{"id":34161,"date":"2017-03-10T17:13:18","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T22:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=34161"},"modified":"2017-03-10T17:13:18","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T22:13:18","slug":"make-neptune-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2017\/03\/10\/make-neptune-great\/","title":{"rendered":"Make Neptune Great Again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
You remember Steve Guttenberg in Season 2 of Veronica Mars?<\/em><\/p>\n
Guttenberg played Woody Goodman, a multi-millionaire who\u00a0built his fortune\u00a0with a popular chain of burger restaurants and expanded to car dealerships. He even bought the local minor league baseball team. Woody\u2019s\u00a0goofily charming TV ads for his businesses made him a kind of regional celebrity, and that along with his reputation as a successful businessman was enough to get him elected as mayor of Neptune, California.<\/p>\n
OK, here\u2019s where our scenario diverges from the show. Get rid of all the Sandusky stuff. The Woody Goodman in our\u00a0story isn\u2019t that guy, thank God. But he\u2019s still haunted by his personal demons, so he\u2019s still got that slightly panicked look and that exuberant over-eagerness to please. Guttenberg was terrific\u00a0at playing that, so let\u2019s keep him in the part. (He could use the work.)<\/p>\n
In this version of the story, it\u2019s Woody Goodman \u2014 not Terrance Cook \u2014 who has the gambling problem. This starts long before he ever decides to get into politics. He winds up taking out ever-pricier loans against every business he runs and every asset he owns to pay off his ever-increasing gambling debts. His 09-er lifestyle remains the same \u2014 big house, fancy cars and all the rest. But it\u2019s all collateral and he\u2019s struggling, bigly.<\/p>\n
This went on for many years, with Woody somehow juggling all this staggering debt and still managing to keep up the facade of being a successful businessman. He even manages, somewhat, to keep his immediate family in the dark. (We\u2019re keeping Krysten Ritter as his daughter, Gia, because who doesn\u2019t love Krysten Ritter?)<\/p>\n
Years later, Gia recalls this period, saying, \u201cI think I was probably nine, ten something like this. I remember my father pointing to this homeless man\u00a0and saying \u2018That guy\u00a0has $8 billion\u00a0more than me.\u2019 Because he was in such extreme debt at that point. And me\u00a0thinking \u2018What are you talking about?\u2019 He was sitting outside of Shark Stadium, and I didn\u2019t understand.\u00a0It makes me all the more proud of my parents that they got through that.\u201d<\/p>\nWe used to be friends a long time ago.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
But Gia, at that point, didn\u2019t fully understand how it was that Woody \u201cgot through that.\u201d<\/p>\n
See, even though most of his neighbors there in Neptune had no idea of his self-inflicted financial struggles, every banker in the area was aware\u00a0that Woody Goodman was leveraged up to his eyeballs. After he\u2019d already taken out loans against his burger chain, and car dealerships, and Sharks Stadium, and his mansion and luxury car collection, the legitimate banks refused to lend him any more. He was cut off.<\/p>\n
And so Woody was forced to turn to some shadier, less legitimate sources of credit. It wasn\u2019t anything so crass and obvious as a back-alley mafia loanshark, of course. Those are for the little<\/em> people \u2014 people whose debts are merely in the thousands or tens of thousands. A guy like Woody Goodman deals with a better class of loanshark. And so Woody wound up turning to some decidedly mob-adjacent<\/em> figures, and, despite all the polite euphemism involved, he\u00a0had no illusions about where this new source of credit was ultimately coming from.<\/p>\n
The arrangements were complicated and multi-layered. It would take a whole team of forensic accountants years of work to trace all the paper connections and front companies and shell corporations. But behind all of that, the reality was pretty simple: Some shady, very dangerous people now owned Woody\u2019s debt. Some shady, very dangerous people now ultimately owned Woody\u2019s businesses.<\/p>\n
Those shady, very dangerous people now owned Woody<\/em>.<\/p>\n
He got to keep his lifestyle \u2014 the mansion and cars and all the rest. And as far as most of the people of Neptune knew, he still ran all of his businesses. But he was often asked \u2014 obliged, required<\/em> \u2014 to look the other way as those businesses were used by his new partners for other purposes.<\/p>\n
In a way, this only enhanced Woody Goodman\u2019s reputation as a businessman. He started branching out into new businesses, many of which appeared to be spectacular failures as they were used to launder money for his new secret partners. Yet none of those failures seemed to touch Woody personally, to diminish his lavish lifestyle. And so even his failures reinforced the impression that he was relentlessly successful, resilient, an unsinkable survivor.<\/p>\n
And that is when Woody decided to run for mayor. Or, perhaps, that is when his secret partners decided Woody should run for mayor. By this point, it\u2019s hard to know which is which or whose idea this really was. I suspect it was a bit of both.<\/p>\n
I think what happened is that Woody\u2019s mob and mob-adjacent partners saw a political career for him as a new opportunity. Having their guy running the county might open all kinds of new doors for them. At the very least, installing their boy in a position of legitimate political power would help to shelter them from investigation and potential prosecution. They could count on him to look the other way, to protect their interests, and maybe, subtly, to do them the occasional favor.<\/p>\n
But I think Woody also imagined that getting elected mayor could be his escape. He really is<\/em> a kind of survivor, after all \u2014 wily, if not particularly smart. I think he was hoping that political power would shield him from the power these people had over him. If he became the Big Man in Charge \u2014 running the council, the sheriff\u2019s department and all the rest \u2014 then he might at last be able to free himself from their ominous obligations and ever-present threat of violence, exposure and ruin.<\/p>\n
Of course, I imagine that the very dangerous people pulling Woody\u2019s strings also guess he\u2019s thinking that. They likely realize that now that he\u2019s won the election and become the Mayor of Neptune, he\u2019s going to try to squirm his way out of their clutches, using his newfound political clout to rewrite the rules of their arrangement.\u00a0But to protect himself, he\u2019ll still need to protect them and their interests. And he can\u2019t risk exposing them without also exposing himself. So we\u2019re all set for an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse, with both sides constrained by the possibility of mutually assured destruction.<\/p>\n
All of this unfolding in a version of Neptune that doesn\u2019t have vicious\u00a0little Veronica Mars or her dad around to save the day.<\/p>\n
So maybe that\u2019s where we are now, after\u00a0Election Day. Maybe that\u2019s our story.<\/p>\n
Or, at least, that\u2019s one possible story. Given what we\u2019re able to know and what we can\u2019t know, yet, it seems like it could fit.<\/p>\n
![\"Neptune\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2017\/03\/Neptune.jpg\")