1/22/06: Players and workers: Garret Keizer's "Crap Shoot"

Garret Keizer's  article in the latest Harper's, "Crap Shoot:  Everyone loses when politics is a game," comes up with a dividing line in America which goes way, way beyond "red" and "blue."

It's "players" who are the dividers and Keizer sets out to tell us who they are -- well, who we are.

For example, the sad delusion of "Uncle Teddy":

Around the same time as the Republican National Committee cashes the donation check it gets from an older relative I'll call "Uncle Teddy," he receives a signed eight_by_ten glossy photograph of George W. Bush. He thereby enters the mystical communion of CEOs and billionaires – he and any number of poor saps like himself, people who did their military service and worked full time from their teens to their retirement, who saved their money and fixed their own cars and occasionally took their families out to dinner after church. I don't see Uncle Teddy as a sap; I see him as the salt of the earth. I also don't think he sees himself as a sap when he writes his check. I think he sees himself, or at least is invited to see himself, as a player. He belongs to the party of the haves – "and the have mores," as Bush so memorably put it.

Never mind that the people he is helping to keep in power would find him laughable. If they didn't laugh at the white shirt he puts on to go to the diner or the little vial of touchup paint he keeps in the glove compartment to address any stray nicks and scratches on his preternaturally well-preserved Buick sedan, what would really get them going, I mean down on their gym-toned abs and punching the floor, would be hearing him say what he’s said to me more than once: 

“I never skimp on my income taxes.  I make sure the government gets every penny it has coming.  It’s a privilege to pay taxes in this country.” 

How many Uncle Teddys are there in your family?  in your neighborhood?  in (say) Thomas Frank's Kansas?  What, Keizer asks, is it that people like him can’t see? 

As the country is bankrupted by an insane war, every one of whose stated objecteives could be refuted by a junior high debating team; as “outsource” becomes the latest euphemism for outrage, be it of jobs or torture; as the ability of our children to read, write, and breathe is eroded almost as rapidly as the ozone layer and the topsoil -- what is it they can't see?  And the answer, at least one of the answers, is this: they can't see that  they're not players. They can't see because the game is all about making them believe that they are players, and because the real players have gotten very good at the game. Finally, they can't see because it would be almost too sad to bear if they could.

Here is where we might note a critical distinction in the ways that the Democratic and Republican parties recommend themselves to their supporters.  A typical Democrat offers to validate your identity. That is to say, a typical Democrat offers to foster the most precious notion (and I mean "precious" in every sense of the word) of the typical Democrat. I was recently the guest on a radio program devoted to the discussion of liberal politics and was fascinated by the number of callers who found it necessary to identify their specific "persuasion" before making their point. "I'm a Christian progressive," I recall one saying, "but I don't support homosexuality." "I used to call myself an atheist," said another, "but it's more accurate to say that I'm a syncretist." This was in the context of a discussion that I was trying, admittedly without much success, to focus on that nebulous identity group consisting of people lacking a pot to piss in. The discussion reminded me somewhat of a St. Francis Day blessing of the animals, with one after another of the faithful carrying a pet notion of him_ or herself up the church steps. Give us your tired, your poor, your vegan, and your harebrained, and we will try to say something nice about them all.

With the arguable exception of large ideological voting blocks, like evangelicals for instance, the Republican Party doesn't offer to validate your identity. It offers to give you an identity – even if you're an evangelical Christian. Especially if you're an evangelical Christian. The identity it offers to give you is that of a player. If that's what you are or want to be, then this is the party for you. The basic idea amounts to the mass production of the same blithe chumminess one finds at a meeting of the Rotary Club. We are "the business community," you see. Not the chumps of the business community – of the corporate leviathans that could eat up our penny-ante establishments like so much krill. No, no.  We're the players. We play the same game that the big boys do.      

And if you're not a player, you're a worker .  But wait a minute.  As with any other polarity, it doesn't really work that way.  The distinction between worker and player is "never absolute," Keizer tells us.  (We're a mixture -- which means we don't get exits from our road to self-knowledge.)

...The player's relationship to the material world is primarily excapist.  He would like to get out of it.  Basically, that means getting out of work.

