Friday, June 24, 2011

The Last White Gangster

cross-posted from Dagblog

The FBI has caught Whitey Bulger, after a mere sixteen years. The arrest made national news because of the FBI's well-earned embarrassment and because of the mythology around Bulger. As a crime boss, Bulger was not nationally significant. He was a formidable gang leader with firm control over one slice of Boston's organized crime, but it was only a slice. He was the scariest gang leader in Boston, but not necessarily the biggest or richest. You'll hear a lot in the papers about what a criminal genius he is, and he really is smarter than any hoodlum should get, but what it's really about is this: Jimmy Bulger is the Last Great White Gangster.

Bulger is the last Irish-American mob leader who's likely to control even a slice of the underworld in a major American city. He is ethnically similar to many of the journalists and editors covering him, and they obviously love writing about him. He's the last gangster who looks like Jimmy Cagney, so even very good coverage of him gets tinged with sympathy and sentimentality that Bulger has never come close to deserving. It's a nostalgia trip. Reporters call Bulger "colorful," but it's only because he's so very pale.

Some of the Bulger myth is based on fact. He corrupted cops and FBI agents, who helped him murder and helped him escape. His brother was President of the Massachusetts State Senate for eighteen years, with Jimmy a notorious criminal the whole time. He is the primary model for Nicholson's character in The Departed, although even that bleak movie pulled its punches about Bulger's depravity and Boston's corruption. He did inform on the Boston Mafia, enabling the FBI to tape one of the Mafia's hokey (but, surprisingly, real) initiation ceremonies. And some people in South Boston, where Whitey did his crimes, did and do talk about him as a Robin Hood figure. But all of that was possible because Bulger was, well, Whitey. The open political connections, the wrongheaded sympathy from cops and deluded loyalty from the neighborhood all come down to ethnic solidarity and Boston's shameful history of race relations. Race isn't the whole story. It's only forty or sixty percent. But it's the forty-to-sixty percent that the media will leave out, and the part that explains all the rest.

The biggest break that the Bulgers ever got was the court order that desegregated the Boston schools by mandating busing in 1974. Back then Whitey was working for a gangster named Howie Winter and his brother Billy was South Boston's state senator. When busing happened, Southie flew into a frothing rage. It took the neighborhood at least twenty-five years to get over it. And while people (including William Bulger) will tell you with a straight face that all the anger wasn't about race (it was really about local control and neighborhood schools and yadda yadda yadda), that's just whitewash. People screamed racial slurs in the streets. They wrote them on public walls. Black people, including kids and unlucky bystanders, got intimidated and physically attacked. (Other Irish-American neighborhoods were also angry, but South Boston and Charleston were the worst, and Southie was ground zero.) Was every last single opponent of busing a dyed-in-the-wool racist? No. But plenty of them voiced the most toxic racism you can imagine, loudly and proudly. Twenty years later, you could still hear some people from those neighborhoods saying vile, hateful things in a matter-of-fact tone. And the fury wasn't even about the quality of white kids' education: South Boston High was a lousy school, at the bottom of the state rankings. What the angry mobs wanted was to make sure their kids went to a failing and dysfunctional school with other white kids.

Billy Bulger became a leader of the anti-busing movement, and it made him. Four years later he was President of the State Senate. Whitey was fighting busing, too, in his own way: the pro-busing Mayor of Boston actually worried at one point that Bulger might have him killed so the anti-busing Deputy Mayor could take his place. If you think of William Bulger as a segregationist Southern governor and his brother as Grand Dragon of the local KKK, you have the basic picture. And the deference they've received from Boston's press and politicians should be seen through that lens; they were the devils that liberals had to deal with, and too many locals had sympathy for.

Cops, including federal cops, liked Jimmy Bulger because he was an Irish neighborhood guy just like many of them were. (His FBI handler was a guy named Connolly who'd grown up in the same Southie housing project.) And the busing crisis turned that garden-variety ethnic bond into something deeper and more tribal as places like Southie and Charleston grew more defensive and aggrieved. Some of those cops felt that their ethnic group was losing ground in the city, and they weren't in any special hurry to see Boston Irish losing power in the underworld. In fact, the FBI was happy to help Whitey expand by undermining Italian mobsters. Whitey got stronger in the 1980s as the Mafia got weaker. The Last White Gangster basically got endangered-species protection.

