King Charles and What It Means to Own Anything

Charles III and his heirs
(official portrait)

Late last week, news broke that King Charles III seizes unclaimed property in common citizens’ estates and steers that property to his own portfolio. This doesn’t happen to every British citizen, only those resident in the historical Duchy of Lancaster, which remains part of the British monarch’s purview. Nor is the process inevitable, as one can avoid it by leaving a will or having a clear chain of inheritance.

Nevertheless, the story shocked people, who thought the idea of royal privilege over citizen property, died with the passing of medieval feudalism. For me, this raises questions about the very concept of ownership, and what states and governments are for. Modern capitalist economics requires citizens to own their property clearly, particularly “capital” property with floating value, like land. But without laws, and therefore without government, ownership is completely unenforceable.

It's easy to claim ownership of property we can carry. The currency in my wallet is clearly mine because it’s in my wallet. But we need laws enforcing when that ownership ends—when I trade that currency for goods—and when that ownership remains uninterrupted—when a mugger steals my wallet. Just because I don’t currently possess property on my person doesn’t mean I’ve relinquished ownership.

Therefore we feel safe leaving valuables, like jewelry, at home. We have portable ownership, legally termed “title,” over property we can’t carry. But that principle of title only makes sense when laws enforce it. Despite the libertarian myth that everyone would flourish if we simply rescinded most laws and regulations, we acutely depend on laws to own anything. Especially for noncorporeal property, like stock portfolios or NFTs, law makes ownership possible.

When governments rely upon a personal monarch, whose inheritance descends from Alfred the Great swinging his pig-iron sword in the middle 800s, these questions become more pointed. Yet these questions aren’t uniquely British. Even in America, where political authority doesn’t descend from any individual, we still pay property taxes and licensing fees to preserve our claim on private property. We still pay the state to own property we already bought.

The Duchy of Lancaster story reveals one dark implication of title ownership. If law makes ownership possible, then ultimately the law owns things, and simply licenses ownership to citizens. This reflects something I’ve mentioned before: you ultimately don’t own real estate. The “real” in real estate doesn’t mean literal or existing; it means royal. Real estate is the king’s permission to control or occupy property. Such permission can be rescinded.

The last photo of Elizabeth, taken
at Balmoral, days before her passing

This should go without saying, but this dual strand of ownership creates moral contradictions. Capitalist economics relies upon concepts of ownership as absolute. When somebody like Elon Musk owns corporations, stock portfolios, and land, that ownership must be inviolable. When Musk leverages his private investments as capital against, say, buying up massive social media networks, that capital must be his, in order to own the risk.

Yet clearly the property isn’t entirely his, if he and others rely upon state authority to enforce his property rights. Libertarian philosophers like Robert Nozick or P.J. O’Rourke note that state authority is always on some level coercive, and contains the implicit threat of billy clubs and riot police. All state power, including the power to enforce ownership claims on anything citizens can’t carry (like land), is tacitly violent.

King Charles III finds himself in an awkward position regarding property ownership. As monarch of the United Kingdom, all state power derives from his person, or anyway his rank. It bears emphasis that, in its origins, “king” isn’t a political rank, it’s a military rank. Early monarchs used violence, or threats of violence, to protect citizens against invaders and bandits; in return, they claimed sweeping rights within the kingdom.

But Charles is also a private citizen. If private property exists, then Charles Windsor-Mountbatten (legally distinct from Charles III) has as much right to utilize and profit from it as anybody. The inherent conflict of interest seems so obvious, it shouldn’t require comment. Yet evidently comment is required, since even in non-monarchical America, plutocrats like Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy see no contradiction between private wealth and public authority.

We’re witnessing an unusually naked display of the failure of human authority. Property ownership requires law, but law frequently kneels to property and wealth. This incestuous cycle ensures that, no matter how superficially democratic our government is, power ultimately excludes ordinary people. The state may protect houses and jewelry for us pedestrians, but ultimately, state power and wealth conspire to protect themselves.

