The Quantum American Violence Cocktail

GUNS and a Whole Lot More…

A terrible thing happened to me in the wake of the school shooting at Santa Fe, Texas last week. I blocked it out. It took place on a Friday afternoon. And I didn’t want to hear about it. I went numb and then sought some other forms of diversion. The Preakness, my new book on Africa, that sweet, silly wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markel that looked like a cross between a Lifetime Christmas movie and a Rainbow Coalition pep rally—anything to take my mind off that obscene, unnecessary mass slaughter of innocents that—like Parkland, Florida before it—now happens so often we have all become anesthetized to the endless montage of mayhem, mourning, and the agony of broken lives.

            Then I got stabbed in the heart by something called conscience.  That conscience filled me with outrage, and that outrage drove me to result … and along with it the realization that if I didn’t speak up, if I didn’t try to come up with answers to this deadly American paradox, it would fall into that national malaise that Jimmy Carter once predicted, now having become a fact of life. We have become a society estranged to itself. Violence in all its forms—guns, knives, truck bombs, and cars crashing into crowds, IEDs, machetes—has become a tragic part of our national character. And forget the mass shooting headlines, tragic and alarming though they may be, the core issue is the day to day violent acts in every city in the USA that make a news blip on a Wednesday afternoon and are forgotten on a Thursday—to the tune of 31,000 plus murders a year.

            For those of you who don’t like to read (and apparently most of you don’t) let me cut to the chase on what I have found to be the sick, sociopathic penchant for brute force that appears here more than any other country. They are in brief as follows: 1) an easy access to weapons and the cornucopia of mayhem available to every single nut job with a grievance. (And don’t run around with your hair on fire NRA supporters, no one is coming for your guns.) 2) The American cult of Villainy Chic and the worship of all aspects of the Dark Side; 3) the erosion of humanity through the electronic zombification of the millennial male. 4) The moral and political impotence of our national leaders to create any meaningful legislation.

            Having parked these four notions in front of you, I realize they all fall into the “well of course” category. Anyone who thought about it for five minutes would recognize all these elements as part of the demented Rubix that has come to be a pattern in the great American peril. So let’s deal with them one at a time:

            1) Item One: The Easy Access Gun Conundrum. What people won’t admit is the fact that—when the next tragic mass murder takes place (and it has a 92% chance of being a shooting)—about one third of you are going to say it’s something else other than the guns. So be sure to check one or more of the previous causes. And all the “get the guns” advocates need to think about it before they butt heads with that Second Amendment thing, because this former Marine who grew up in radio days happens to remember that this is the same Bill of Rights we had back in the 1940s and 50s when every kid on my block had a BB gun, a pellet pump gun and toy pistols that were realistic in every detail. They actually proved to be excellent training tools for the proper handling of weapons. And there were—except for an occasional mob vendetta—no mass shootings, mass murders or mass-anythings. It also seemed that just about every family had guns—a couple of rifles and a pistol and perhaps an old WW II souvenir—but absolutely no one had AK-47’s or AR-15’s or Glock 9’s, or enough rounds of armor piercing ammo to take down an AFV. There were also no mega-kill motion pictures or movies where everyone in the film fired off a zillion rounds hipshot from a .50 caliber M2 Browning that splattered the entire landscape without so much as a ripple of recoil (all done while chewing tobacco and drinking a beer). But let’s face it. It was a kinder, gentler time. Humanity and human contact were our default means of communication, and lunatics didn’t have electronic access to tap into their grievances.

            Some interesting stats though: Of all the mass shootings in America in the last 18 years, 28% involved high-magazine automatic rifles, while 61% involved pistols (over half of those semi-automatic or high-magazine pistols). And like it or not, proximity to high-volume magazines and rapid fire creates a proportionate number of casualties. Do the math! The argument is beyond refutation.