People were willing to tolerate, even to celebrate, the Bulger brothers because they were a bulwark of Irish political influence that was otherwise in danger of eroding. At least they were Irish, and you couldn't be sure the next guys would be. William Bulger ran an old-school political patronage machine; if you backed him, he could help this or that nephew find a public job. Whitey was an old-school ethnic racketeer. He might have robbed South Boston blind and helped keep it poor, but at least the neighborhood got exploited by one of the tribe.

The "Robin Hood" myth about Whitey is partly the usual dysfunctional ghetto Stockholm Syndrome bullshit, and partly about the belief that Whitey kept African-Americans at bay. People will actually say that Whitey "kept drugs out of the neighborhood." That's not just a lie but a self-delusion. Whitey Bulger kept drugs out of Southie the way that Santa Claus keeps toys out of the living room on Christmas morning: he didn't deliver the packages himself, but everyone who did was acting in his name. The "keeping drugs out of the neighborhood" story demands (or allows) whoever believes it not to notice that Southie was totally full of drugs.

But if you read "keeping out drugs" as "keeping out blacks," it makes a lot of sense. That was the thing about Southie: the kids were on drugs, but all the drug dealers were white. Some people in Southie and Charlestown were willing to fight bitterly for the right to have their own all-white drug traffic and all-white extortion rackets and failing all-white schools where white kids could get a rotten education among their own kind. South Boston's love for Whitey Bulger is about the desire to be abused and exploited by a fellow member of the tribe; you can only have a Last White Gangster if you have a Last White Ghetto for him to rule over.

The Bulger brothers are masters of South Boston's greatest art: playing the victim. Whitey has the balls to complain that the FBI confiscated the $800,000 in his apartment and ask for a court-ordered lawyer. Billy Bulger complains that he was forced to resign as president of the University of Massachusetts in 2003 just because his brother had been a federal fugitive for nine years and Billy admitted having contacted him during that time. (Give Mitt Romney his due for making that happen.) That's the same Billy Bulger who used to complain that anti-busing protestors were being unfairly painted as racists just because they stood around screaming "Nigger!" at teenagers. Whitey's girlfriend, Catherine Grieg, excused his explosive temper by telling the neighbors that he had Alzheimer's, and serious media outlets gullibly repeated that. In fact, Whitey is just a terrible person. If his violent anger is a symptom of Alzheimer's, then Alzheimer's set in while he was in the womb. The Bulger brothers' Southie, the Southie they exploited and preserved, was just the same way: loudly declaring victimhood at the hands of any outsider handy, while reserving the right to do all the actual victimizing themselves. But don't let the martyr act fool you: neither South Boston nor Jimmy Bulger are victims. They're simply hoods.

Thursday, June 09, 2011

No Privacy, Only Privilege

cross-posted from Dagblog

The media can't resist talking about Congressman Weiner's penis. That's no surprise. The American entertainment industry exists to talk about penises and the things various penises like. And our news media is only a minor subsidiary of that entertainment empire.

On the other hand, the news media has no interest, zero, in the fact that Clarence Thomas leaves his wife's income off his financial disclosure forms, despite the, ahem, plain reading and original intent of those forms. Bor-ing! So technical! No one wants to hear a story about financial technicalities and legal loopholes. Blah, blah, blah, some loophole exists somewhere that allows people to funnel large sums of money to a Supreme Court Justice when they have a case in front of the Court. Who cares about loopholes?

Of course, Weiner's misadventures are tied to an overwhelming public interest: voyeurism. He's an exhibitionist, we're voyeurs, there's no point interfering in the course of nature. But no other "public interest" is involved. No crime. No public policy, no public funds, no harassment of employees and no harm done to anyone over whom Weiner had power. (Dave Letterman really isn't allowed to scold.) Weiner didn't even flirt with his own constituents. And any annoyance he was causing unwilling recipients could have been stopped easily. Creeps are easy to block.