Lights, Camera, Inaction

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 50
Andrew Niccol (writer-director), S1m0ne

Veteran movie director Victor Taransky has grown disillusioned with Hollywood: with demanding actors, interfering producers, and insatiable audiences. He got into movies to create art, but he’s become beholden to the money. Then one day, a computer programmer approaches Taransky with a priceless invention: a completely digital actress. Taransky thinks he’s found his artistic salvation. But controlling the perfect actress simply creates new problems he never anticipated.

This movie garnered lukewarm reviews and barely broke even upon release in 2002; it lacked studio support, and never found an audience until its home media release. Yet it’s received a new lease on life with recent developments, real and proposed, in computer learning heuristics. Promises which this movie made in 2002, Hollywood wants to fulfill today. It’s almost like the studios didn’t understand this movie’s parable of artistic control.

Simulation One, whom Taransky rechristens Simone, is the filmmaker’s ideal: a beautiful, graceful, and infinitely adaptable actress who makes no demands. She exists entirely as she is and follows Taransky’s directions without question. Her human costars, who have frequently grown indolent in their fame, find themselves inspired to resume improving themselves. Studio executives count their receipts. Nobody ever questions why they’ve never met Simone, who gets inserted in postproduction.

Al Pacino plays Victor Taransky much like he played Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, as a frazzled wreck whose failures push him to take extreme measures. Like Wortzik, Taransky doesn’t know how to control the monster he’s created. (For purely plot reasons, the programmer who wrote Simone’s code is excluded from the story.) He simply wants to finish his latest big-screen extravaganza after his designated star abandons the set.

Canadian model Rachel Roberts plays Simone as an Anglo-American icon of fair-skinned beauty. Roberts had done some advertising campaigns, but had no prior acting credits, making her, like Simone, a complete cypher. To enhance the illusion, the theatrical release didn’t include Roberts’ name; she wasn’t added to the credits until the home media release. Perhaps learning from this movie’s message, Roberts chose to avoid stardom, pursuing only occasional guest roles.

Rachel Roberts in her only starring role, as the title character in Andrew Niccol's S1m0ne

Simone salvages not only Taransky’s picture, but his foundering career. Audiences, costars, and studio execs love her. Taransky struggles to handle the sudden demand for his newest discovery, whom he cannot admit is phony. Managing Simone’s career quickly becomes his full-time job, one that keeps him away from the family whom he already barely knows. Taransky invented Simone to control her, but before long, she controls him.

Everyone seemingly loves Simone. But the longer we watch, the clearer it becomes that nobody really loves Simone; they imbue her with their favorite virtues, and idolize the myth they’ve created. The movie includes a post-credits scene, a relative rarity pre-MCU, encapsulating this perfectly: a moon-eyed fan watches rigged footage of Simone and locks onto one insignificant detail. From that, he deduces they’re star-crossed, if only he could meet her.

Again, Taransky initially loves Simone because she makes no demands whatsoever. Contrast this with his snippy studio-chosen star, played by Winona Ryder, whose ever-shifting demands become costlier than his actual shooting budget. But the fewer demands Simone makes, the more demands Taransky starts receiving from other stakeholders. Everyone wants something from her: money, art, public morals. Taransky, the only one who knows how to operate her program, has to deliver.

These aren’t fiddling issues. The exact reasons Victor Taransky initially loves Simone are the exact reasons the AMPTP recently threatened to replace background extras with scanned images. Hollywood wants compliant actors who don’t expect to be paid, respected, or kept safe. Lucasfilm, a Disney subsidiary, owns James Earl Jones’ voice, ensuring he’ll continue performing Darth Vader, for free, long after he’s laid in clay.

The whole point of Simone is that the Hollywood mogul thinks he’ll control her; the whole lesson is that he’s wrong. The traits of compliance and adaptability which Taransky loves, increase the demands laid upon him. His attempts disavow Simone only create new problems, as not only do studio execs resent the lost revenue, but audiences resent the lost icon who saw their own supposed virtues in her.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s previous filmography includes Gattaca and The Truman Show, movies about the futility of chasing perfection and control. This is Niccol’s first attempt at comedy, which perhaps threw reviewers, who didn’t always grasp his dry, understated style. Though Niccol offers only occasional laugh-out-loud moments, his deft irony underscores the absurdity of his situation. And it presciently foreshadows the path Hollywood has taken since.

