On Omertà - and the Tattling Culture

Experience

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ post of the week. These are part-personal essay and part-wandering rumination. By the way, if for some odd reason you haven’t watched Goodfellas yet, you should probably (for spoiler reasons) skip this essay.

Best,

Sam

ON OMERTA - AND THE TATTLING CULTURE

At different points during the Trump administration - just to, like, spruce up the collective prison cell a bit - I’d try to think some nice thought or other about Trump. This wasn’t at all easy to do, but there were moments - there was something a bit sweet, for instance, in his saying that Goodfellas was among his favorite movies. This declaration of his was treated with disdain - the president of the United States more or less admitting that he thought of himself as a mafioso - but it was different from saying that his favorite movie was, for instance, Scarface. 

Goodfellas had a cogent worldview to it. Everybody is a crook, is the point, everything is a racket, so the trick is to organize one’s racket in the most effective possible way and to be unendingly loyal to it. “You’ve learned the two greatest lessons in life,” says Jimmy Conway, the Robert De Niro character, to Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, “never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.” When you think about it, that’s, of course, one lesson - an ironclad gangster’s code. And the tragedy of Goodfellas - its curious, perverse pathos - is not that Hill is somehow locked into a life of crime (that’s a given for his background), it’s that things go sideways and he’s compelled to narc on his friends. That’s the real shock for him - as in the movie’s closing sequence, Hill out in some witpro condo, getting his morning newspaper and saying, “Now I’m just an average nobody, I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook” - Hill realizing that the code he had lived by really is gone and he had done as much as anybody to kill it.

The end of Omertà - Henry Hill

I had something of a similar thought re Trump. There was every imaginable reason to loathe him, but there was something, circa 2016, that you had to admire about the gangster cunning - the racket he had built; the tight circle of loyalists. And then, by about 2018, the loyalists were testifying for Mueller; and then by 2020 or 2021, everybody - family members, everybody - were cashing in by writing a book about him. That seemed like the final indignity in a presidency that had had so many - if you’re a gangster without a gangster’s code, then what are you? 

And, in a Henry Hill-ish part of my psyche, there was something, I felt, era-ending about the whole thing - the end of Omertà. I was thinking about this in more personal ways as well. My dad had been the gentlest of parents, but he had an ironclad rule - no tattle-telling; and, for my sister and me growing-up, that held: there was absolutely no telling, in the way that seemed par for the course for every other set of siblings I interacted with. When I was bullied at a new school in sixth grade, the regret for me wasn’t the bullying but that an administrator managed to pry the story out of me - there was a real shame in violating Omertà. And, as a junior employee in my 20s, there was a strict camaraderie among everybody else at my level - an understanding that we had each other’s back, that anything that happened on a shoot would never be reported to senior management, that we would never for any reason rat on one another. 

In my life that sense of Omertà collapsed dramatically - on a nightmarish project I was working on in the middle of 2020. I was working with a famously diva-ish and madcap director, and there was a real Gosford Park quality to the work. It was very common to be on an hours-long call with the director, for the subordinates by the end of it to have no idea at all of what the director wanted, and then immediately afterwards get on a call or group text chain with each other and try to figure out a viable plan of action. Discretion was at a premium, it was important always to double-check group text chains to make sure you weren’t accidentally including the director. There was a whole art to pretending to agree with the director’s orders and then quietly doing something different - and there were people in the company who had been working that way for years and relying completely on Omertà and a winking camaraderie among the subalterns. In 2020, there was a new hire, at my level. Within a month or so the new hire had repeated something I’d said in confidence to the director. It’s a bit of a complicated thing to describe what exactly it was - it was something potentially embarrassing for the director - but the result, from the way it was related, was that the director felt that I couldn’t be trusted. That sense of Omertà vanishing was compounded by a junior tech person reporting something really very innocuous I had done to the production company we were partnered with and making it less likely that I would ever be re-hired by them. The tattle-telling by the colleague at my level I sort of understood; she was ambitious and may have wanted to undermine me. The tattle-telling by the junior techie really unnerved me though. This was somebody that I had had a nice working relationship with. There was no benefit at all to him in tattle-telling on me. He was Gen Z and seemed to feel that reporting on any kind of malfeasance among co-workers was the appropriate thing for him to do. 

