Yes friends, television was different back in my day. You may have your singing dragons, your super quadruplets, your dysfunctional family-owned conglomerates. Give me the cereal sponsored pablum of my childhood: shows with such titles as Magic Maude and her Wonder Flute, The Boy Who Ate Marbles, and the gentle western flavored heroics of Cactus Cal and the Jolly Tinker. When the sun rose after five hours of morning chores on another weekend, nothing beat that toasty feeling of sitting your tired ass down with a bowl of maple flavored millet for 5 more hours of Saturday morning tv. It was a new medium with a lot of dead air to fill and a limited amount of time and money to fill it with. They could have just turned the camera on a bucket of toads and we would have been entertained, but what they did instead was hire admen, retired vaudevilleans, has-been B movie stars and young out-of-work method actors and let the magic happen.
And there was none of this politically correct stuff back then. Just trust me.
We're talking limited animation classics like Zip Magruder, the Chimp from Outer Space brought to you by Duvernois Filterless Cigarettes, and Betsy and Kimmy Meet the Mummy.
But perhaps my favorite weekly serial featured the antics of that canine corpse, Dixie the Ghost Dog. Follow the spooky pooch and her young master Terri as they traverse the globe in search of rights to wrong and wrongs to right! Nothing today could quite hope to compare to the excitement and anticipation a young lad got each week hearing the melodic strains of the opening theme song:
Oh there's a late fox terrier; No canine spook is scarier. (The ghost of) Dixie Doodle! Dixie Doodle! Hair like wire, Breath of dog shit and Hell Fire. (The ghost of) Dixie Doodle! (She ain't no fuckin' poodle!) She used to stand around; Now she's a real Hell hound! Gents and Ladies, meet the bitch from Hades: Dixie Doodle!
We don't know what it was about, but did it kill us to watch? No, it did not! And we assume for that reason it might have made us stronger.
The Big Con is a book from 1940 by David Maurer, a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville who made his career studying the culture and argots of the drug and criminal undergrounds and other subcultures. A contributor to later editions of H.L.Mencken's The American Language, Maurer discovered his calling trying to penetrate the arcane conversations of fishermen on summers he spent as as a young man working as a hand on fishing boats off the coast of Newfoundland. The Big Con, his most celebrated work, is a “linguistic study” of the subculture of the streets, taken from testimony of actual con men of the early 20th century. Men with such colorful names as Larry the Lug, The Sanctimonious Kid, Wildfire Bill, Limehouse Chappie, 102nd Street George and The High Ass Kid, describing the ins and outs of their métier in language like the following:
Never boast about your rags, but brag about your long cush. That will lead him along to brag about his long jack, and then you’re getting somewhere, brother. If he is a hard-shelled Babbitt, why you’re one too.
But the book is as much about the trade as about the language with which it is plied. The professor sued the makers of The Sting in the 70’s for $10 million, alleging that David Ward's Oscar winning screenplay copied his book without attribution or compensation. Indeed, the plot of the Sting bears a strong resemblance to a con referred to by Maurer as The Pay-Off and Paul Newman's character Shaw Gondorff is clearly a nod to brother grifters Fred and Charley Gondorff memorialized in Maurer's book.
As Maurer describes it, there are short cons like 3 card monte and crooked faro games by which any two-bit grifter can separate a fool from his money in minutes, but then there are the elaborate Big Cons like "The Wire", "The Rag" and "The Payoff" that take knowledge, skill, technique, determination, props, sets, personnel and days or even months to come to fruition. All 3 involve an arc in which a "roper" trawls dining cars, poker games or hotel lobbies in search of a suitable "mark", perhaps a small town entrepreneur in the city for some business, who he chats up in order to ferret out an openness to partnering in the procurement of easy money, often based on inside information say on the results of a race or the performance of a stock, information that due to the willingness of a disgruntled insider the roper has become wise to can be delayed long enough for a bet to be placed or stocks to be bought or sold.