            BTW, be ready to reassess the whole “enhanced school security, armed teachers” argument, because—unless you’re going to build a bunker—it’s almost impossible to lock down a school. And as far as school security is concerned, Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida had an armed security guard who froze under pressure outside the building (while Nikolas Cruz was inside popping off rounds at half the student body). Santa Fe High School had 3 security personnel who despite “advancing on the situation” proved yet again to bring too little too late against Dimitrios Pagourtzis when he was cutting loose with his sawed-off shotgun and automatic pistol.  As of now, about 43% of all schools in America have regular weekly security and the count is rising. And so the jury is still out.

            At this point, emphasis on optimum security it is already everywhere—schools, universities, public gatherings, shopping malls, travel ports, airports—all have security guards, armed staff and lookouts, and still there is mayhem. And nothing and no legislation can protect us from the solitary contrivances of a madman or the political conspiracies of a terrorist group. They are all a part of the quantum dementure of our modern American culture, and our only means of preparation involves extreme vetting that requires the eventual abridgment of one or more of our personal freedoms. And on the face of it, no one wants to buy into that.

            This leads me to Items 2 and 3 on my list of contributing factors. In Item 2, I reiterate my belief that practically all of us spend large portions of our waking moments in the thrall of some of the undisputed scum of the Earth. Perhaps it is a by-product of America’s peerless embrace of the underdog, BUT we have for generations built cult followings around every murderous scumbag in history, on film or as portrayed to us by a truckling toady press. Since the beginning of this nation, we have celebrated such dark eminences as Jesse James and John Dillinger, lionized mass murdering scum such as (political cult figure) Che Guevara and wholesale hitman Whitey Bulger who had, not one, but two movies and a TV-series made about his life. I could make a laundry list of hero/villains—from John Wick to the Terminator—and somehow the lines get blurred between right and wrong, heroes and villains, as long as our guy is pretty and cool and always wins in the end, usually after mega-kills and body counts in the dozens.  (I wrote about this in my article “The Celebritization of Evil” and double down on that document now.) http://robertahola.com/comments-on-society/the-celebritization-of-evil/

            Oddly and sadly, this perfectly dovetails into the irrefutable rise in factor Number 3: The electronic zombification of the millennial American male. This theory runs into violent opposition from a number of sectors, because you are cutting into the annual revenues of a $108 billion a year business. It’s true that only 68% of video games have violent aspects or are driven by first/person shooters. It is also true that the industry is making a concentrated move away from violence (especially with the advent of VR). But there also exists the chilling fact that violent video games are now offering kill-ratios at quantum levels of progression. Forget Call of Duty (the second most successful franchise in all of gaming) or World of Warcraft, the newest spate of violent games include such lovely concepts as Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, For Honor and Outlast II—extreme violence matrixes where shooting, hacking and slaughtering one’s opponent not only gains power points, but (in the case of Bulletstorm and For Honor) brand new stores of ammunition for every megakill, and rewards for creative ways to torture and slaughter the opposition.

            Despite the professional evaluations of 90% of pediatricians and 70% of parents that violent games prompt aggressive behavior in our youth (8-18), there are arguments and some rather skewed studies on the other side to indicate they do not. But let me counter those with some chilling statistics. It is estimated that the young American Male who plays your average video game has made about 100,000 kills by the time he is 18. For some reason estimates cut off there under the assumption these game players retire once they reach adulthood—they do not. About 66% continue well into their late 20s and log in an estimated 100,000 more kills. And if you doubt that this not only creates aggression but also desensitizes the human being, I refer you to the recent rogues gallery of assassins and their relationship to violent electronic media.

            Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook mass-murderer of 27 children and teachers, was obsessed with video games, other mass killings, and even had some perverse video offshoot of a game called “School Shooting.”  James Holmes, the Aurora Colorado theater shooter (24 killed, 140 wounded) loved the video game World of Warcraft and showed up a screening of Dark Knight Rises announcing that he was “The Joker.” Eric Harris and Dylan Kelbold (the killers of Columbine) loved violent video games and even made one of their own that they called “Hitmen for Hire.” Eliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara shooter/stabber (9 killed, 14 wounded) was obsessed with World of Warcraft and played it for hours on end, finally creating a video manifesto praising the “Alt-right” and underscoring his hatred of women. All-time mass murderer (Norwegian) Anders Behring Breivik, a dedicated neo-Nazi, admitted he used the video game Call of Duty to train for his wholesale slaughter of 77 people in Oslo and a Utoya Island youth camp. I could go on with the laundry list, but point made: there is a connection in all of this, and it has been vehemently renounced by all the “experts” as being insufficiently evidential.

            And you can’t go to court try and resolve this. California already tried it. And in 2012, in Brown versus the Entertainment Merchants Association, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a 7-2 vote that the state could not ban the sale of violent video games to minors. In principal, it was the right thing for our courts to do. (So chalk one up for the Constitution but not for common sense.) But therein lies the conundrum. Every measure taken to safeguard a society will involve some restriction of personal liberties. So, we remain at choice…

            I can also assure of you of another thing. You won’t find Hollywood owning up to their part in this violence cocktail mosaic. Screen violence is now exponentially on the rise, but it’s cloaked in all kinds of new disguises that appeal to Millennials and Generation Z. We still have the very popular blood operas of dark heroes like John Wick, the Punisher, Jason Bourne and the Mechanic—real blood, real killers and gluts and gobs of gore. But those, due to pressure from the obscure coven of the morally indignant, have developed disguises that come in the form of what I call the Disneyfication of violence.

            Star Wars, the Avengers, X-Men, and Transformers, Black Panther and every Marvel hero—all have adapted a video game approach to their mega-kills. If you’ll carefully check these out in the next orgy of non-stop action-adventure that pours into your popcorn-saturated senses, certain things will become evident. First, there is no blood anywhere. Our heroes just sort of smack into all their villains and the bad guys bounce off and crumple into a corner (or just evaporate). And fights create no injuries. Apparently everyone is now made of plastic. Cuts and bruises vanish in minute, as if they never happened at all. The action-adventure partisans fly at each other from 100 yards away, bang into one another, and then go at it again. Bop! Pow! Smash! Repeat! There’s not much human contact either. No hugging, no kissing (certainly no sex) and not much dialogue: just some droll writer’s room one-liners, tossed out with a smirk as they make their way to yet another brawl.  Even the weapons they fire are clean and antiseptic in their impact—shields, hammers, paralyzing gazes, laser fire and zapper rays, all clean and neat and desensitizing: Violence without consequence and the slow deadly erosion of all feeling.

            What chafes me more than anything is the fact that Hollywood studios still use dollars and cents metrics to measure their action-adventure box office super-stars in terms of “screen-kills,” and yet have the unmitigated gall to get on stage at some award show or other and lecture us on gun violence in America. The hypocrisy is palpable. And it isn’t going to change; not in Tinseltown. 

            As I write this I realize that, at some level, I’m jousting at windmills, mainly because we are hacking our way through the thicket of intellectual property, media franchises and hundreds of billions of dollars—fortunes made by seducing our senses and replacing our humanity with the murky economics of objectification. We are targets, all of us. We are so in need of validation and escape—so much fallen from our higher-selves and a distant vision of God—that we’ve turned ourselves into cannon fodder to feed our obsessions with diversion. We have been dehumanized and it comes at a cost. That cost is the slaughter of innocents and the peril of our democracy.

            So what is the solution? We fix what we can. We can’t stop these media monsters. But we can take away their toys. 

