I recently saw the film "The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford" (henceforth referred to as "The Film" for the duration of this essay) for the first time. The film was beautiful and tragic, if a bit long. The story concerns the last days of notorious outlaw Jesse James, the second most hated man with that name. In the twilight years of the James Gang, most of the originals were in jail or dead, forcing Jesse and Frank to hire local hooligans to bolster their numbers. Robert Ford's brother was one such hooligan hired for the Blue Cut robbery in Glendale, Missouri. Robert Ford uses this connection to get involved with Jesse James, who he idolized as a kid. The relationship sours and Ford agrees to assist the authorities in ridding the world of the original America's Most Wanted Man. One morning after breakfast, Ford shoots James in the back of the head in his living room, becoming immortal from James' death.

The tension prior to the climax of the film is replaced by a profound sadness afterwards. Ford tries to cash in on his accomplishment and finds that the public is at best unimpressed and at worst despises him. It turns out that James, the notorious outlaw, the robber and murderer, was far more popular than the man who brought him to justice (of sorts). Ford was essentially jeered out of Missouri, never found love or respect from anyone, and was eventually murdered by another outlaw in 1892. The man who protected his neighbors from a cold-blooded killer spent the rest of his days as a pathetic drunk, reviled by the very neighbors whose lives he may have saved.

As I reflected on this, it occurred to me that, due to some strange accident of human nature, we seem prefer people who do evil in a cool way over people who do good blandly or unstylishly. Jesse James was handsome, charming, intelligent, and was always one step ahead of the authorities. To the people of the day (the ones that weren't murdered by him anyway), he represented that rebellious, rugged individualism that Americans have always been entranced by. He was the embodiment of adventure, the essence of all things masculine. In contrast, Robert Ford was kind of a weiner. He was a poser, a gangster-wanna-be. He was only ever known in the outlaw world as a "hanger on". Let's face it: it's not fair that a dashing man like James was killed by some bumpkin from Missouri. He should have been killed in an epic shootout with the state police, or blown up in a harrowing blimp crash, or thrown to his death during a train-roof fist fight with Teddy Roosevelt. Shot in the back by a doofus was beneath him.

The situation reminds me of Marvin Heemeyer. You might not know the name, and you might not remember what he did in Granby, Colorado. On June 4, 2004, after a protracted dispute with the local and federal government over property rights, Heemeyer went on a rampage with what was lovingly referred to as the Killdozer.Here's a link to prove I'm not making this up. It was an armored bulldozer that was impervious to gunfire and resistant to explosions. It had bullet-resistant cameras installed for visibility, as well as food, water, and life support in the air-tight cabin. Heemeyer destroyed 13 buildings, caused $7,000,000 in damage, and nearly caused propane explosions by shooting at tanks. He also shot at police officers. He gallantly killed himself after getting the Killdozer stuck in a basement. Despite this, he was cheered by viewers and internet users all over America. He was an average joe who built a death machine to stand up to The Man. I remember seeing numerous celebratory topics on internet message boards popping up that day hailing him as an American hero, and the name Killdozer has become something of a lauded internet meme. "Go, Killdozer, go!" was a popular comment on the new sites carrying the footage.

Once again, we love a stylish criminal, especially one who goes up against the powers that be, the bossman, the authorities. I have no doubt that part of it lies in our admiration for people who aren't "sheep". The average person goes to work, pays their taxes, does what the police tell them to, and generally does what society expects of them. This is frustrating and stultifying at times, so we take some vicarious joy when other people say "To hell with this!" and flip out. We wouldn't risk jail or death ourselves, but it's nice to know someone out there is.

I suspect, though, that a larger part of our fascination is that the Jameses and Killdozers of the world let us hope and pretend that our own moral failings needn't feel so shameful. Even though my job often constitutes human pest control, I do believe that most people are basically decent and don't enjoy their various flaws and foibles. We don't like not living up to our own standards, and if we're religious, we hate not living up to our religion. It makes us feel like failures. At times, it's hard to even look at ourselves in the mirror. So when we see people being very destructive and making it look cool, it's a bit of a relief. If THAT guy looks cool, maybe I don't look like such a schmuck after all!

It's an intoxicating proposition, because from an early age it's drilled into us that bad guys are twisted monsters, belching toxic gas, or skeletal liches living amongst rats and snakes. We're taught that that no one likes bad guys, that they are to be scorned and hated. And yet, at some point during our lives, we become our own bad guy, and we have to figure out how to fit ourselves into that framework. There is certainly no lack of examples of redeemed characters in literature and film, but in the midst of our own darkness, it's hard to find comfort in those who already transcended their own. It's much more seductive to look to the charming rogue, the clever villain, or even the anti-hero. Especially when his counterpart is a Ned Flanders-esque nerd.

