Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
Filed on behalf of: The United States of America
Against: Consequences, Specifically
Case No.: Are You Kidding Me
I was sitting on my porch outside Charlottesville, Virginia, watching my pig, Trouble McFussbucket, methodically destroy a flower bed she had definitely been told was off-limits, when the press conference came through my phone. I want you to understand the specific quality of my attention in that moment. Trouble had been at the flower bed for twenty minutes. I had told her no at least eleven times. She had acknowledged me each time with the focused indifference of someone who has already decided how this ends.
Approximately four feet away, Mr. Pickles was screaming at a cloud.
Mr. Pickles is a Scandinavian Lintbøøl. If you are unfamiliar with the breed, picture a tennis ball that survived a house fire, developed opinions, and decided those opinions were worth sharing at full volume with anyone within a quarter mile. The Lintbøøl is not recognized by the American Kennel Club, the World Canine Organization, or any governing body with standards, which suits Mr. Pickles fine because Mr. Pickles does not recognize governing bodies. He is approximately five pounds of matted, mysteriously damp fur wrapped around a philosophical commitment to conflict. He once barked at his own reflection for forty-five minutes and, when the reflection finally stopped, declared victory.
I bring all of this up because what I saw on my phone was, structurally, the same situation as my porch. Just with more cameras. And more rubble. And a Tomahawk missile where the petunias used to be.
Let’s set the scene properly.
It is day two of a war. A school in Iran is rubble. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, the majority of them children, the majority of those children previously in possession of futures. Reporters have video. The video has a Tomahawk missile in it. The United States military has Tomahawk missiles. The United States military is currently, actively, and enthusiastically bombing Iran. A reporter asks the President of the United States if perhaps the United States is responsible for the missile in the video that killed the children in the school during the war the United States started.
And the President of the United States, the elected leader of the most powerful military force in the history of human civilization, a man with access to every intelligence agency on the planet, a man whose name is literally on the order to start the bombing, looked into the cameras and said:
“Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us.”
Take a moment. Take several moments. Go outside. Look at a tree. Come back.
Mr. Pickles had moved on from the cloud and was now barking at the tree.
What you just witnessed was not a gaffe. It was not improvisation. It was not even stupidity in the conventional sense, because stupidity implies an attempt at intelligence that went sideways. What you witnessed was the activation of The Marketplace Defense, America’s oldest and most beloved legal doctrine, a doctrine so thoroughly embedded in our national operating system that the President deployed it instinctively, the way a Scandinavian Lintbøøl attacks a riding lawnmower, without thought, without shame, without a single advisor in the room apparently willing to say sir, please do not use the gun lobby’s argument to explain the school.
This is what scholars of the American innocence doctrine would recognize immediately as a fully matured specimen: the clean, confident, ancestral logic that says we are the origin of things but never the consequence of things. We will be presenting four exhibits. Buckle up, because by the time we’re done you are going to need a drink, possibly a constitutional amendment, and definitely a Lintbøøl with better impulse control. Good luck finding one.
Exhibit A: The Enchanted Broom, or: This Has Been the Plan Since Before There Was a Plan
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not a fairy tale. It is a deposition.
An apprentice, who we will call The Junior Employee, uses his boss’s intellectual property without authorization to animate a broom and make it haul water. The broom, having no soul, no judgment, and no legal liability, immediately goes berserk and floods the entire castle. The Junior Employee, panicking, chops the broom in half with an axe, which any reasonable adult could have predicted would result in two brooms, because that is how wood works, and now there are twice as many enchanted brooms flooding twice as much castle.
Eventually the Sorcerer, the Senior Executive Who Was Golfing, sweeps back in and fixes everything with a wave of his hat.
No inquiry follows. No broom registry is established. No legislation limits the unauthorized animation of household objects. The Junior Employee will absolutely do this again.
Here is the lesson the story was supposed to teach: don’t start something you can’t finish. Here is the lesson America actually absorbed and has been running on ever since: the guy who enchanted the broom gets to stand in the doorway looking concerned while other people drown.