Once hooked by the roper, the next step is to bring the mark into the orbit of the real master of the con, the "insideman" who can make it happen, a suave and charismatic moneyman who the mark believes must be convinced to overcome his reticence to bankroll the sure thing that the roper and the mark have brought to his attention. Of course the insideman is in reality the engine of the scam who through his apparent earnestness and deft manipulation gains the trust of the mark, who is ultimately persuaded to raise funds of his own to front or facilitate what he believes is a much larger and more complicated transaction from the insideman that will guarantee that the dreamed of payoff will be enormous, yet which due to a glitch has been inconveniently tied up in a way that only the mark's earnest money can get unstuck.
With the "trim" (the mark's money) in hand-- often tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars raised surreptitiously but dutifully by the mark from back home-- the sure thing is derailed, usually because of a misunderstanding -- say, a bet "placed" on a horse to win that should have been put on the horse to "place"; a stock that should have been sold rather than bought-- the deed is done. All that's left is to set the mark on his heels. Something that's usually not hard to do with the suggestion that the law might have become privy to a questionable, possibly larcenous transaction that the mark participated in with open eyes and full intent to profit from. If further prompting is needed, perhaps a spectacularly violent murder of the roper whose misunderstanding blew the deal apart staged in front of the mark's eyes, followed up by a hint that the mark himself could now conceivably be convicted by any jury as an accessory to a murder he had surely already thought of committing himself. If the mark on cooling his heels decides to raise a beef, additional personnel are needed in the form of "fixers"-- attorneys or other influencers free with cash for cops, judges and jurors on the take. With the fix in, a con could set up permanent shop on Main Street, right next to the Western Auto. All of it creating a sort of shadow economy co-existent and in many cases finely intermeshed with "respectable society" in many an American town.
While a little grifter slang goes a long way, the book itself still goes down like the finest bourbon. What’s especially interesting about it is that one gets the sense that Maurer’s interest in these chaps is more than academic. There seems to be a good bit of admiration in his recounting of the scams, many of which are insanely elaborate—think of the Sting with its telegraph room and all those fake bettors and other “extras” in on the scam – all of them acting as though their ruse is real, and in a way that is meant to convince the rubes is real. So elaborate as to invite the question, “who thought this would work, let alone turn a profit?” But according to Maurer this kind of thing was extremely common, and extremely profitable in the early part of the 20th century. Here he describes the nightmare of a mark with a beef with uncommon sensitivity to the jeopardy posed to the con:
If the insideman handles the blow-off properly, the mark hardly knows that he has been fleeced. No good insideman wants any trouble with a mark. He wants him to lose his money the “easy way” rather than the “hard way” and the secret to long immunity from arrest is a properly staged blow-off, with the mark blaming the roper and feeling that the insideman is the finest man he ever knew. It is the mark who is not cooled out properly or is mishandled by a clumsy or incompetent insideman who immediately beefs; furthermore, if he is sure that he has been swindled and if the local police do not act, he may go higher up, with revenge rather than recovery of his money as his object. Marks of this type can upset the whole corrupt political machine and even land not only the con men but perhaps some of the police and the fixer as well behind bars.
After his suit against the Sting's producers was settled for $300,000 (over the protests of David Ward who claims-- plausibly-- to this day to have gotten nothing more than inspiration from The Big Con), Maurer retired from academia to his farm in Kentucky. Injuries sustained in a car crash aged him before his time. Hoping to avoid becoming a burden and financial drain on his wife (whom he referred to as The Countess), he took a walk to the cornfield in 1981 and killed himself with a shot gun.
The Big Con endures.
A sample of grifter slang from the David Maurer's The Big Con:
Apple - A mark. Any person.
Beef - complain to the police
Blute - fake newspaper clippings used as props in the big con
Bobble- to arouse a mark's suspicions
Boodle - A fake roll of large bills (large bills on the outside, small bills inside which can be flashed in front a mark for effect.