                       

            So here’s my simple Four Point Plan that practically no one will like:

1)    Ban new purchases on high velocity automatic weapons – rifles and pistols – there is simply no place for them. Bill Clinton banned “assault weapons” in 1994, and it cut down on kill ratios for violent crimes by 38%, until George W. Bush rescinded the executive order in 2004 (shortly after his brilliant invasion of Iraq). It needs to go back on the books. (And yes the statistic is true that Americans own 48% of the 650 million privately owned guns, rifles and automatic weapons in the world. Among those 308 million American guns, about half are owned by 3% of the population, a group called superowners. And virtually none of those are on the “watch” list for being suspects or for irregular behavior. (Then again, Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter was a “superowner,” with 14 AR-14s, several rifles and more than 2000 rounds of ammo found in his hotel room.) Of the gun owners in the “super” category, about 22% of those own most high-velocity automatic weapons.  So I’m sorry. But if it means that .4% of the population has to be deprived of buying more high-velocity kill-toys, so be it. We have to take action in the one area that just might make a difference.

2)    If we want to keep our 2^nd Amendment “right to bear arms” intact, freedom is greatest when the boundaries are clearly defined.  We have to police ourselves. That requires enhanced background checks, no weapons sales to anyone under 21 years of age (without a “right to carry” waiver including psychological profile), and qualifications at a shooting range before licenses are granted. (You have to pass a driver’s test to have a license to drive. The same should absolutely be applied to a license to shoot. You, citizen of the United States of America, are applying for a means to kill someone or some thing. That requires judgment, maturity and skill…which leads to Item 3.)    

3)    Provide background checks that have teeth. With all guns purchased today, the FBI has 3 days to run a check on the application, if they do not complete the check—and in about 345,000 applications a year they do not—the purchase is automatically granted. So the mentally twisted, serial felon and self-motivated loony has a nearly 4% chance of slipping through the net of detection. Add to this the fact that the overworked understaffed FBI is also forced by sheer volume to rubber stamp another 12% of the more than 8.4 million gun purchase applications every year, and that’s another 1.1 million that don’t get checked as thoroughly as they could be.

4)    Go local and regional (statewide) with your gun reform initiatives. The Congress and Executive Branch of the United States government have already made their Faustian pacts with the NRA and the gun lobbies, and as such will remain in a state of political paralysis until the earth turns brown. But now is the era where states are retaking their rights (at least those with any initiative left toward self-governance). So stop looking to the government of the United States to create a national mandate. States have the power to enact these initiatives, and should: state-by-state. Go local. Go regional. Work at it. Make a difference.

            This plan, like just about everything else that matters, requires taking action. It requires Citizenship 4.0 and most of us just can’t be bothered. We have forgotten that an informed citizenry is the best weapon against tyranny. And no gun in the world can protect us from the slow, doggerel downgrade of our national will.

The Complicity of Ambition. The Hypocrisy of Outrage

Harvey Weinstein. Me Too.

And Hollywood's House of Cards.

I’ve been observing all the fallout from the Hollywood “sexual predator” scandals, the offshoots of “Hurricane Harvey,” and finally just had to drop in my two cents worth. And I for one think we should all thank Harvey Weinstein for breaking out like a bull-rhino and finally smashing down the circus tent hiding the worst kept secret in the world. Not that this “alleged” sexual predator and accused rapist and over-the-top industry bully-boy deserves any gratitude at all for his 60 plus allegations of everything from out and out rape to hotel room bathrobe “massages.” But the fact is that Harvey (who everyone has known about for over 30 years) has turned overnight into the enabler’s nightmare.

            No doubt, Weinstein, feeling brash and bulletproof as only Harvey could do, tested Hollywood’s tolerance levels, already stretched paper thin, and just took things too far. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. 

            Now everyone except Zazu Pitts has jumped onto the red-hot “Me Too” bandwagon, which started out as a timid act of courageous expression and has now become a celebrity stampede into the headlines. Now righteous indignation (overdue God knows in some instances) has poured out from so many women on such a daily basis that by now it has gone from being “OMG, not another one,” to bordering on being merely fashionable. Now there is a full movement, mark my words, that will soon become a feeding frenzy and ultimately a witch-hunt. This will all happen in rapid succession before things settle down, the iron law of economics takes over and reason returns with a realization that jobs are lost, projects are cancelled and this industry is hemorrhaging money.

