Columbo Catches a Sociopath, Too Bad We Can't

Tomorrow may be Twitter round up day (if I have time), but before that, there's a thread that must be shared in full from a guy named John Rogers:

I can't sleep. because a scene from one of the first Columbo TV movies keeps running my head, and it explains everything about America right now.

So in "Ransom for a Dead Man," available on our friend IMDbTV,
the cunning lawyer Lee Grant murders her husband, dumps his body, then fakes a kidnapping so she can hijack the ransom and deprive the stepdaughter of her inheritance.

The stepdaughterr figures it out, and offers to disappear for a nice bribe. Lee Grant agrees, pays her off — but TWIST! Columbo set it up so he could prove she has the ransom money.

The scene that’s killing me is the reveal scene, in the airport bar, where Columbo explains why he knew this plan would work. I’m going to quote at length, and really, Falk in this scene *chef’s kiss*:

“Because, Mrs. Williams, you have no conscience. And that’s your weakness. Did it ever occur to you that there are VERY few people who would take money to forget about a murder? It didn’t, did it. I knew it wouldn’t.”

“No conscience - limits your imagination. You can’t conceive of anybody being any different that what you are. And you’re *greedy*”.

That’s who’s running giant chunks of the country. People with a complete lack of imagination, unable to conceive of anything more important than shoving money upwards, or becoming powerful because that’s what’s important to them. Even *virtuous* to them.

When Lindsey Graham whines that you can’t be too generous with unemployment, because people will take advantage of it, it’s because he can’t imagine somebody who wouldn’t exploit the system. Because HE WOULD.

Trump can’t imagine anyone who’s not try ing to cheat the system, or fuck other people. Kushner can’t imagine anything but exercising power. An entire political movement incapable of imagining any virtue than work and obedience to your betters.

So governors like Abbot and Reynolds can’t imagine a solution *other than* “get back to work!” To do anything less than the most extreme version of capitalism is to invite the most nightmarish version of socialism. To do less than force people to work would invite ruin.

What are we supposed to do — help people? With TAX MONEY? That money’s for bailing out respectable rich people, who we know are virtuous, because they are rich. Saving corporations. Money flows UPWARD, not OUT.

What’s crazy is other countries said “Let’s use our national resources to cover everybody for two months, and we’ll go from there once we think it’s safe.” But *even with the examples*, they STILL couldn’t wrap their head around the idea. Impossible. UN-possible.

To a great degree, it’s to be expected — we’re a half century into a long memetic war waged by plutocrats to transform the virtue of hard work into a fetish of servitude.

But in a rapidly changing world full of unprecedented challenges, we are burdened with close to half of the ruling class laboring with imaginations limited by their greed. They cannot imagine a better world, because *they cannot imagine better people.*

Luckily, there *are* better people. And they’re the majority. But they didn’t spend the last fifty years trying to figure out how to hack the system. And so they are in a shitload of trouble right now.

A little while ago I grabbed another tweet where the original poster, an account called @duty2warn, wondered about the original motivations of Trumpism in the Republican party, and a bunch of people responded with their hypotheses. I never got around to posting it, but it seems to fit with this thread:

Seems statistically inconceivable that an entire political party would effectively forsake oath, conscience, and country simultaneously over this flawed a guy. 90%? Maybe. 100% (x Mitt)? No. The core fear can't be getting primaried or insulted on twitter. So what is it, really?
@duty2warn

I have been saying this more years, when millionaires started running for offices at all levels 20 years ago and now billionaires: unfettered access to inside information. As if these rich people suddenly felt the need to serve the good of the people or country.
@robertgg85

I think it is getting primaried and/or booted from office. Being in the house or senate is a lot more lucrative than the $175k/year we know about. See Loeffler and Burr as exhibits a and b.
Christopher Hopper

They are getting everything they want. A Christian White Racist Rich Male Hyper-Conservative Government. The American Dream for them.
@EhWOL

It's a cause. Trump doesn't give direction; he takes it. He is a hired suit to the highest bidder, in this case the GOP. The GOP wants to decentralize government, have one party rule and remove all social safety nets; they see Trump as the vehicle to get them there.
@SamSanderson123

Once you join the Mafia, there is no leaving the Mob. They resisted the Devil, but finally chose to accept and support him. The longer he served as president, the more compromised they became. Now they have to hang together, or they will all hang separately.
NameNoWithMan

They were each informed about it by Trump et al and bought in to keep silent about it to save their political careers and stay in power. And that is part of the compliment. That they were told what happened and they didn’t whistleblow.
@kidsneedheroes2

Racism and grift. Confidence that the media will enable them to frame the election on their terms no matter the fallout so long as they stick together. Fear that once they lose, they won't be in power for a long time because of demographic change.
@blankslate2017

John Rogers has it right, that Republican power-brokers time and time again show that ascribe their actions or what would be their actions to everyone else and lack any kind of empathy. Mike Pence, maskless at the Mayo Clinic yesterday, is the exemplar of this. A person who says he's a Christian parading through a hospital in a pandemic without a mask even though he was asked to wear one.

It's sociopathy, pure and simple. (And they're racists, too, of course.) We are a country being run by sociopaths.