Black Afterlives Matter, Part II

Cadwell Turnbull, We Are the Crisis: a Novel

This review follows the book reviewed in Black Afterlives Matter

Two years after werewolves, vampires, and shapeshifters revealed themselves on the streets of Boston, some “monsters” are settling into healthy lives. Others, not so much. A faction of monsters have profited handsomely from their adversarial relationship with humans, and aren’t willing to relinquish their advantage. And some humans resent the changes they didn’t ask for, forming anti-monster vigilante groups in response. Something must give; the only question is what.

Volume Two of Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence Saga drops two years after the first, which is somewhat awkward, since Turnbull provides few refreshers for veteran readers. I remember liking the first volume, with its blend of literary and genre conventions, its character-driven story structure, and its experimental use of a narrative voice that has come unstuck from the story. But I don’t remember his cast of thousands or their intricate relationships.

Ridley, Laina, and Rebecca have lost their werewolf pack, and someone doesn’t want them to find it. They try investigating the disappearances, and realize they can’t do it alone. So, against the advice of fellow “monsters,” they attempt to organize the monster movement and create a sense of solidarity. Unfortunately, as disfranchised peoples have always discovered, you can’t organize without drawing attention to yourself; the Black Hand starts hunting them.

Teenage Dragon enjoys the freedom he’s encountered since escaping a private collector’s perverted zoo. But the trade-off to freedom is remaining incognito, concealing the fire-breathing force of nature he truly is. The slightest slip means his human allies pay the price—as he learns when his comes home to find his adoptive human parents murdered. His friends scramble to compensate, but Dragon still lives with a target on his back.

Sondra has left public service to protect her secret shapeshifter identity. She attempts to live as a soft-spoken community organizer in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a remote American outpost that offers the opportunity to experiment with revisionist economic models. (Models which Sondra explains volubly.) But she can’t outrun her family’s history as embodiments of the islands’ primordial elements, and someone seems eager to expose her secrets in public.

Cadwell Turnbull

As these sprawling synopses imply, Turnbull doesn’t really write one novel. Basically, he’s written four intersecting novellas around the same theme. As the Convergence Saga title indicates the stories converge toward a unified climax, but for most of the book, Turnbull’s characters occupy their own worlds, with their own conflicts; sometimes, their stories seem to contradict one another. The resolution of that apparent contradiction is part of the payoff.

Consistent with the previous volume, Turnbull doesn’t blush to spotlight his story’s parallels with real-world issues. The previous novel dealt with the collisions between majority-led police power and minority populations. This novel carries these same stories, but not with the same torch-wielding vigor. Turnbull still deals with racial issues, but not necessarily directly; he in fact takes great pains to avoid mentioning his characters’ race, unless they mention it themselves.

Instead, Turnbull mainly inveighs against economic injustice. He repeats the words “cooperative” and “solidarity” heavily, alongside other revolutionary economic buzzwords. One of Turnbull’s protagonists, Sondra, has left public service to organize Mondragon-style worker cooperatives. His other protagonists organize against hatred under the cover of economic solidarity, while his antagonists disguise their bigotry behind claims of economic grievance.

This does require some level of patience. Much as I enjoy Turnbull’s story overall, it nevertheless sometimes feels like he’s lecturing his readers, in passages that expound his themes but don’t advance his story. This volume is fairly average length for a mass-market genre novel in the current market, but probably could’ve been fifty pages shorter without the economic theorizing. Even though it’s a theory I personally find admirable.

That said, Turnbull writes about the forces that turn ordinary people into “monsters” and chronic outsiders, and economics is one of those forces. It’s unlikely he could entirely excise the theorizing without short-changing his themes. Turnbull wants you to think, not only about what happens to these characters, but about why it happens, what forces outside individual control hastened this conflict, even before these characters fell backward into it.

Hovering over everything is the narrator, an enigmatic figure whose relationship to Cadwell Turnbull is, let’s say, vexed. Like the characters, the narrator only wants answers. Unlike the characters, the narrator has become unhitched from the story, and understands himself as a narrator. This forces him to reckon with why, if he’s telling the story, he can’t see where it’s headed. That question remains unresolved, postponed until Volume Three.