            We’re not there yet. And at this point I’m glad to see more courageous women (and men) coming out with accounts of being traumatized, abused, intimidated and violated. And yet along with all these breakouts comes a caution.

            Because everyone—and I mean everyone—has known that casting couches, influence peddler sexual blackmail and sexual predator pathways to success have been imbedded in the fabric of this town since the 1920s. And a startling number of industry players, at some level, have embraced the complicity of their own ambition, shelved their conscience and pandered to it.

            It is a numbing kind of acceptance that has gone on for generations until Harvey Weinstein came along and tore open the book for all of us. He was, of course, preceded by Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ayles and the rapaciously unrepentant Bill Cosby whose “drug and dip” somnophilic antics seem almost quaint by comparison. Following Weinstein in quick succession were producer Brett Ratner, Kevin Spacey (the new poster child for end-of-career gay predators in ‘the biz’) and Louis C.K who has strangely garnered some “style points” for actually fessing up to his misdeeds—and yes that is how far we’ve lowered the bar!

            At this point, I have to acknowledge my cellular consciousness for tipping me off because over the years each of these men had managed at some point to make my skin crawl. I also have to note that it’s easy to drop the dime on this particular gaggle of fondlers, flashers and (“alleged”) rapists because none of them is particularly attractive. Weinstein looks like Seth Rogen’s love child with Jabba the Hut. Roger Ayles resembles a poop emoji. And Bill O’Reilly, a 6’5” glowering tower of smugness, seems so palpably pompous that he doubtless has to carry his ego around in a wheelbarrow. Louis CK reminds me of that pained pillar of angst you just knew would eventually self-destruct. Kevin Spacey has always reminded me of an Emperor Penguin with a boner. And Bill Cosby, the loveable Huxtable, has always worn that supercilious smirk that made you suspect he’s had his hand up the Mona Lisa’s skirt all this time (and probably popped her a Quaalude to get there).

           There is a point to this beyond the fact that these men have all been egregiously serial and obtusely obscene in their depravity. Many of them are, by reputation, not very nice people. Spacey has had a knock for being difficult ever since he arrived in the business. O’Reilly is the archetypal imperious
“horrible boss.” And apparently “Hurricane” Harvey’s staff had to carry around a first aid kit just to get through a day with him.

            By contrast, why are we surprised that other reported improprieties such as those launched against the likes of Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Dustin Hoffman, Jeremy Piven, Sylvester Stallone, George Tikei and Richard Dreyfus seem to be popping up and just as quickly vanishing like whack-a-mole from the daily headlines? Meanwhile certain standing and ex-presidents, ex-governors, rockstars and many athletes have had “serial” accusations that somehow just washed away like whispers on the wind.

            Am I saying there may be a “cuteness” factor that allows some of these men a pass? Absolutely! But that’s only a piece of the puzzle. It’s a Rubix of corruption and an industry convention. It comes with its own laundry list priorities, and it goes something like this: 1) Long-term industry cachet, 2) current bankability, 3) degree of depredation, and 4) the “bounce-back” factor. (How quickly can they recover from this?) It is now a mosaic that is under assault, a siege that is overdue.

            More than that, the #MeToo movement has great momentum right now. It is the reason for the hastily assembled board meetings of the Motion Picture and Television Academies where there were quickly voted expulsions of Weinstein, director James Tobak and others from their memberships. Those were followed by “Zero Tolerance” declarations issued post haste from studios, networks, production companies, and every academy up to and including West Point. Meanwhile (trust me) an entire battalion of co-conspirators and fellow felons sit at home in cold sweats trembling in their boots.

