I was a little boy in the early seventies when a staple of women's fashion was large, tacky necklaces. I remember sitting on my Mama's lap in church and playing with her large and tacky necklaces as a way to occupy myself while a preacher talked about heaven and hell and virgin birth. I don't know why, but I was always a little obsessed with whether the stones in her necklaces were "real" or not. I'd say Mama, is this a real diamond? and she'd say No, darling as if wearing a large rock around your neck--a large rock of one kind pretending to be a rock of another kind--was no big deal. But it was a big deal. I didn't know the word at the time, but i do now: It was disingenuous. I mean, Mama wasn't being disingenuous; she was just following fashion. But for some reason it really bugged me.
So many things that people seem so concerned about--like sexual orientation or smoking pot or that America is a Christian nation--don't matter a hill of beans to me. What does matter to me, though, is whether the stone is real. Is honor. Is telling the truth. Is a concept so old fashioned it hasn't even kept up with gender: a man's word. For me, to be disingenuous, to misrepresent one's self or some
thing, is the unpardonable sin. Even if it's just some fake rock in a necklace.
Okay. Craigslist first:
A guy named Craig Newmark started the website we now know as Craigslist in 1995. It was--and is--a sort of internet garage sale. Anyone with a computer and the ability to type a few words can use it to sell something or barter a service or find a drummer for their band. It's free and always has been. It's also the largest classified listing in the entire world. It has--get this--20 billion page views per month. It is, to generalize a bit, one of the most successful businesses in the entire world. But do you know what Craigslist's CEO Jim Buckmaster said to Wall Street a few years ago? He told them that Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit, but instead prefers to help users find cars, apartments, jobs and dates.
I don't wanna go on and on about it--and believe me, i could--but i respect the folks at Craigslist so much. If they wanted, they could sell that site for billions of dollars. But they don't. Instead, they pay themselves well and provide a really great community service. In exchange, they ask us to behave ourselves when using their site. They ask that businesses advertise in the business section. They ask for users to not "over-post" or misrepresent themselves. They exert no real manner of force to impose these requests, instead asking its community of users to police themselves with a system of "flagging" the listings that ignore these requests.
Bob Dylan sang "to live outside the law you must be honest." I ascribe to this. So, quixotically, it's also why I would never abuse a non-compulsory list of rules like those of Craigslist. You see, It's one thing to kick open someone's door and steal their television, but it's another to tell them you're there to fix the plumbing and take the tv when they're not looking. The first one just makes one a low-down thief, but the second makes one disingenuous. Hey man, steal my tv, but don't lie to me about it. So, for me, it is the worst kind of crime to abuse something honest like Craigslist.
It upsets me then that here in Charleston the "tools" and the "materials" section of C.L. are crammed full of a couple of businesses lying about stealing your tv. The most egregious offender is a chain of pawn shops called
Money Man Pawn. Not only do they misuse the service as a place to advertise their stuff for sale, but they also use multiple--nay,
hundreds--of listings to do it. They are aware of their crime, too. The website has a built-in protection feature that spots similar ads. Money Man gets around this by slightly altering each one. So one ad will say "call Randall at 843-737-5323!" and another will say "call Betty at 843+737+5323!"
In short what we have here is a business in the business of waiting until times are so hard that you take your not-as-yet stolen television to them in order to get a few bucks to pay the rent. They give you a 1/3 of the value of your television and then require you to pay them an interest rate that amounts to 2 or 300% a month which you can't afford, thereby losing your tv, which they then try to sell for a few dollars less than what you paid for it new.
Okay. So be it. I mean, that's the way a pawn shop works. If you don't want a haircut, don't hang around the barbershop. As business practices go, pawn brokers may be scraping the bottom of the barrel but it doesn't mean they're thieves.
So Money Man Pawn isn't a thief. Its much, much worse. Money Man Pawn is disingenuous. They misrepresent themselves. First, they post on a site that specifically asks them nicely not to and then make it difficult for the community to flag them by using multiple posts. But to top it all off, they commit the unpardonable sin of actually pretending to be someone else.
No, I'm not Money Man Pawn. I'm just some dude named Randall, rhymes with handle, tryin' to sell a tv.
Well, Randall, you're not just some dude. You're a turd. A boil on the ass of humanity. I spoke with the devil this morning and he told me that yes, indeed, there is a special place in hell for people like you.