The Broads - 3 card monte.
Bumblebee - $1 bill
The cackle-bladder - Method of shaking off a mark with a beef involving the insideman shooting the roper with blanks in front of the mark, made more effective by blood splurting from a rubber bladder filled with blood held in the roper's mouth.
Cannon (also gun, whizz, dip, etc) - A pickpocket.
Chick or Chicane - Short of money
Cop a heel - Run away.
Curdle - Go wrong (as in a fix that doesn't work)
Cush - Money
Drop-In - Easy money
Ear-wigger - Eavesdropper
Fixer - One employed to buy cooperation of police, judge and jurors
Get a hard-on - Reach for a pistol
Have smallpox - To be wanted on a warrant (since it might lead to others being sought for arrest)
Heavy-gee - A safeblower or other professional
Jacket - Something or someone liable to be trouble to a grifter in a trial - e.g., his criminal record or a witness who can testify against him.
Joe Hep or Hep - Smart or wise to the grift.
Jug or jay - A bank.
Lagged - Sent to prison
Mudkicker - A prostitute
Peter - A safe
Plinger - A beggar
The quill - Genuine
Raggle - Attractive woman
Savage - A mark
Scat - Whisky
Scatter - Saloon
Shed - Rail or bus station
Sneezed - Arrested
Square paper - An honest person.
Taw - Bank roll
T.B. - Total Blank; No score
Tear off - Cheat one's partner of their share.
Tin Mittens - A fixer (from the sound of coin clinking in the hand)
Tip - A crowd of people
Touch - Money taken from a mark
Trim - To take money from a mark; also, the amount taken
Twist - Woman, often in the rackets or connected to crime
Whip -To walk
Winchell - A mark
Wrong - Not bought by a fixer as in a wrong cop or judge.
Yellow - A telegram, especially a fake telegram used in a grift.
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* As a pre-formed youth I was huge fan of the movie when it first came out in 1973-- it was one of the few I paid good money to see several more times than once. I rewatched it with my family a few years ago. The fam was utterly unimpressed and I cringed at it from start to finish, mostly at the wooden near 40-year old Robert Redford’s casting as a 20-something street kid. But the time might be ripe to set the peepers on it for one more go.
Reading the reasoning of a lawyer, Norman Finkelstein, on Roe v Wade, which half a century ago established federal protection of a woman's right to choose abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, and on the leaked Alito decision that could end it, I was struck by the bloodless sacrality at the heart of it.
The landmark US Supreme Court decision upholding a woman’s (qualified) right to abortion, Roe v. Wade (1973), pretended to avoid the enigma of when life begins: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” But the Court was being disingenuous. First, except by artifice, it seems impossible to decide the legality of abortion without engaging this irreducible question. Second, even if only by indirection, the Court did stake out a position on when life begins. The problem, alas, was that its position was wholly unpersuasive and wholly political.
... However much the Court denied it, viability was ... the point at which it determined life began. It made sense politically as the Court reached for the broad center in public opinion. But its own determination was as capricious (or rational) as the others. It grounded the right to abortion during the first stage of pregnancy in the Fourteenth Amendment right to liberty, and it grounded the State’s right to intervene during the later stage of pregnancy in its obligation to protect prenatal life. The Court presents this resolution of the abortion enigma as a compromise between the extreme pro-choice and pro-life positions. But it’s only a balanced decision if life begins at viability. If, however, life begins at conception, then, by the Court’s own reasoning, a woman’s right to liberty would in general be trumped by the fetus’s right to life, while if life begins at birth, then State intervention prior to birth would in general violate the woman’s right to liberty.
Truth be told, the whole of the Court’s jurisprudence is absurd as it is premised on the belief that an insoluble moral enigma—when does life begin?—can be resolved by a clever turn of phrase or, less charitably, verbal subterfuge. The intractable fact is that, for all anyone knows, the so-called rigid pro-life position might be vindicated by History. Indeed, if the jury is still out, and it’s human life that’s at stake, then isn’t the categorical imperative to err on the side of caution: if it might be life, then act as if it is life?