            At the moment, “Me too” is on a high speed rail—with parades and daily speeches on talk shows—and for the foreseeable future, no one wants to get in the way of that train. This was of course inevitable. And yet what still leaves me confounded is the simple truth that everyone for the last 90 years or so has helped—in every sense of the term—to lay the tracks.

            Almost since the beginning of the industry when Columbia head Harry Cohen had a private bedroom next to his office for “leading lady” auditions and MGM Chairman Louis B. Mayer was (reputedly) trying to fondle underage stars like Shirley Temple and Judy Garland, the perverse game of sexual predation had its start at the very top of the Hollywood food chain.  Actresses such as Joan Crawford made no qualms about using their sexual charms to get roles. Early on, Marilyn Monroe apparently thought it was a job requirement.  (And Rita Hayworth once lost a lead at Columbia by refusing to sleep with Cohen, even though her husband Edward Judson tried to pimp her out to do so). Apparently the most egregious and blatant casting couch offender of all was Darrell F. Zanuck who had a hidden walkway and secret door to his office at FOX just so young starlets could “privately audition” each day at 4 p.m.

            The irony in all of this lies in the fact that during that time, the cycle of sexual enablement was all a part the soup. Everyone knew who the predators were as well as their expectations. They knew which studios to court and the ones that “came at a cost.” If you went in to DZ’s lair, you were going to pay for the play. If Buddy Adler was your producer you were expected to grant whatever favors he asked for all the inroads to OZ. (Marilyn Monroe chose to do so. Joan Collins apparently did not—a rejection of Adler she claims cost her the role of Cleopatra ‘62.)

            Nor was this exclusively a gender issue. Young aspiring actors too had to make their Faustian pacts.  Confessionals and exposé biographies of everyone from Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson to James Dean and Steve McQueen revealed that all of them (reputedly) went on their knees to Hollywood’s Gay Mafia for those breakthrough roles that helped to launched their careers.

            This of course is a taboo subject that is consistently kept under the radar when its depredations too have been going on for nearly as long. (And isn’t it bizarre that Kevin Spacey’s pederastic romps have virtually ended his career, while Producer/Director Bryan Singer seems to have successfully managed to cajole, scrub clean and otherwise suppress every one of his?)

            Am I saying there is a double standard here? By every indication there is. Simply follow the money, follow the leverage, follow the rules of the game.

            The “Sexual Revolution” of the late 1960s created something of a paradigm shift in the way parts were pandered in Hollywood. By the early 1970s Hugh Hefner had moved his Playboy Mansion from Chicago to Beverly Hills. So there was a new “Candy Box” for all the industry players to gather. After a year or two it was widely rumored that private walkways had been constructed so that Hefner’s celebrity pals James Caan, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicolson and Bill Cosby could have instant backdoor access to the Playboy Mansion any time they desired.

           

            (Even as far back as the 1970s the major players inside Hefner’s playground knew about Cosby’s somnophilic “Sleeping Beauty” fixations and played into them. So no wonder, he felt put upon in 2014 when all these victims came forward. Doubtless in his twisted, perverse sense of logic, Cosby somehow believed he had been playing inside the lines.)

            Playing inside the lines—imagined or real—was of critical importance, especially when it came to someone trying to leverage their careers by commoditizing their sexuality. It was the same mindset that apparently intimidated high profile celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Helen Mirren to suffer their sexual humiliations in silence for years. It was the same culture of complicity that prompted cynical smirks and smiles in response to Barbara Hershey’s wry observation that, “You can’t sleep your way to the top. But you can certainly sleep your way to the middle.” It was the same culture of complicity that apparently prompted A-List actors like Russell Crowe and Matt Damon to try to cover for Weinstein by entreating victims to keep quiet about the producer’s more recent outrages.

