Only One Man Can Save Us...

and he's kind of a jerk

Americans love inside baseball.

They love feeling like an insider. Knowing the inside poop. How things really work… Is anyone else tired of knowing how the sausage is made? If I have to watch another movie about movies… Quick, cut to the person behind the camera! So the audience knows we know they know it’s a movie!

I don’t give a fiddler’s fart or a tinker’s damn about Hollywood anymore, except that every rapist fuckhead like Weinstein should be forced to to immolate his genitals on streaming. And the annoying camerawork on shows like The Office, that want us to believe it’s a reality show, I just don’t get the point. We’ve broken the fourth wall for many decades; if we want to hear a character address the viewer, just do it. I like a lot of stories that only work when the audience is “in on the joke,” but it can be abused.

And speaking of abuse, maybe we can stop thinking that creativity comes from a tyrant and their “vision,” while we’re at it. Almost all creativity is collaborative. A writer usually has an editor, an artist has a gallery or someone they work with, and a director has an editor and many others. So there’s no need to treat a showrunner or any other person like they’re a god and can abuse the peons because they know the Secret Sauce. Just fucking get over yourselves.

I knew what a scumbag Harvey Weinstein was from reading the news stories that She Said was based on, but the movie is still excellent. And he’s just one man in power who was protected by a bunch of people who should all have committed suicide like the 47 Ronin.

We’ve had hierarchy in human relations at least since livestock and agriculture came into their own, around ten thousand years ago. Egalitarian societies existed until this point; we know because they didn’t have enormous tombs and megaliths to honor one person, and most of their buildings were of similar sizes.¹ It’s believed that domesticating livestock led to hierarchy because people who had a good year would lend stock to those who lost theirs, and thus incur a debt owed to them. Similarly with agriculture; you had a bad year, you needed my grain, you are now indebted to me. Of course this didn’t occur everywhere; some egalitarian societies remained until colonizers committed genocide to steal their land before the impoverished indentured laborers saw that there was another way.

I wrote a little about this and the utopian matriarchy trope in my story, “Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind,” which you can read below. The hierarchical societies (who had also mastered riding on horseback) may have wiped out the egalitarian ones; or they may have just won out. There are death pits all over old Europe during this period. The “big men” won.

A kurgan stela

Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind

So, we didn’t always worship One Person as better than the rest and build giant tombs to them, or let them rape and molest people because they gave us a job.² And we need to get back to that. It’s not just show business that has this problem. Business in general, with overpaid CEOs, politics in general. We allow leaders—political ones especially—too much personal power. And our stories are riddled with this trope:

Only One Man Can Save Us… and He’s Kind of a Jerk!

Wouldn’t that be great, if we didn’t have work together? And some hero would come out of nowhere, with some snappy dialogue, and fix it all for us? Maybe with some explosions and a catchy soundtrack.

Unfortunately, we need to solve most problems with another Zoom meeting, where we hash it out until we’re exhausted. Now, you might think that doesn’t make a good story, but 12 Angry Men is not a bad story to remake in a thousand different ways. It doesn’t have to be men, or twelve, or angry, and it doesn’t have to be a jury, for that matter. Or maybe someone could punch out Henry Fonda and then ride away on a motorcycle.

I’d watch that.

This week’s read that you might find interesting involves the metric system. Apparently, the nascent United States was going to adopt this new-fangled French system of measurement—because they were using English and Dutch systems, and everyone was confused about how many shillings to pay for a scheepslast—but the kilogram weight that Thomas Jefferson requested from France was stolen by pirates.

If only that ship hadn’t been raided, I wouldn’t need two damn sets of socket wrenches. 9/16ths? Maddone…

1. I learned all this from the excellent Tides of History podcast, specifically the pre-Bronze age episodes on the rise of farming, the neolithic, Old Europe, and the Americas. I listen to them on my morning hikes.

2. Prima noctis, anyone? Eugh.