BS Nation

Through one of RSS feeds I saw the headline, The Half-Century in Bullshit: On Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” and Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power”. Paul Thompson authored the essay. I've seen Paper Moon, only once, and that was decades ago. One of those great movies from the Seventies that seems forgotten today. The essay implies time has made its conman story naive.

We’ve become so starved for artful bullshit that we strain to see it where none exists. Think about all the essays you read claiming that Donald Trump was the perfect emblem of his era, one dominated by “grifters.” This is a total misreading: while Trump ran a predictably dodgy real estate training program and routinely stiffed contractors and construction companies working on properties he owned, there was no sleight of hand. Trump was first a symptom of, and then a driving force behind, an ideological shift toward the lionization of cutthroat business practices, even when they come at the expense of that ideology’s adherents. The cruelty and vacuousness of the era are not drawbacks but evidence of Trump et al.’s dedication to success. The Steinbeck quote about Americans seeing themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” is now somewhat beside the point — there is open cheering for figures whose wealth no one assumes they could ever achieve.

Even scams and plots that have been romanticized recently, like the story of Anna Sorokin, who posed as a wealthy heiress to drift through the New York art and society scenes in the mid-2010s, have captivated people primarily as anachronisms, recalling a time before online banking and the Patriot Act when one could conceivably turn their life into a private performance exhibit and stay a half-step ahead of the exes and creditors nipping at their expensive heels. At the end of Paper Moon, after Moses finally drops Addie off at her aunt’s house in Missouri, the young artist has a shock of realization, then runs down the highway after her pretend father: he still owes her $200.

I have not understood the appeal of Donald J. Trump, there is no art to him. He bludgeoned, lacking the finesse to otherwise capture people's attention or support. The same method has not yet worked for Kari Lake. Maybe there is hope that crudity and brutality have not swallowed up our American talent for wit and a quick tongue fueling American success.

 

Style. Class. Wit. 

Art and beauty.

These are things to admire.

We should be asking why they are lacking in our culture.

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