Okay. So maybe this kind of thing doesn't upset you as much as it does me. I recognize I'm a little over the top here. But here's the deal: You know how it feels like a real honor when a friend trusts you with their house keys? We should all aspire to be people that are trusted with each other's house keys. An irony here is that Randall can't be trusted with the simple honor system, and Craig Newmark, who could have a billion dollars in his bank account tomorrow chooses not to maximize profits but help people find a date. You know, Randall--the real one and not the cartoon one I've kind of created here--is probably a good guy. Someone probably loves him. Like George Bush, he's probably pretty fun to hang out with. But still, if we impose my system of ethics here, Randall is willing to risk his immortal soul over a Cordless Bosch drill.
It begs the question: If he's willing to do something like that for 29.95, what's someone willing to do for 29 million?
Which brings me to this: Which GOP candidate would you trust with your house keys?
What about a man named Mitt Romney who's made a living by taking yours away? Or a fellow named Newt Gingrich (Newt Gingrich!?) who professes his love of Jesus Christ while sticking his weeny in any hole available? How about Rick Santorum, a sanctimonious hater of many of God's creations?
Lord have mercy.
Here's the deal: I fear and dislike misrepresentation and dishonesty and disingenuousness so much because I recognize it in myself. I spot it 'cause I got it. Perhaps I'm so angry at Randall because I wish i could do what he's doing and not feel bad about it. But i do feel bad about it, so I don't do it....
But...what if i didn't feel bad about it? How bad could I be? What if it were me that owned Craigslist? Maybe I'd sell it for a million billion dollars.
What else would I do--me and my million billions--if I were to just drop this whole honor thing?
I might try to get some naive, greedy soul like me to start a foundation with a disingenuous name like Citizens United. It wouldn't represent citizens at all. It's sole purpose would be for me to use my money to influence political decisions to go in my favor and thereby get me more money. Me and a few other disingenuous people, say, me and Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney and Glenn Beck, would combine our money and influence and have our crooked organization called Citizens United file a case with the Supreme Court of United Sates. We would be so powerful that even in that institution--which holds the notion of justice for all people so dear--we could sway opinion in our direction. Well, at least 5 out of the 9, anyway.
We'd get something as nasty as a corporation--a thing that heats it's home by burning human beings--recognized as...drumroll!.. a human being! What brilliance! It'd be nothing but a business but it would pretend to be something else! Then we'd diversify our holdings. Me and Rupert and Randall and Glenn and Dick would already have the Supreme Court. Next we'd get the Presidency!
We'd get people that are really good at acting like they have other people's best interest in mind but really don't to be GOP presidential candidates. Yeah! You know, like people that are willing to hate your gay friend, or are willing to take their brother's job away without thinking twice, or are able to get an erection for their mistress while their own wife lays dying in a hospital. Then we'll use this corporation-as-people shit to put all of our money--and here's the really brilliant part--on every single one of the candidates! That way we couldn't lose! No one will know where the money's coming from!
Everyone would just suspect that the average American is so concerned about who their president is that they're willing to give over a billion dollars of their money getting them elected. Never mind that's more than 3 dollars for every living person in the U.S. and that only 50% of the eligible population actually votes. People are stupid. They would never suspect that all that money eventually has to be exchanged for favors or that just a couple of guys are responsible for it all. I've heard the human brain is incapable of truly understanding what quantities over a couple dozen actually mean, even if it's a group of things they're familiar with. Sure they've heard of a billion dollars, they've heard that it would take someone like Randall and 590 of his friends to combine all the money they make in their lifetime to actually come up with a billion, but they don't really understand it. Plus they have no concept at all of what it is to be mega-rich. Have no idea at all how powerful it actually makes you...
Anyway, then what we'd do is use Rupert's media empire to force every other news outlet in the world into representing the noble hope of being president as something as exciting as Monday Night Football. We'd turn this 40 year old notion of extended presidential primaries into a behemoth enterprise. Rupert would pocket millions as people constantly tune into to see which team is ahead. Early on we'd use each of the candidates to test market a combination of different loves and hates: hate for gay people and love of capitalism and freedom, hate for taxes but love of war and imperialism, hate of war and taxes and same-sex marriage but love of gay people divorce and capitalism. We'd watch to see how much hate can we actually get away with. You know, tell Santorum to say something incendiary about lesbians and see how it plays. Have Newt make a not-so-subtle racist comment about food stamps. When it looks like we've gone too far we could just manipulate the stories or give the candidate enough money to wait til the smoke clears and keep them in the race. It would be important to keep as many voices in there as long as possible so as to get the best information. That way, when it's actually time to run our guy for president, we'll have the perfect demographic survey. We'll be able to create the ideal candidate never minding what the sucker might actually believe in....bwah ha ha!
and we.
will be.
in.
total.
control...
bwah ha ha! Bwah ha ha ha!
...but, you know, there's really no way I could ever do anything like that. I can't even cheat on Craigslist.