So what's the crucial news angle here? Nothing. Weiner's behavior is creepy and compulsive and sad, but it has nothing to do with the public welfare. We just want to talk more about penises, and he's obliging us.

The important thing is that no one has any privacy anymore. Privacy is so 20th century. It's boring, like talking about checks and balances or public integrity or the right to a fair hearing before the Supreme Court. Privacy is for old farts. And so is observing other people's privacy.

You can argue that Weiner violated his own privacy by texting and tweeting his private business. But he texted and tweeted to private citizens, in private. And various third parties published them, with no justification whatsoever.

If a politician were writing racy letters, longhand, to women he met on bars along the campaign trail, and enclosing a naughty Polaroid or two, that would be creepy and bizarre. But if one of those women went to a newspaper or television station with those letters and photos, the appropriate question would be, "What public interest is served by publishing these?" The only rational answer is "None." That the illicit blathering took place through digital technology doesn't change that. The press has no right to publish people's letters or transcripts of their phone calls, unless there's a reason. If the FBI is a wiretapping a criminal and he begins to indulge in phone sex, they're legally obliged to stop taping and come back later.

But we now live in a society where major news organizations will publish embarrassing sexual material on no pretext at all. We have a British tabloid, and perhaps other newspapers, wiretapping private citizen's phones in order to publish details of their private lives. We have creeps like Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe hacking and snooping and secretly taping, answerable to nothing but their own slender consciences.

Back in the Iron Curtain days, Communist secret police would wiretap dissidents and then publish whatever dirty laundry they overheard. (Milan Kundera writes about the Czech secret police taping the dissident Jan Prochazka kvetching about his friends over a few drinks, and then playing his back-biting gossip on the radio.) That's what a police state aspires to: a world without privacy.

Now we're approaching that secret policeman's dream world, except we've outsourced the secret policing into private hands. Everyone is allowed to wiretap everyone else. Everyone can publish each other's e-mails, pass along each other's pictures. We've chosen a world where the freedom to humiliate each other, and to stare at others' humiliation, is treated as the bedrock right, and freedom from humiliation is a privilege that can be revoked on a whim. Anybody's whim.

Sure, you can say that Weiner had it coming, that he got himself into trouble. But that's what they'll say about you, too. You should have known better than to send that e-mail or that text message. You should have known better than to pay for that with a card. You should have known better than to go to that website. You should have known better than to write that down. And you can say that Weiner is a public figure, and so has no private life at all. But when it's your turn to be humiliated, there will be some colorable excuse: you're a schoolteacher. You have a blog. You commented on the internet, or a gave a quote to your local paper. There will always be a convenient excuse. But the real reason is this: the rest of us want to dig through your business, and we've decided that it's our business, too.

Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, has decided that his wife's income is no one's business, the letter of the law notwithstanding. Justice Thomas doesn't want to tell us who his wife's clients are, or how much she's paid. And if he doesn't have to, anyone who wants to pay off Justice Thomas simply has to hire Ginny Thomas and pay her more than she knows it's worth. Sure, they won't be paying the Justice. He'll just have access to the money and the things it buys.

I'm not accusing Justice Thomas of being on the take. He has revealed enough of his joint finances to support any such accusation. But what he is doing is creating a precedent (which any Supreme Court Justice should surely understand), by which a federal justice can be bribed with impunity. In fact, his behavior creates a clear road map to bribing a Supreme Court Justice and getting away with it. And that is a shameful precedent to set.

There's no privacy for private citizens in 21st century America. There's just privilege, and secrecy, for the privileged few.

When Clarence Thomas was the guy who allegedly chatted about porn movies in the office, we were utterly fascinated with him. Now that he's subverting the basic integrity of the highest court in the land, no one's interested. And this scandal, unlike the salacious twittering, is very literally our business. Clarence Thomas is sworn to do the people's business. He is not allowed to contract himself out while he does it. But evidently, these are the new rules. Big Money is going to be allowed to funnel all the money it likes to Supreme Court Justices. As long as the Justice taking the cash doesn't spend it on hookers, he'll be fine. And the rest of us won't notice how our world has changed. We'll all be looking at someone's crotch, twittering about what a scandal it is.