Writing on the Double Yellow Line

Militant moderate, unwilling to concede any longer the terms of debate to the strident ideologues on the fringe. If you are a Democrat or a Republican, you're an ideologue. If you're a "moderate" who votes a nearly straight party-ticket, you're still an ideologue, but you at least have the decency to be ashamed of your ideology. ...and you're lying in the meantime.

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Location: Illinois, United States

Friday, October 20, 2017

I am Shocked − SHOCKED

I am Shocked − SHOCKED
©2017  Ross Williams



I can’t possibly be the only one thoroughly unmoved by the sudden outrage over Harvey Weinstein.  Can I?

It’s not like this is unprecedented or unpredictable.  Hollywood has had a casting couch since before they married picture to sound.  Marilyn Monroe, after her major break in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, commented “That’s the last cock I’ll have to suck.”

The reality is people with power or status − in any aspect of life − are going to leverage that power and status for what it can get them.  In many cases, the commodity leveraged is sex.  While rude and boorish it’s not typically illegal.  Even when it violates some law a government has crafted, a libertarian would blanch at the imposition unless it involved children or force.  If Norma Jean Baker believes a series of hummers to post-war Hollywood execs is a fair trade for her transition to Marilyn Monroe, what business does the government have in nixing the deal?

At the end of the day, hell, at the crack of dawn of the day, Harvey Weinstein is as prosaic as they come.  He’s got movie roles for actresses, actresses have roles to perform for him.  I’ll concede that most of the roles discussed to date are puzzling for their trite fetishism, but still.  Don’t like the trade-off? stick to theater.  If you still want to get into movies and television, do it like Bebe Neuwirth: work for it.  Work hard.  Be like Bebe.

More puzzling than Weinstein handing out favors to budding thespians willing to watch him shower, though, is the pious responses from the sheltered ninnies who insist on publicizing their naiveté.  Among the more facile comes from a numbskull victimologist named Barbara Boland, who claims that many women making the same accusa … well, let’s go with her exact words: “the fact that so many women have accused him over so long a period of time makes their stories more believable.”

Really?  Does that logic also work with accounts of alien abduction, and visits from the Virgin Mary?  They are remarkably uniform as well, spanning even more years than Weinstein. That creates credibility?  Seriously?

What reason would they have to lie?” she implores, with all the feels of a college campus date-rape activist.  Oh, I dunno: fame, validation, basking in the glow of reflected glory, to cite Homer Simpson.  Revenge − personal or ideological, either one.  There’s four reasons, all endemic to the human psyche, and virtually unarguable.

I’m somebody!  I got pressured into watching a troll suds up his cojones just so I could read for a part that I didn’t get; give me another shot…”  Aww.  Poor dear.

While I have zero doubt that Harvey is a manipulative cad who did all − and more than − he’s being accused of, I also have zero doubt that there is a more or less large amount of concurrent piling-on.  Embellishment and outright fabrication.  Ditto altar boys about their catholic priests, ditto sweater geeks upon Bill Cosby, ditto every rock-n-roll bimbo groupie over the sexy front man who filled his trailer with booze, barbs and babes after the concert.  The reason I say this is because people are always going to be people.  It’s in their nature.

It is grossly naïve to believe that Weinstein is the only asshole in this equation.  Those who think he is are apparently unfamiliar with the human race.  And, well, to those: welcome to Earth, guys.  Can you shed some light on the whole alien abduction thing?  Barbara Boland needs to know; she has another victim group to champion.

As intellectually offensive as Boland’s fatuous credulity is, the truly loathsome responses come in the form of faux piety from Hollywood and the national democrat party insiders.  Those who knew, from Day One thirty years ago, what kind of bounder Harvey Weinstein was, who winked and nodded through it all, and who only chose this moment to get weepy and righteous about it.

They’re all playing a very poor rendition of Claude Rains’ Captain Renault.  They are shocked − shocked − to learn that Weinstein is a compulsive and serial defiler.

They didn’t give a damn when it was merely their friends and co-stars being mauled.  They couldn’t care less when he fundraised their political campaigns.  It only mattered when their silent complicity became evident and they were taking a share of the blame.  From that moment on, they signaled their virtue with the same single-minded ferocity of the telegrapher on the Titanic.

S.O.S. 

Save Our Sycophantia. 



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