The other half of the issue is the damnable banality of goodness. Unless you're part of Doctors Without Borders, or a Special Forces operator killing terrorists behind enemy lines, most of your everyday acts of goodness are fairly vanilla. Indeed, for the average person, much of being good lies in inaction: not succumbing to base desires. Being good means not swearing at your mate during an argument, not keying the car of the guy taking up two parking spaces, not belittling the cashier who got your order wrong. When goodness does call us to action, it's similarly mundane: holding the door open for the elderly man, washing dishes after our spouse cooks us a meal, tossing a fiver into the donation box, calling a friend dealing with a rough week.

Frankly, bad guys look like they're having all the fun. They do whatever they feel like, take whatever they want, they play with guns and bombs, they say what's on their mind, they get to "be themselves". That's the real attraction, isn't it? Being good feels fake, being bad feels so deliciously natural. Of course, we forget that, by and large, bad guys are pretty miserable. Jesse James was looking for one last score because he wanted to settle down with his family instead of moving them around and living a lie. Heemeyer was clearly a depressed, pathetic man. As thousands of Americans were cheering them on, I'm comfortable claiming they both would have rather been the cheerers than the cheered.

We think there's such an adventurous thrill to gun fights, bank robberies, and Killdozer shenanigans, but those are so easy. Those are the paths of least resistance. The real battles are in our hearts and minds. It doesn't take courage to rob a bank, it takes courage to take a second crap job to pay the mortgage. It doesn't take courage to shoot at the cops protecting their community, it takes courage to humble yourself for your friends and family. When you have no vested interest in the greater good, no skin in the game, being a bad guy is actually the boring choice. *yawn* Selfish guy looks out for number one. Who gives a crap about that?

I wouldn't presume to try and change human nature in terms of what excites us. I'm certainly no stranger to it myself: when I first saw the Killdozer, I was slightly attracted to the romanticism of the endeavor, though I quickly became disgusted by the reality. I do think in entertainment, it's fine to enjoy a charismatic evildoer every now and again. There's some good fun to be had in rooting for the bad guy at times. But never forget that while cool villains can be fun in books and on screen, that doesn't mean it's anything other than pathetic in the real world. It's not noble to destroy property, steal money, and murder innocents, no matter how stylishly you do it. Understand that when all is said and done, the adventure lies in choosing the true, the good, and the beautiful, because that is the path that we're truly terrified to take.



(second half of essay heavily edited 9-27-2010)

Sorry for the title, I'm literally still 12 years old.

There is a brewing hullabaloo this weekend regarding Google's relationship to online privacy. You can get up to speed with this link that I googled (via NYT). For reasons not quite clear to me, a consumer watchdog group has been spending lots of money to criticize Google for keeping track of your searches and online behavior when using their products. They have even gone so far as to take out a giant ad in Times Square painting the CEO of Google as a quasi-pedophile. And you thought subtlety was dead...

Other people have opined far more eloquently on the ins and outs of this story, so I won't add to the noise with my own views on the company whose blogging website I'm currently using for free. However, the story does invite me to meditate on the idea of privacy, on what it is and what it means to us. There is obviously a powerful allure to the idea of privacy, or else why spend millions on ads to defend it? It must either be a precious resource in need of conservation or else a commodity with commercial value.

When people talk of privacy, they could mean a few different things. The adjective "private" goes all sorts of directions depending upon the noun it modifies. Private businesses are companies owned by one or more regular citizens offering products or services in whatever manner suits them. "Private" here is meant to distinguish the business from a government-controlled (or "public") entity. A private party at your local wine bar typically means a gathering of people who don't want to socialize with you (or else a gathering you attend in which you don't want to socialize with strangers). A private patio is simply an area walled off so that only the homeowner can use it. One's private parts refer, of course, to sexual organs which are generally not allowed to be shown in public, body parts that one generally wouldn't want strangers interacting with anyway.

When we talk about Google and online privacy, we're usually talking about the idea of your activities on the internet being hidden or inaccessible to the rest of the users on the net. This has practical applications in online commerce: I don't want Nigerian scammers and basement-dwelling hackers to obtain my credit card number when I'm trying to buy my Salute Your Shorts DVDs off of Amazon. I don't want my social security number being parceled out to a legion of illegal immigrants and sticking me with a seven digit tax debt at the end of the year. No one disputes the necessity of privacy in these instances.