Mr. Pickles has declared war on the following things since January: the UPS truck, the FedEx truck, a different UPS truck, all four tires of my wife Karie’s car individually and separately, a garden hose that was not running, a garden hose that was running, the concept of the mailbox, three crows, one crow twice, and a Roomba that has since been retired not because it broke but because we feared for its dignity. Mr. Pickles has never won any of these engagements. He has never acknowledged this. He has never been held accountable. He has never once stopped. He is, in this metaphor, the United States, and everything else is history, and I apologize to the Roomba.
As I’ve noted before in my ongoing documentation of things that do not learn from experience, the pattern is always the same: animate the thing, lose control of the thing, look surprised at the thing, repeat. The Marketplace Defense begins here, in myth, which means we have been marinating in this logic since before we had countries to blow up. That is Exhibit A. It is three thousand years old and we have not improved on it since.
Exhibit B: The Pill, or: We Are Merely the Molecule’s Landlord
In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin to the American marketplace with the sincere and documented assurance that it was less addictive than other opioids. This was, in the technical medical sense, categorically false, and in the moral sense, a premeditated decision to let people get addicted to a drug in order to sell more of the drug, which is the business model of every drug dealer who has ever existed, except those drug dealers did not have a marketing budget, a lobbying firm, or the ability to write off their legal settlements as a business expense.
When the deaths started piling up, and they piled up in quantities that would embarrass a war, Purdue Pharma’s legal team, who were paid extraordinary sums of money to think about this professionally, arrived at the following product liability defense: we make the pill. We do not make the addiction. The pill travels through a supply chain. The supply chain involves doctors who prescribe it, pharmacies that dispense it, and patients who take it. Each of those is a separate decision made by a separate human being. We are merely the origin point. We are the pill’s manufacturer, not the pill’s moral guardian.
A federal judge looked at this argument and said, in essence, yes, fine, pay a fine, goodbye.
The fine was $8 billion.
Purdue’s revenue during the opioid crisis was estimated at $35 billion.
The Sackler family, whose name is still on buildings at universities that are only now getting around to feeling bad about it, retained most of their fortune, all of their teeth, and zero of their prison time.
I have written three books. They are funny, they are available on my website, and they have not made me $35 billion. I want to be transparent about this. I’m not suggesting that the Sacklers should have written humor essays instead of destroying American communities with synthetic opioids. I’m just noting the financial disparity and sitting with it quietly while Mr. Pickles bites my ankle for reasons that remain, as always, entirely his own.
The Marketplace Defense, Exhibit B. The product enters the stream of commerce. The stream of commerce is not our department. Please direct your grief to the stream. This is the American innocence doctrine in its corporate phase: profitable, lawyered, and deeply, sincerely sorry in a way that costs exactly as much as it needs to and not one dollar more.
Exhibit C: The Gun, or: We Have Literally Been Rehearsing This Argument for Decades and Are Delighted to Finally Use It at Scale
This is the one that should make you put down your coffee, because once you see it you cannot un-see it.
The National Rifle Association‘s central legal and political argument, the argument that has successfully neutered gun legislation for the better part of fifty years, the argument that has survived mass shootings in elementary schools, movie theaters, concert venues, churches, synagogues, clubs, and every other venue where Americans gather to briefly not think about getting shot, is this:
Guns are manufactured. Guns are sold legally through licensed dealers. Guns enter the marketplace. Once in the marketplace, a firearm can be transferred, resold, stolen, or modified through any number of transactions involving any number of people. The original manufacturer is not responsible for every downstream application of a product sold legally in compliance with existing law. If you want to prevent shootings, regulate the people, not the product.
Now read that again and replace “guns” with “Tomahawk missiles.”
Do it. I’ll wait.
Mr. Pickles will also wait. Mr. Pickles is outside waiting for the UPS truck with a focus and a fury that eleven therapists could not untangle. He does not know what he will do if he catches it. He has never considered this. The planning phase is not the point. The commitment to the conflict is the point. This is also, as it turns out, a pretty solid description of American foreign policy, and I’m sorry for noticing.
The NRA’s argument is the Trump press conference. The Trump press conference is the NRA’s argument. They are the same document with different product SKUs. The only distinction between them, the only meaningful legal and moral distinction in this entire weapons accountability vacuum, is that the NRA at least has the basic decency not to claim that Smith and Wesson pulled the trigger.