Meg Myers Speaks a Cold and Distant Truth

Meg Myers, TZIA

I needed longer than usual to embrace Meg Myers’ third LP-length album, not because of the music, but because of her amended image. Her previous albums foregrounded her beauty, but in ways that subverted White Euro-American standards. Her redesign into a strange, Star Trek-like dominatrix, seemed too abrupt. Then somebody reminded me of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album, with its body horror-influenced art, and I finally glimpsed Myers’ intent.

Like Bowie, Myers has apparently decided to periodically reinvent herself to ensure that she, and her audience, never become complacent. This new image accompanies Myers’ rejection of the “Big Sad” character she’s previously played. This album contains several songs explicitly declaring how she’s no longer beholden to the demons from her past. Which is personally empowering, sure; but as art, this album feels more like a TED Talk than music.

Several tracks have lyrics so declarative, I can only call them thesis statements. Lines like “I know the truth is inside of me, I hold the key” (from “A New Society”) or “A call for all the people, Who stand for what is right, From different places, We all unite” (from “Sophia <144>”) bespeak the energy Myers wants to convey. She’s no longer content describing her pains from a personal, introspective angle. She’d rather unify listeners in rebellion against the conditions that made those pains possible.

This puts me, the listener, in an awkward position. I respect the hippie-esque protest anthem motivation. Pop music has a long history of demanding the world do better, that it show more respect to those most abused by our culture and economy. Many of these songs, written in a very square 4/4 time, are perfect for marching on public squares and national monuments. Myers clearly wants to create a pop-art manifesto for a post-Me-Too world.

Yet something feels missing. Most tracks have a synth-driven background with a programmed percussion track—the personnel list names a human drummer on only two songs. This results in hypnotic, looping rhythms on most songs, like a heavier ‘Hearts of Space” trance. Looking back on classic protest songs, like “Peace Train” or “Fortunate Son,” these songs shared an important quality: audiences could sing along. That’s far harder here.

Meg Myers

Myers’ thesis statements are well-grounded, mostly. She decries the ways culture moralistically controls women’s sexuality, while ironically foregrounding sex, with lines like “Victimized, I’ve been tied to bedposts” (from “Me”). She excoriates the ways women, including herself, manage men’s emotions for so long that they become deaf to their own needs, in “My Mirror.” The song “Searching For the Truth” begins with the self-explanatory lines:

Everybody’s hiding from their fears
Spinning in their cycles all alone
With a hand over one eye
Disconnected pieces of a whole

I appreciate these messages, which would arguably make good stump speeches. But since Myers tells us how to receive her songs directly in the lyrics, and we’d struggle to sing along with her trance-inducing rhythms, I struggle to understand why she wrote them as songs. She isn’t inviting us listeners on a journey, she’s lecturing to us based on her hard-won experience. Basically she’s channeling her inner indie-pop Rebecca Solnit.

As a result, this album’s most intensely felt song is probably the only one she didn’t co-write. When I saw the title “Numb” on the track listing, I assumed she’d re-recorded her own song of the same title. Nope, she’s covered Linkin Park’s icky 2003 hate-lust anthem, possibly on a dare. Her understated arrangement here serves her message, as a synth drone and Myers herself on harp create a disconnected, ethereal soundscape. The collision with the original version is palpable.

In the decade since her first EP, Myers has reinvented herself constantly. Among other things, she’s shaved her head after each album tour. She’s given conflicting reviews of her earliest recordings, sometimes claiming she was constrained and controlled, other times claiming her collaborations with Andrew Rosen and Atlantic Records brought her to technical musical maturity. Maybe that explains this album’s line: “It’s time to give yourself all of the love you’ve been missing.”

Despite what I’ve said, this album does have admirable songs. Tracks like “Bluebird” and “Waste of Confetti” stop the lecturing tone and instead invite listeners on Myers’ unique journey. But they don’t come together to create an album the way her previous two LPs did. Perhaps this is a transitional album. I’ve previously felt drawn to Meg Myers’ personal, confessional lyric style. Sadly, it feels she’s now holding us at arm’s length.

