From April 21, 2008, “Who do we shoot?“:
Here’s one of my favorite scenes from John Ford’s film adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Muley and his son confront The Man who has arrived to evict them from their Oklahoma farm. Muley, played by John Qualen (the condemned sad sack fom His Girl Friday), clings to his shotgun:
MULEY: You mean get off my own land?
THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.
SON: Whose fault is it?
THE MAN: You know who owns the land — the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?
THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.
SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?
THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
SON: All right. Where’s the bank?
THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!
MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?
A host of demagogues these days are eager to answer Muley’s question. “Want to know who to blame?” they ask, “We’ll tell you.”
“Shoot the Mexicans,” says Lou Dobbs. “Shoot the lazy blacks on welfare,” says Grover Norquist. “Shoot the atheists,” says James Dobson. “And the gays,” adds his chief politico, Tony Perkins. “Shoot the Islamofascists,” say Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the rightwing bloggers. “Shoot ’em all,” says Fox News.
None of those suggestions, of course, are of any use to Muley or to his contemporary counterparts, because none of those scapegoats are really the source of their problems. But the demagogues don’t give a rat’s ass about solving Muley’s problems. Their only concern is making sure that he keeps his shotgun pointed somewhere else, somewhere that doesn’t threaten the status quo.
Such demagogues are con artists. And they’re good at it. But recognizing that is where things get tricky and difficult to talk about.
Good con artists are difficult to prosecute. This is true, in part, because getting conned is viewed differently than being the victim of other forms of crime. There’s a sense of shame, or at least of embarrassment, on the part of the victims, so they’re less likely than other crime victims to report the crimes. Con artists know this, and they exploit it — sometimes compounding that embarrassment by working a con that relies on the mark’s greed or chauvinism or some other trait they are unlikely to be proud of and thus making the victim feel complicit in their own victimhood.
It’s never easy to tell someone they’re being conned. “You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took,” Malcolm X said. “You’ve been bamboozled.” But nobody wants to hear that, even if it’s true. Especially not if it’s true. It sounds too much like, “You’ve been a sucker.” Or even, “You’ve been stupid.” It seems to add insult to injury so people reject both the message and the messenger. Even if that means continuing to subject themselves to the ongoing injury of the scam. They are, after all, accustomed to it.
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