of Florida, but, to my knowledge, he has yet to explain his decision to knowingly risk appointing an unrepentant sexual predator to our Supreme Court. The baseline moral seriousness most of us would demand of someone applying for the position of a lifeguard or a daycare worker does not seem to apply to these high rollers in the Republican Party. Until a mandated reporter successfully puts an uncurated question to them or they find they have to respond to a subpoena the way most non-millionaires do, they remain protected, in a manner of speaking.

I don’t think “protected” is the best word for it though. I’m tempted to say they’re “stuck” or “trapped,” but that obscures the sense in which they’re each perfectly free to change their abusive postures and abandon the business model of disinformation. I am sometimes privately assured by people who know them that they know the score, that they aren’t happy about the cards they’ve been dealt in the roles they play, and that Ben Sasse, for instance, probably apologized privately to Mitt Romney after he refused to join him in siding with the people of Ukraine and the Constitution when it was proven that Donald Trump tried to extort Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The novelist in me enjoys the drama of the chumocracy, the tight circle of crushingly wealthy people privately acknowledging their abusive choices to one another while avoiding any show of responsibility for the horrors they’ve wrought on our time and our dime. The teacher in me would like to think I could talk them into owning up to their behavior and changing course. The Tom Paine in me, however, has words: "A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody."

I want to return to Ms. Wheeler’s words and highlight something: "We have yet to get a full accounting for all the commitments McCarthy made to be elected Speaker.” As we watched Kevin McCarthy get outvoted by Hakeem Jeffries until he didn’t, we knew he was making deals which involved commitments to which we are not privy. With news of his decision to give a private citizen (Tucker Carlson) exclusive access to footage that belongs to We, the people of the United States of America, those commitments are coming to light.

The full accounting for all the commitments might be a long time coming. But we know what we’re looking at. We’re watching the white supremacist terror putsch continue through other means. The poet Claudia Rankine has an adage I try to keep before me: “If you don’t name what’s happening, everyone can pretend it’s not happening.”

We can. We do until we don’t. That adage came to me as a challenge I tried to meet by describing what I take to be the commitments of people nearby in Nashville. I know some of them personally. I am, to some degree, implicated in the networks I describe as the Prayer Trade. Its commitments are plain as day. The wicked fruit borne of those commitments are more manageable when we go granular in our analysis of how we got here. We get to talk about the soil, the pressure points, the misplaced deference, the culture. We need to name names and ask questions. We need to ask people like Pat Sajak what it is they’d like to see happen exactly, what they’re hoping for, and what we should expect moving forward.

But these aren’t questions morally unserious people entertain easily in public. If they entertain them privately in family therapy sessions, good for them. But in cities like Nashville and states like Tennessee and countries like America, the morally unserious people who’ve played a role in the decision to order the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police to grant Tucker Carlson and his handlers exclusive access to national security footage are a threat to themselves and others. They are playing games with the lives of family, constituents, and neighbors. They are choosing a business model over public safety and the national interest. Disinformation is lots of things at once: a grift, a business model, and a brutal game.

I can’t remember where I was when I first heard tell of LARPing (Live Action Role Playing). I think I’m for it in many contexts. But I’m not for paying for it with money that’s been budgeted for public resources (except perhaps for public educators facilitating arts and sports programs that serve the cause of human dignity). As I mention in the Prayer Trade piece as well as my coverage of baptized elected officials targeting law enforcement and constituents on government Twitter accounts, I have a kind of custody over my senators who LARP. When neither they nor their church organizations respond to my e-mails and phone calls, I feel compelled to publish words like these.

A very upsetting but supremely effective and thoughtful film called We’re All Going To The World’s Fair has taken me further in my consideration of LARPing and representative democracy by introducing me to an acronym. MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game. As soon as I heard it explained in the film, I knew I had a new paradigm for understanding the challenges we face. When I see Marsha Blackburn walking through an airport staring straight ahead and refusing to say Yes or No as a journalist asks her if it was wrong of Donald Trump to dine with a Nazi, I now realize I’m beholding a committed gamer.

Yes, she’s a baptized member of Christ Presbyterian Church. Yes, she’s a spouse, a mother, and a grandmother. Yes, she swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and to serve the people of the beautiful state of Tennessee. But no, she does not feel free to break character in the MMORPG that dictates her public behavior (votes, tweets, media appearances). She’s enmeshed in the same constellation of commitments that move Kevin McCarthy like a marionette. That MMORPG is the GOP. Cults demand sacrifice.

The image above is Anne DeLisle and Cormac McCarthy of Knoxville holding monkeys.

Cults do demand sacrifice, but I don’t want to end with that. I want to end (or almost end) with a passage from McCarthy’s second-to-latest, The Passenger. Unlike Bill Lee, Bill Hagerty, Andy Ogles, and Marsha Blackburn, I am not confusing a MMORPG for public service. I am not morally debasing myself by treating my neighbor constituents like brute force test subjects, but I do do dumb things for reasons that are often a mystery to me. I read Cormac of Tennessee because he helps me feel inspired, smarter, and less alone. Check this out.

When smart people do dumb things it’s usually due to one of two things. The two things are greed and fear. They want something they’re not supposed to have or they’ve done something they weren’t supposed to do. In either case they’ve usually fastened on to a set of beliefs that are supportive of their state of mind but at odds with reality. It has become more important to them to believe than to know.

Hear the oracle.

Stay safe, America.

Image acknowledgments:

“Flag” is a painting by Jasper Johns.

Jeff Fortenberry and Ben Sasse and a man whose name I don’t know appear in the image that follows it.

The third image is the Board of Trustees of Hillsdale College.

The fourth image comes from We’re All Going To The World’s Fair.