Are we just raising questions with this approach, or are we begging them? Finkelstein's reading of the decision seems to be fixated (perhaps appropriately for all I know) on how closely it adheres to the matter of what is legally correct in this instance. His admonition in light of what he appears to acknowledge is the present unsettleablility of the question of when life begins and should be protected is to err on the side of caution for the fetus which cannot speak for itself. On the matter of whether a fetus has life that the state is bound to protect, Finkelstein acknowledges the unanswerability; but on the question of whether a fetus declared to have life has the right to be born, this controversy Finkelstein appears to take as a given.* In light of the insolubility of both questions, as I read the reasoning behind Justice Blackmun's majority opinion on Roe v. Wade, I am impressed by the pragmatic judiciousness of it.
Speaking as a person with perhaps the least legal, least reverential mind that anyone ought to dare to bring to bear upon such a topic, I find the notion in this day and age, when an intrauterine device can silently, unobtrusively and definitively intervene as intended in a way that merely certifies the futility of a sperm's already doomed mission of fertilizing an egg, when a pill can artificially induce infertility or reverse a fertilization within hours of it happening, when the termination of an unplanned, unwanted or forced pregnancy can be done in a way that does not add to whatever trauma occasioned it, I can outdo Finkelstein's bloodlessness. If a fetus might be life: what's it to you? Abortion exists in nature. It will always be with us. A fetus cannot have an opinion. The woman carrying it is alive and among us. Her fetus is none of your business. The opinion of the man, who frequently is not even around afterward to be polled on the matter, is only relevant it seems to me when it supports the reality the woman is faced with.
Life doesn't happen every day, even for the living. "Potential" life is thwarted at every turn-- by abortion, by miscarriage, by contraception, by abstention, by menstruation, by infertility, by mood, by alcohol, by having a work deadline pop into your head just when it was getting good. My wife and I were recently contemplating how differently our lives would have gone if we had not been rejected as a young impoverished couple for a mortgage on a beautiful old house we had let ourselves unrealistically dream about owning in the small provincial city in the nation's heartland we were living in at the time. Of all the differences it would have made in the trajectory of our lives to have gotten that mortgage instead, the most devastating was the absence from it of our daughter-- because surely the sperm and the egg that made her could only have met that particular moment in the very different circumstances of the lives we were then able to make for ourselves many miles, many changes and many years later.
This is not a case for the sanctity of life, but for the virtual impossibility of any single life, even against the inexorable onslaught of life constantly trying to happen. The minutely infinitely particular circumstances in which any one life must have started-- especially compared to the overwhelming finality of those uncountable multitudes that fail to happen-- to my mind weakens the notion that human life could be considered sacred before it is born into this world. If the fertilization of a single egg by an individual sperm is so unlikely that it could have been easily undone without any intention, how could it be sacred? If every life that makes it to birth is pre-determined in its quality and its duration, do choice, will and sacredness have any meaning? If every pregnancy must by statute be brought to term, that's not holiness, that's an algorithm. Who is anyone to decide that a woman must not take advantage of readily available technology to improve the circumstances under which she might bring forth a child into the world? Birth is demonstrably not a right for every fetus even by cosmic justice. How differently might we treat it if we recognized it as a privilege?
It seems to me that Alito's decision on the undecidable question at the heart of the Mississippi case that apparently will undo Roe v Wade nearly 50 years after it became established law, and that potentially threatens to undo protections of so many other intimate individual choices and behaviors that required nearly 200 years of social development for the all-male until 1981 Supreme Court to recognize is, just as you would imagine it to be, just as arbitrary as Blackmun's but on the side of the meddling state of Mississippi and against the women whose lives and autonomy it interferes with.
