Failing Up: The Long, Strange Trip Of Happy Jack
He's back.Pre-achievement celebrity Jack Thompson filed suit against Facebook this week for $40 million or some equally ridiculous sum. Apparently, there are groups on Facebook that not only called Jack Thompson a douchebag (true), but advocate violence against him (how seriously is in dispute).
After all these years, I've come to the conclusion that if Jack Thompson didn't exist, Family Guy would have to create him.
Here's what, to me, is most amazing about Thompson's career: he hasn't really had one. His "landmark" moment in 1990, when 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be was ruled obscene by a judge in Broward County, Florida, was overturned on appeal in 1992.
To the best of my knowledge, Thompson has never prevailed in a court of law. On anything.
He has never won a lawsuit about videogame violence. He has never successfully blamed videogames as the cause of various murderous behaviors in various criminal and civil trials. None of the state laws passed concerning videogame violence (where he was used as a consultant) passed constitutional muster.
It's incredible, really-- as far as I can tell, Thompson's career is a nearly 20-year string of unbroken losses. And you'd think, with 20 years of uninterrupted failure, that the last two decades wouldn't have gone well for Thompson.
Mostly, though, that's not true. Almost every time, he's "failed up," becoming more and more prominent. He managed to parlay losing every lawsuit, every court trial, every civil proceeding, and every piece of legislature he helped draft into "expert" status and became the "go-to guy" for television networks needing an incendiary voice on short notice.
Being an expert, apparently, isn't what it used to be.
What was always particularly amazing about Thompson was the degree to which he was factually incorrect. It was staggering, really, particularly his repeated claim about his involvement with the F.B.I., a claim the F.B.I. has repeatedly repudiated. He also savagely misrepresented the contents of an F.B.I. investigation into school shootings. In almost any sentence that comes out of Thompson's mouth concerning videogames, there will be factual inaccuracies.
For a long while, though, he prospered, not because he was right, but because he served the purposes of people and organizations who wanted to villify and demonize videogames.
Of course, alienating everyone in the legal profession he ever encountered eventually pays untidy dividends, and Thompson was permanently disbarred in Florida last year.
One down, forty-nine to go.
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