VOLLMAN GOES TO THE MOVIES: "The Proposition"

Catching up with William T. Vollman’s writing output is hard to do. Even as I was finishing up his condensed version of his seven volume series called “Rising Up and Rising Down,” he himself was just seeing into publication his fat new book, “Imperial,” about the illegal immigrants crossing the border in the Imperial Valley of California and Mexico. He is a poetic journalist, if you can accept that category, who mixes his fact-finding and interviews with evocative images. There’s an excerpt at the NYTimes today if you want to see for yourself.

“Rising Up and Rising Down” is an attempt to come to terms with some kind of moral rules that will help us make decent [sic] decisions about violence, mostly based on relationships. He has gone into war zones and ghettos to see what is there and has not been a fellow in a lab coat but rather a companion to those in trouble. He leans on the lip of the great maw called “Violence” that swallows so many and counts its bloody teeth. I was wondering how I could make any of this new when we stare at so much banal violence in the daily newspapers and television. What reference point can we share?

Netflix to the rescue, as so often. Last night I watched “The Proposition,” a so-called “Western” but set in Australia, an even harsher and more ancient frontier than the American Desert. It directly confronts these kinds of moral boundaries: spouses/protection, family/allegiance, races/oppression, settlement/disorder, colonialism/genocide, and righteousness/punishment. The story is balladic: there are brothers, the youngest can only be saved by sacrificing the oldest, and the outcome hinges on the decisions of the middle brother. The point is not really how the plot ends: it is all in the getting there and like Vollman, the writer (a song writer of considerable stature) sees poetry everywhere. As the actors commented, the intensity is increased by the fact that people went to America willingly and in search of a New Eden. The founders of Australia were felons deliberately banished to Hell.

BILL’S OBSERVATION: “Give me a soldier anytime. For straightforwardness a soldier cannot be beat. Like cops, doctors, mothers and whores, they’ve been through it and they cannot be fooled.”

Therefore, the real pivot of this story is the Captain who is supposed to protect the settlement and dearly wishes to protect his wife. He suffers over ends/means as he tries to obey Vollman’s SHEPHERD’S MAXIM: As authority enlarges itself, its obligation to protect from violence the individuals it controls increases, and the ability of those individuals to defend themselves from violence correspondingly decreases.

The self-appointed mayor and “owner” of the town obeys CAESAR’S MAXIM: Should I extend mercy beyond expediency, then I have the right to commit whatever aggression I please. Though I didn’t notice much mercy as he orders the youngest brother to be whipped to death to satisfy the blood thirst for vengeance in his town dwellers. He’s also a believer in TROTSKY’S MAXIM: No one who disagrees with me is allowed to judge me.

The Irish Murphy brothers’ principle is THE AMERICAN MANTRA: Because the right to self-defense remains inalienable, each of us can and should maintain a self-reliant distrust of authority. This idea was undoubtedly born in Britain where England and Rome struggled to control the pre-existing tribes but Robin Hood always wins over the Sheriff of Nottingham. Because of the colonialism of this little island, Australia shares this conviction -- at least in the Outback -- and no displaced population more so than the Irish who arrived in chains.

So the Brit attitude has been governed by CORTES’S MAXIM: In order to secure and defend my ground, I have every right to conquer yours.

That quickly drifts over from land ownership to people ownership, as blacks of both America and Australia know, so then operations are governed by THE KLANSMAN’S MAXIM: If I believe your race or culture threatens mine, I have the right first to threaten you back, then to remove your threat by violence.

This in turn triggers in both America and Australia (and oh-so-much in Ireland) THE VICTIM’S MAXIM: If any members of your side harmed any members of my side, then your side is in the wrong.

There are other assumptions like this buried in the minds of voters, politicians, businessmen, teachers, and so on -- none of them dug out, defined, examined and either rejected or reformed. All of them can lead to horrendous violence, if only the slow self-destruction of drugs and alcohol.

There are two interacting assumptions that Vollman doesn’t directly define but that I’ve been pondering here in Montana. They both come from sports violence, which seems to be increasing regardless of lip-syncing about “sportsmanship.” They are particularly strong in the small towns and reservations of this high prairie or maybe I just think so because I see it first hand.

One is that Winner takes all. The other is that Being the “last man standing” is the same as winning. In a place where survival is tough, the idea of controlling everything is a very attractive one. Not only does it protect the group to which you have allegiance, whether family, tribe or town, but also it increases power because other people will have to come to you to beg for survival.

That’s when the other rule kicks in: if winning depends more on the weakness and neediness of others than it does on true excellence of leaders, then it is always a temptation to cut the minority losers down, regardless of what they deserve.
Weak persons then begin to turn to the victim’s maxim and the Klansman’s maxim, keeping track of offenses against them and waiting for a moment of weakness in the winner, which always comes sooner or later.

Aside from the Golden Rule, worthy religions oppose the “winner takes all” idea with the principle that if the weakest among you are protected, then also the strong can prosper in peace, because there will be no need to accuse and suppress them.