In pinpointing the state's interest in the sacredness of a human life at viability, Blackmun might have been overplaying the government's hand, but his argument strikes me as a genuinely valid compromise that in any case has proven for nearly 50 years to adequately protect the right of a woman to choose for herself whether to continue or to terminate the circumstance of an actual pregnancy actually confronting her. The rescinding of this rare instance of governmental decency in a matter of individual freedom would be not merely tragic but barbaric.
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* If I am following Finkelstein's legal argument, judicial protection of a woman's choice at the Federal level is overreach, but local legislative or democratically chosen protection of the right of a fetus to be born should bind the woman pregnant with it.
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Postscript: Several years later, I realize I misread Finkelstein's argument about Casey, the 1992 decision that introduced viability as the arbitrary point at which the court determined life begins as a way of limiting the freedom of a woman to choose abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. As Finkelstein says, by arbitrarily and unconvincingly setting viability as the boundary between legality and illegality of abortion, it was the court that created the vulnerability in Roe. In that event my argument is with Casey and Dobbs, not necessarily with Finkelstein on this point.
Here’s my amateur quasi-non-ideological Frankenstein myth about the American left since the New Deal:
Post Roosevelt History is divided into pre-End of History and post-End of History. Pre End of History, the left was to a great extent labor unions who due to material conditions and power were partners in American prosperity (and in anti-communism) until about the 70’s when the right, in response to Civil Rights, Voting Rights and other Human Rights, and to the peace movement and environmentalism, got its shit together and began aggressively destroying the left—motivated not just by profit but by a desire to put the genie of civil rights and feminism back into the bottle. This was achievable in part because global shortages and high inflation weakened the leverage of labor in negotiations forcing an extended period of concessions. With the advent of Reagan using the excuse of an escalating cold war to bloat the US military budget, labor was in retreat, social programs were cut, and public services began to be privatized extending the scope of wealth at the top while stagnating or shrinking the wealth at the bottom.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world, the experiment of actually existing socialism was imploding in Russia and China. Thus Unions and actually existing socialism died at the same time in the early 90s resulting in the conquest of history by neoliberalism.
In the end of history era, politics died. Flames were kept kindled by extremely isolated, utterly marginal and effectively discredited pockets of angry alienated folks (and some faith keepers—e.g., Noam Chomsky, Adolph Reed, yourself). Neoliberalism hardened the arteries of history with an intractable plaque that is with us today. However, the flaws baked into capitalism in this time of extreme social isolation, alienation (even amongst the managerial and owner classes at the top) herniated in the 2000’s inspiring a resurgence of leftist activism (the flames of which were fanned by not just the financial meltdown and its exposure of runaway disparities in wealth and freedom, but also by such neoliberal contributions to human civilization as free trade, forever wars, anti-democracy, technocracy), a resurgence which reached its apotheosis in the 2016 and 2020 presidential primary challenges of Bernie Sanders*, an effort which brought the disparate tendrils of the disaffected left together in collective hopes of achieving something like legitimate power with which to jumpstart history again and to get to hacking apart the soulless hegemony of neoliberal capitalism.
The defeat of Bernie Sanders by a concerted conspiracy of Democrats in 2020 was a setback that we’re still trying to recover from.
There’s a shit ton I’ve left out of course-- the war on drugs leading to grand scale incarceration, the pretext of a war on terror for draconian erosion of personal privacy and autonomy, the onset of the observable destructive effects of human caused planetary warming and Trump (who is in fact more neoliberal than he wants his base to think—the negative twin of Obama—both having similarly deludedly satisfied bases.)
I wanted to bring this back to the abortion thing. Hard to see how this isn’t going to have repercussions that I’m really looking forward to seeing. The contradictions are going to be obvious to everyone I thnk. If something exciting doesn’t come out of this, we’re even more doomed than I thought we were last week.
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* If you see Bernie Sanders as right wing, it might be a good idea to ask yourself if you're willing to set aside your purity to make revolution happen for other people who probably need it more than you.