The "players" I know -- including George W. Bush, a bunch of other annoying people, and sometimes myself -- often talk about how hard and long they're working.  The "workers" I know -- including pretty much all of my neighbors -- have lives which are almost, if not all, work, but they call it life. A surprising number of them, in the midst of this work-life, will suddenly go away for the weekend to this community's weekend playground of choice, Las Vegas.  Which fits right in with what Keizer warns:

We should be cautious of aligning the player with playfulness and placing the work on the opposite side.  sports and gambling have always been highly esteemed among the working classes and among working people in general.  What distinguishes the worker from the player is the former's understanding that the game is just that.  The worker possesses the consciousness, as noted by Huizinga, that play is "different from ordinary life."... In contrast, the player conceives of ordinary life as "the game."  The casino world of the Dow Jones Industrial  Average, or the racetrack or the numbers racket, is the norm.  Work is the diversion.  Work is something you do at the gym.  You work at your golf stroke.  You work at your "relationships."  You work during your "off" hours.  But business is all about the game.... You know you've met a player when someone tells you about an activity that's "better than sex."  What the person generally means is less work.

So how do players and workers relate to each other?

Perhaps the greatest contract between the player and the worker consists of their different attitudes toward "the others."  Exclusion is contained in the very definition of the player.  If everyone is a player, then no one is a player.  When everybody comes into "the field," it's no longer the field.  It's a park.  The worker, on the other hand, invites participation.   Many hands make light work.  At his most militant, the worker insists on participation.  That is because the worker senses that justice is only possible, and work bearable, when everybody works.  As long as there are both workers and players, the worker is going to get screwed.  This is why social experiments launched in the name of "the workers" have tended to be totalitarian.  The question remains as to whether that outcome is better avoided by emancipating the worker or by letting the player run amok.  Without constraint and vigilance, the player always does....

Which means cheating.

...Cheating is simply an unauthorized form of playing.  They differ in degree but not in kind.  What is the natural aim of the player if not to steal the ball, knock down the opponent, invade his goal?  "Cheating" is simply playing out of bounds, and the bounds are meant to be tested...

Players and religion:

The player's relationship to religion is necessarily complex.  The opiate of the people is the player's gin and tonic:  it loosens and enlivens him; it can also make him terribly depressed.  He is attracted to the religious promise of transcendence, exemption from death, consequence, chaos, whatever stands as an obstacle to his whims.  But the player balks at religion, too, for its suggestion that here is such a thing as hubris...

Keizer has some interesting observations on Bush's relationship to religion and the religious, including the cheezy little  detail that the Christian Booksellers Association has posters "of George W. Bush in the robes of the prophet, perhaps those of Jesus himself, healing the wounds of the nation."  But Bush as Messiah is also, Keizer says, "prophetic." What is happening is inevitable, a serious battle,  a playing out of history -- and I've agreed with him on this for years, through all the blog conversations about how to get rid of Bush. 

The Republican Party as it now exists is the most progressive of all American political parties in the sense that it is hastening the inevitable showdown that was predestined the moment workers and players first blimpsed the shores of this country and conceived their separate versions of its promise.  You can see that division running like a fault line through four centuries of our politics and poetry... People who ask "How can we defeat the Republicans in 2008?" are asking a secondary question.  The primary question is whether we ought to try...

Recovering from the battle will take a basic change in all of us players and would-be players: arriving at  the understanding that "you have nothing to lose but the notion that you are a player -- or that being a player is an aspiration worthy of a grown woman or man..."  We need to ditch the glorification of the player or it won't matter who the hell is in power.

Meaningful change in America will not come from the "progressive" conferences and op-ed  hand-wringing and better target-marketing to the coyer identity groups.  It will not come from reinstating the same players who posed with such smugly affected arrogance for Annie Leibowitz in the pages of Vanity Fair after the first Clinton victory.  (Those photos, if you can find them, will tell you more about "what happened to our country" than anything I'm writing here.)  Not to put too fine a point on it, change will not come from deciding which former member of Skull and  Bones will get to drape the coffin of American labor with the Stars and Stripes.  Change will come only when people who work, who love to work, whose conception of the world is of a work in progress, come to realize they have no choice but to fight.  Fight, or accept a world in which a shrinking pool of players lords it over a multiplying pool of slaves.

Now.  While you're still wondering how indignant to get over what Keizer writes about those Vanity Fair photos, tell me something.  Are you primarily a player?  Do you want to be?  Are our Democratic members of Congress players?  Should they be?  And as for 2008 (or 2006, for that matter), are we busting our butts to elect players or workers?          

NB:  Harper's has not yet, at this writing, posted even the table of contents for their newest issue containing this article.  And even when they do, chances are they won't post the article itself.  That will come half a year or more later.  More and more, however, good Harper's articles turn up on the web.  You just have to go googling for them.