Would someone please write out this idea on paper, wrap around something heavy enough to be thrown, and heave it over the wall into the Republican party? I don’t think they are enough in the modern times to read a blog. Or particularly books as fat and frequent as Vollman’s. Anyway, if you drop Vollman on them, they’ll be squashed. Maybe they would sit through “The Proposition,” but they might not get the right message.

RE-THINKING MONEY

Remember that guy a few years ago who figured out to hack into ATM codes so that every time someone made a deposit, the software rounded it up to the nearest dime and deposited the difference -- never more than a few pennies -- to his own account? He made millions, because there were so many deposits -- until he was detected by penny-chasing software. The discrepancies were so small that they went unnoticed.

Something like that seems to be going on all the time, not just at the level of toxic loans, insecure securities, and underwater mortgages, but also at the gas pump, the grocery store, and the county clerk’s office, little bits of chiseling, add-ons and sleight-of-hand. I’m foaming over the latter today because I went down to the county court house to register a “beneficiary deed” which on my death will automatically transfer the ownership of this house to my niece without probate. I thought I was escaping lawyers. What I discovered was that I could not register this document without a “Realty Transfer Certificate,” a “confidential tax document” that makes her liable for any county taxes on the property. At this point she would not have to pay the taxes until my death, which makes it seem all harmless, but who knows what circumstances will be when I DO die? She might not be in a position to pay any taxes and there may not be potential to sell this house. It might be a liability instead of a bequest. What the State wants is to know ahead of time whom to go after for money. There are lots and houses sitting empty in this town because they are a liability, for instance, the lot where a former gas station’s leaky gas tanks caused contamination VERY expensive to clean up. All inheritors are claiming NOT to have inherited -- in expensive lawsuits, of course.

I keep seeing stories in the newspaper that make me deeply dubious about the practice of levying fines or punishments in the form of imposing a debt. Today there was a story about a woman who embezzled over a hundred thousand dollars. The judge’s sentence was a year in jail and the requirement that she pay back all the money, but how realistic is that? Who will hire an embezzler who’s been sitting around talking about swindles with felons for a year? Assuming she finds a job, at the level of salary she might draw -- which won’t be the top of the market -- how long will it take her to make a hundred thousand dollars? What does she live on? Does the court say how much she can pay for rent, how much for groceries? Won’t she be pretty well trapped unless she embezzles again, this time more cleverly? Or leaves the country?

I just paid off my Exxon bill. Two months ago I paid off the gas I had bought. Since then I’ve been paying off the late fees that were levied because I didn’t have enough money to pay for the gas at what they considered on time. When I first got the charge card, I strictly paid off the total monthly. There was no definition of “late.” Then we went to five dollar gas. Then the bill began to show a “minimum payment” that was acceptable and I used that option. Pretty soon there was a $10 late fee -- which was really unavoidable because the bill always came a couple of weeks later than the others so it was paid in the next Social Security cycle. Then the late fee began to increase. Notification was in those eye-straining tiny print pamphlets that come with the bill. (Unreadable by some elderly.)

Sometimes I sent the money on time, but blizzards and holidays intervened so that it didn’t get there on time. Also, I began to suspect that it DID arrive on time but sat in a pile until someone had time to post it. When I called to protest, the woman on the phone coolly informed me that the solution was to give them access to automatic debit, the ability to take money out of my checking account without my permission or even my knowledge. At the same time my bank began to impose a fee for overdrafts (I’d been exempt as a courtesy for senior citizens) and then raised that fee. I think it’s up to fifty dollars now.

I only have one automatic debit, which is Netflix, $20 a month. Twice I incurred an overdraft fee from the bank because Netflix always debited on the day just BEFORE my SSI deposit showed up in the bank, when funds were lowest. An amount as small as fifty cents can throw one into overdraft. The debit date is the automatic result of the time interval from signup. That is, if you sign up on the tenth, that’s when the debit comes. At least the Netflix telephone staff was willing to explain it all. I had to cancel Netflix, wait until the debit date safely interacted with the deposit date, and then re-enroll. Who knew all this stuff? It was a fifty dollar tutorial. That’s five per cent of my income.

How much sense does it make to impose fees because people don’t have enough money? But if we confine people, which is our only alternative punishment, it costs the PUBLIC money to feed, house and clothe the wicked. Jails are expensive and when we crowd the cells to extreme levels with our severe sentence decisions -- as California has done -- then the courts step in and some felons will go free. Public service sentences quickly becomes a substitute for paying people to do jobs as regular work. Some use credit-rating services as threats, but as we get deeper into the bowels of finance, they turn out to be no indicator of ability to pay.

Will we get so frustrated that we go to Taliban-type whipping? When people used to talk about what would keep drunk drivers from driving, Bob used to remark dryly that if their hands were chopped off, they would drive with their elbows. Will we go to such extremes in our determination to make laws work?

Hopefully, with a new government beginning to take up regulation, inspection and “nudging,” things can be channeled constructively.