The President of the United States stood in front of cameras and used the gun lobby’s liability defense to explain a Tomahawk missile strike on a school full of children during a war he ordered. Not a war his predecessor ordered. Not a war that started under complicated historical circumstances. A war he ordered. Last week. On purpose.
And the argument worked, at least in the room, at least for that news cycle, because we have been training ourselves to accept this argument for fifty years and we are very, very good at it now. This is The Marketplace Defense at its most refined: not a mistake, not an improvisation, but a reflex. A national reflex. Fifty years of reps.
Exhibit D: The Boomerang, or: This One Is Short Because the Math Is Embarrassing
The United States manufactures Tomahawk missiles.
The United States sells Tomahawk missiles to allied nations at approximately $2 million per unit.
Then, the United States also fires Tomahawk missiles at its enemies, which it did, from American submarines, operated by American sailors, under American orders, on a school, in a country it was bombing, on day one of a war it started.
The President then cited the existence of a secondary market for Tomahawk missiles as evidence that the Tomahawk missile in the video might not be America’s Tomahawk missile specifically.
You made the boomerang. Then sold some boomerangs. You threw a boomerang at a school. The boomerang hit the school. You pointed at the boomerang market and said, many nations have boomerangs.
The boomerang knows who threw it. The children in the rubble knew who was bombing their city. The pilot of the aircraft that fired it knows who gave the order. The Secretary of Defense, who was standing approximately four feet away from the President during this press conference and who visibly declined to agree with the Tomahawk theory, knows who gave the order.
The boomerang is not confused.
Trouble McFussbucket, for reference, has never once pretended she didn’t eat the flower bed. She will look you dead in the eye with dirt on her snout and hold your gaze without blinking. She is, relative to the current administration, a paragon of radical transparency. You can read more about Trouble’s long and distinguished career in property destruction here.
Mr. Pickles once destroyed an entire porch cushion and then barked at the stuffing as if it had ambushed him. When I pointed at Mr. Pickles and then at the cushion, he looked at my finger. Not the cushion. My finger. As if the finger was the issue. As if the finger had started this.
I have never felt more seen by a dog in my life.
The Verdict The Brief Was Always Building Toward
Lay all four exhibits on the table. Look at them.
A mythological broom. A pharmaceutical. A handgun. A cruise missile.
They are the same document. Different centuries. Different defendants. Different body counts. The same signature at the bottom.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice told us we could animate something we didn’t understand and then be surprised when it floods the room. Purdue Pharma told us we could profit from suffering we created and then point at the supply chain. The NRA told us we could sell the instrument of death and then point at the dead. And now a president has told us we could start a war, drop a missile on a school full of children, and point at the missile catalog.
Every single time, The Marketplace Defense is the same argument. Every single time, it half-works. Every single time, the architects of the American innocence doctrine go home to their houses and their money and their unruined lives, and the people the thing landed on do not.
This is not a series of unfortunate rhetorical coincidences. This is not a president improvising badly under pressure. This is the load-bearing logic of American exceptionalism, the idea that we are the origin of things but not the consequence of things, that we manufacture and sell and fire and bomb and profit and then gesture broadly at a complicated world full of many actors and many products and many streams of commerce, all of which somehow end up flowing in the same direction, away from us, into someone else’s rubble.
The Marketplace Defense has never once been successfully prosecuted. It has never once prevented the next version of itself. It has never once required its architects to spend a single night in a building that no longer has a roof. If you want to understand how we got here, I’ve been writing about exactly this kind of institutional sleight of hand for years, and the pattern is always the same, and the pattern never gets old, and the pattern never stops.
It will be filed again. The product will be different. The school will have a different name.
The signature at the bottom will be the same.
I went back out to the porch after I finished writing this. Trouble was asleep in the sun, feet up, completely unbothered, dreaming whatever pigs dream about, which based on available evidence is probably flower beds.
Mr. Pickles was on the railing. Staring down the driveway. Vibrating with a low, steady sound that is not quite a growl and not quite a whimper but is somehow both, aimed at nothing visible, committed to a threat only he can sense, five pounds of matted fur standing between this farm and whatever he has decided is coming.
I’ve read enough Vonnegut to know what they are.
They’re us.
The United States of America v. Accountability
Case status: Ongoing
Verdict: Pending
Outlook: Come on.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
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