Ohio On My Mind

One thing which strikes me about this month’s Ohio constitutional referendum, enshrining abortion and other forms of “reproductive freedom” in the state constitution, is that Donald Trump won Ohio’s popular vote twice. Indeed, in 2020, Trump was the first Presidential candidate of either party to win the entire contest without carrying Ohio since 1960. This despite Trump running on the explicit pledge to pack the courts and overturn abortion rights.

Thing is, this outcome isn’t unprecedented, not even recently. Like Kansas before it, Ohio voted one way on candidates, and another way on issues. In the same ballot cycle, Ohioans voted to legalize recreational cannabis, something Republican leadership consistently opposes. Yet despite breaking with organized conservatism on important, high-profile issues, Donald Trump is currently on track for a third Ohio win, with an anticipated simple majority.

We could extrapolate this trend nationwide. I already mentioned Kansas, which has a Republican-controlled legislature, but an endangered Democratic governor. I live in deep-red Nebraska, which hasn’t supported a Democrat for President since 1964. Yet on polls which survey issue-specific views, Nebraskans consistently show razor-thin a majority for legal abortion and wide support for minimum wage increases. Nebraska’s government consistently spikes efforts to let Nebraskans vote on medical cannabis.

On issue after issue, Americans consistently skew center-left. Over three-quarters of Americans support cannabis for recreational and/or medicinal use. More than two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should remain legal in at least the first trimester. Same-sex marriage was once deeply unpopular even in relatively progressive states (think California’s Prop8), but support currently stands above seventy percent. When separated from personalities and parties, Americans consistently support progressive issues.

Despite this, Donald Trump, who has pledged to crack down on all these issues, is currently on track to win next year’s general election. Some of that comes down to single-issue outrage: President Biden’s willingness to support Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing nationalist government in the current Israel-Hamas war has proven toxic with his own party. But let’s be honest, Trump won’t repudiate Netanyahu either, so that’s a losing issue either way.

Nor are the Republican Party’s opinions exactly concealed. The Party itself hasn’t had a nationwide platform since 2016, and currently is beholden to the whims of its most active members—which, in practice, means whatever applause lines Donald Trump can muster at campaign rallies. As Levitsky and Ziblatt have noted, Trump has no underlying principles; he’s built his entire campaign around whatever anti-democratic puffery his crowds demand.

But that’s the people who actually attend Trump rallies. Crowds are pretty poor barometers of public opinion, as the ugliest, most aggressive crowd members usually dominate the outcry. Worse, they have a polarizing effect. When people only communicate with those they already agree with, they tend to emerge with more doctrinaire, intolerant versions of their existing views. Psychologists call this “group polarization,” but I prefer the military term: “incestuous amplification.”

While Trump panders to his nastiest supporters, Americans overall consistently support more progressive concerns. Ideas which formerly dwelt at the pinko fringe, have become mainstream. Americans want stricter gun control, or at least background checks and red-flag laws; higher taxes on the super-rich; and a path to citizenship for immigrants, including the undocumented. These aren’t fringe Looney-Lefty ideas. All have majority support, and some have overwhelming supermajority support.

This gulf between America’s principles, and America’s candidates, baffles me. Based on the most prominent hot-button issues, the mainstream of the Democratic Party is more conservative than the aggregate American electorate. Some Democrats are arguably losing support, not because they support progressive issues, but because they think they’ll gain electoral advantage by pandering to conservatives and pretending to be bipartisan. Kamala Harris, a law-and-order Democrat, comes immediately to mind.

Ohio has this month become the most prominent example of this division. The state is currently controlled by a Republican legislature and a Republican governor. The state’s GOP has pledged to simply ignore the voters’ will, at least on abortion. Citing Levitsky and Ziblatt again, the Republican Party has become the party of anti-democracy in America today. They see voters as a force to squelch, not honor.

And a frightening number of Americans are apparently okay with that. If Trump wins the Presidency next year, and especially if he shepherds a Republican majority into Congress, they’ll pass laws that contravene the will of their own voter bloc. They have, indeed, pledged to do so. When they crack down on their own voters and suppress the popular will, nobody should pretend that they weren’t warned.