Recently Your Humble Blogger has seen a saying going around that\u2019s a version of an old line: if you don\u2019t know who the mark is, you\u2019re the mark<\/i>. I had heard it years ago (decades ago?) about poker: if you are playing poker with a bunch of guys and don\u2019t know who the mark is, it\u2019s you. In one version attributed to David Mamet it\u2019s if you\u2019re in a con game, and you don\u2019t know\u2026<\/i>, but I don\u2019t actually think Mr. Mamet would have said it like that, since (a) I am always suspicious of free-floating quotations like this one, with a supposed writer but no listed work, and more important (2) Mr. Mamet as much as anybody knows that the mark doesn\u2019t think he\u2019s in a con game\u2014or if he does, the con men will provide him with someone else for him to believe is the mark. I mean, con men are, on the whole, good at what they do; looking around for the mark will not protect you against them.\r\n
And in seriousness\u2014if you are playing poker with a bunch of guys, and you are looking around at who is the \u201cmark\u201d, stop playing poker with those guys immediately. Never play cards (or any game) with people you think might be confidence men. Just don\u2019t. Whether you are the mark or not.\r\n
But I think that the reason people are using the line these days isn\u2019t really to do with actual individuals and actual confidence men. No, this is just this season\u2019s equivalent of Wake up, sheeple!<\/i> As if all that was required was awareness to combat inequality and injustice.\r\n
And more than this, I believe very strongly that the world is more than grifters and suckers. Yes, the current leaders of the Republican Party seem to hold ordinary conservative Americans in contempt\u2014and yes, that happens on our side of the aisle as well sometimes\u2014but that doesn\u2019t mean that they are nothing but grifters, or that the voters are nothing but suckers. Many people are doing politics as politics\u2014that is, attempting as best they can to influence the nation\u2019s self-government to have policies they think are better than the alternatives, and doing so out of patriotism as well as personal ambition. People donate to candidates and organizations, go to rallies, knock on doors, write blog posts (well, tweet) and run for office themselves for a wide variety of complicated and simple reasons, motivations they understand those they don\u2019t, from altruism and fear and force of habit and cool reason and greed and hope. And sometimes because they are grifters, and sometimes because they are suckers, too. But not always.\r\n
And as strongly as I believe that in politics the world is more than grifters and suckers, I believe it even more strongly in the rest of life (if there is a rest of life outside politics, properly understood). Many businesses are run in the sincere hope that they are providing value for money\u2014does the owner of the local pizza joint think of me as a \u201cmark\u201d? The franchise holder at the gas station? The lady at the second-hand clothing store where I get suits for $20? The guy at the meat counter at the grocery? The publisher of the novel I want to read? My doctor? My dentist? My heating-oil company? My insurance company? My garbage man? My boss? My siblings? My spouse?\r\n
The truth is\u2014or at least my truth is, as far as I can live with it\u2014that maybe somebody<\/i> I am dealing with thinks of me as a mark, and is using deception to exploit me as much as he or she can. Or maybe it\u2019s not somebody who is dealing with me, personally, but somebody in an office in some other town, playing some long con. Maybe! But looking around for the mark isn\u2019t going to inoculate me against somebody at TIAA\/CREF sending me a phony retirement statement, or someone having substituted cheaper ingredients for my organic treats, or even making fraudulent charges on my credit card. And most<\/i> of my dealings\u2014really, almost all of them\u2014are not dishonest at all. Even the businesses who are trying to maximize short-term profits are doing so within a basically honest framework. I\u2019m not saying that ethical capitalism exists, mind you, just claiming an important distinction between ordinary profit-maximizing and the pigeon drop.\r\n
Anyway, yes, there exist confidence men who cheat and lie and defraud the unwary, and yes, one of them is Our Only President, but you still retain the choice, as you walk around your own life, of deciding whether to look for the mark or not. And I strongly advise you not to. Partially, yes, because I don\u2019t think it will preserve you from actually being<\/i> a mark, if a real con marks you, but mostly because it will keep you from understanding what is really going on, in almost every one of the transactions and interactions of your daily life.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger is cranky, but hopes to be inspirationally cranky.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19954"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19960,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19954\/revisions\/19960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}