And yet, the consumer watchdog was not accusing Google of storing your financial information and using it to buy Three Moon Wolf shirts for their IT department. Their beef with Google was that they stored your search history and possibly other activities when you use their products. As we all know, Google provides so many free services online, it takes a concerted effort not to use one of their applications at some point. The consumer group alleges that whatever you're doing on these applications is being stored, possibly cataloged, and possibly perused by Google employees, federal agents, and a cigar-smoking Dick Cheney.

A couple questions immediately come to mind. The first question is this: where is it written that your activities on someone else's product, using someone else's bandwidth, are supposed to be private? There is a very odd sense of entitlement some people seem to have when it comes to a free application given away by a company. No one signed any contracts, no one made any deals, and yet this private company is obligated to have no say and no purview over how you use the product they maintain on the web real estate they pay for? You can't go into a restaurant and demand that the manager never looks at you while you eat, so why would you walk into a search engine and demand no one watch you search? Who told you that you had that right?

At various times, I have been mere mouse clicks away from the purchase of iTunes music, iPods, iPhones, and iPads, but I completely object to the way Apple locks down their products and forces the user to use the iTunes store and forces me to buy locked music files. So, I don't use Apple products. I wouldn't dream of demanding Apple change their business structure because I have the "right" to unlocked, unDRMed mp3s. I have certain expectations, Apple doesn't meet them, so we don't do business. That's how it works. Google is a private business, if you don't like their product, don't use it.

Beyond that, the more interesting question in my mind is this: what IS privacy and why do we want it so bad? Let's just jump to the extreme scenario and get it over with: I might not want everyone to know that I'm searching for gay pornography or penis extension pills or a website for married people to have affairs. The internet has ushered in an age of limitless access to the full spectrum of human interests and we're ashamed of some of our interests. Never before have we been able to entertain and explore parts of ourselves that we keep hidden without having to expose ourselves to possible rejection, hatred, or disgust. It doesn't have to be sexual - plenty of people use the internet to express opinions in impolite or downright despicable ways, ways they would never express themselves in public. Read the comments in any random YouTube video and see if you don't see "Nigger!" or "Faggot!" or some other nasty epithet at least twice. The internet allows us to tap into the dark core that we hide away and gives it license to behave without restraint. And my friends, many of us are addicted to the freedom...

In a certain sense, privacy is freedom. The freedom to be our most unbridled selves, to explore our shadows, to taste the forbidden fruit growing in the darkest corners of our soul. This is why many people clamor for total internet privacy. However, I want to clarify, I am in no way saying that privacy advocates are all moral degenerates, only that they are fighting for the freedom to be whatever it is they aren't comfortable being in real life, to ask about whatever it is they can't ask their peers about. I don't believe that their searches for low cost auto insurance or for tickets to see Wicked are what they are fighting to keep shrouded. Perhaps it's the WebMD search for symptoms of a urinary tract infection, or for diet pills, or for a marriage counselor, or for a foreclosure attorney, or for their estranged daughter. I would say most of our secrets are perfectly mundane, but perfectly frightening to consider the whole world knowing.

We have to recognize, however, that the world of 2010 is far too interconnected to hope for total privacy. Sure, you could go live on a compound in Montana and grow your own food, but the rest of us have to contend with the fact that we live in an interdependent age where the only true private corner lies inside our minds. Everything else, everywhere else, someone has a peek into your life. The internet is not only not an exception, it's probably the least private place on earth. Forget Google, your ISP sees every single thing you do, and per federal law, archives it for up to four years. It's just that as long as you're not sending Ahmadinejad a job application, no one cares and no one is paying attention. That's as good as it gets.

What I'm saying is that, for better or worse, we're going to have to reconcile ourselves to that which we want private. The more we strive to keep it in darkness, the more we lie to ourselves. The more we pretend that we can present ourselves to the world completely on our terms, the more we set ourselves us for embarrassment and failure. I'm not saying that we need to start pooping with the stall door open and asking our friends if they can recommend a good erectile dysfunction pill. What I'm saying is that we need to be okay with ourselves and secure enough to weather any breaches of our privacy that occur. We need to search ourselves, we need to know ourselves, and we need to be mentally ready to be seen for who we are.

Whether Google knows your secrets is irrelevant. The relevant question is whether you know your secrets and whether you are willing to engage them or just keep your head in the sand and hope for the best...