In the culture at large I started to notice that attitude more and more. The watchword for it was ‘transparency.’ It seemed that every time I glanced at The Ethicist column of The New York Times it was dealing with the ethics of tattle-telling. ‘My Colleague Is Secretly Holding Two Jobs. Should I Expose Her? ‘Should I Tell My Friend Her Husband Is Cheating On Her?’ There was a strain of liberal politics that had always had an element of tattle-telling in it. The ‘whistle blower,’ ‘the activist,’ ‘the investigative journalist,’ ‘the union organizer,’ ‘the crusading lawyer’ - all of these modern archetypes, and liberal ideals - organized themselves around a certain hostility to Omertà. Their primary target was the you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-your-back ethos of business-as-usual. Their reigning belief system was something along the lines of ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ - i.e. that the transparent society, with ‘reform,’ ‘accountability,’ ‘regulation,’ etc, was better than the corrupt society based on various networks of personal relations with an accompanying Omertà sensibility. The leading critique of leftist revolutionary states - their overriding dystopian aspect - was the tendency towards a society of informing. Something about the mindset of collectivism and revolutionary purity - particularly when cynically manipulated by a totalitarian regime - fostered a Pavel Morozov sensibility, a belief that virtue could be equated with loyalty to the collectivity, which was proven above all by willingness to sacrifice one’s personal relations. As Emmanuel Carrère wrote of the Soviet Union, the economy was based, ultimately, on a ‘dual system’ - one person to carry out a task, one or several others to inform on them - and, by this clever technique, virtually everyone was kept ‘employed’ even in the absence of any actual economic growth. And an event like #MeToo seemed to exist right on a razor’s edge - the archetypal liberal figures of truth-teller, whistleblower, crusading journalist, revealing abuses but at the same time fostering a mindset of tattling in the culture-at-large - making it socially acceptable to tell tales about very private sexual encounters and without necessarily running into blocks of the court system or of libel protections. By 2020 and 2021, tattling (aka ‘transparency’) was completely standard practice in liberal culture. No one was surprised - when Jeffrey Toobin exposed himself on a Zoom call - that other participants of the call immediately told news sources what had happened. It wasn’t particularly a surprise that a junior employee reported on Andrew Cuomo’s making a veiled proposition to her nor that Chris Cuomo ended up losing his job for attempting to protect his brother. That, to me, felt like the nail in the coffin of Omertà on the left - the premise being that Chris Cuomo was expected to be loyal to the values of his network and of the culture-at-large at the expense of his own family (and would be harshly punished if he got his priorities mixed up).

The end of Omertà - Pavel Morozov

Much of the appeal of Trump, then - and this was the appeal too of figures like Putin and Berlusconi - was that, whatever else might be said of them, they seemed to understand Omertà. Putin, discussing the qualities he looked for in subordinates, said that all that mattered to him was ‘loyalty’ - the sense of his regime was of a gang masquerading as a state. I remember being weirdly impressed by the systems Trump appeared to have in place for covering his many misdeeds - the non-disclosure agreements as administered by an ally like David Pecker; the close watch kept over him by Keith Schiller in the security team. (What’s surprised me, more than anything about the Trump presidency, is the complete absence of sex scandals from his tenure; it’s very hard to believe that nothing at all happened when he was in the White House, and Michael Wolff thought he was sleeping with Nikki Haley, but somehow no other reporter got close enough for a Lewinskyesque sex scandal.) But then Michael Cohen flipped and, one by one, the entire Trump orbit turned on him - Kelly, Mattis, Pence, Trump’s own niece. It turned out that Trump world wasn’t really the strict Omertà code that prevailed at the start of Goodfellas, in the heyday of Paul Cicero; it was the no-honor-among-thieves ethic in place by the movie’s end, everybody covering their own back and looking to be bought out by the highest bidder.

The end of Omertà - Michael Cohen

And the Henry Hill-ish part of my psyche regretted that aspect of the collapse of the Trump administration as much as anything else about it - what kind of Omertà code was it when the capo’s chief lieutenants were turning on him on national television; when everybody was selling their memoirs? The feeling was that even the crooks had given up on Omertà. We had entered, on right and left, into a society of tattling, of ratting out. There were all kinds of advantages to that - it was good for publishers, journalists, crusading lawyers, there was a real economy to it. But, unfortunately - as I had learned the hard way at work, as was more than evident from any read of The Ethicist - that shift made it harder to trust anybody around you, made it so that you learned to ignore rule #1 in life, to have loyalty to your friends, and to subscribe even more wholeheartedly to rule #2: that the wise course was just to keep your mouth shut.