            Now the lid is off this Pandora’s box, and now I’m even more astounded by the hypocrisy of outrage that is pluming out of it. Many of the same people in high-dudgeon over this recent spate of scandals are the same ones who formed a 40 celebrity petition list to get serial pederast Roman Polanski reinstated after his flight from prosecution. Many so terribly outraged over this recent run of allegations were also among those among the 370 celebrity “character witnesses” who endorsed singer Michael Jackson—a list that included Larry King, Elizabeth Taylor, Stevie Wonder, Kobe Bryant (now there’s an endorsement!) and Whoopi Goldberg, whose defense of the likes of Polanski, Jackson and Cosby seems to have turned being the perp’s apologist into a cottage industry.

            Michael Jackson is a classic case of slipping through the net of “reasonable doubt.” No one wanted to believe that little Michael would molest teen and pre-teen boys, despite two lawsuits, his triple deadbolt bedroom doors and a string of young visitors that continued at Neverland for years on end. His antics were dismissed as “eccentric” even though rumors of payoffs persisted and two trials nearly ten years apart went to completion.

            At this point one cannot overlook the inconvenient truth that Michael Jackson was a billion dollar industry, as is Woody Allen today. And that might go far to explain how Woody, despite being outed in New York Magazine by stepdaughter Dylan Farrow for having serially molested her, continues to write and direct films. And someone please explain to me how Allen receives 21 Oscar nominations and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes, while Amazon Studios Exec Roy Price gets fired over one alleged proposition in the backseat of a limo?

           

            Is there a double standard? You bet there is. Its names are Power and Leverage. Entire empires get taken down when superstar perversions are exposed. Michael Jackson was an empire. So is Woody Allen.

            Up to now, The Weinstein Company has been arguably the most powerful, successful independent production studio in Hollywood history, and it now sits dead in the water, crippled and on the verge of bankruptcy because its CEO was an (alleged) rapacious monster who couldn’t control his urges…and they knew. They even built a slush fund to cover Harvey’s (alleged) criminal sexual transgressions.  Everyone at Weinstein knew, and so did all those doing business with them. But everyone—many of this industry’s most powerful people—went along with this cretin’s depredations because an entire industry fiefdom had been built up in the midst of it…and they thought the center would hold.

            Now Harvey has blown the center open with a time bomb. So now there is a mad scramble in Hollywood to regroup and remoralize a system that has been essentially corrupt since its inception.

            But it’s not just Hollywood that is hypocritical in its approach to sexual misconduct. America as a nation suffers from a pandemic of moral relativism in how, why and where we plant our outrage and our sense of retribution. And we are—all of us—very partisan in our censure. And we often get political when we do it.

            Why else would we have two weeks of Senate hearings to unseat Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas because Anita Hill accuses him of saying “Long Dong Silver” and asks her out to dinner? Then two years later we dismiss all allegations of molestation, sexual misconduct and even rape against William Jefferson Clinton and elect him not once but twice as President of the United States. (Even now he has frequent flier miles on Ron Epstein’s “Lolita Express.”)

            How do the people of California (of all places!) manage to shrug off a dozen accusations of serial fondling by gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger and elect him by a landslide, while now a new posse wants to lynch Al Franken because he tongue kissed his leading lady?

            After all these years, I’m bewildered at how Senator Gary Hart not only loses his 1988 run for president because of an affair de coeur with Donna Rice, when Donald J. Trump openly brags about groping women, quells an (alleged) pending rape charge, and gets off Scot free from several accusations of fondling and sexual misconduct because he declares it all to be “fake news.” (Hell Donald! They have you on Tape!) I’m even more confounded by the fact that an entire nation of fundamentalist Christians (the moralistic Ted Cruz Bible thumpers) managed to park their conscience somewhere along the side of the road and vote this man into office.

            In a final condemnation of our national character, I have to observe that surviving allegations of sexual misconduct may or may not be an issue of popularity. It’s certainly one of agenda.

            Even now we engage in a willing suspension of disbelief if one of “our own” gets nailed. Plausible denial becomes a factor, especially with “one-off” offenses. Many of us side with the accused because after all, it's a “he said-she said.” And we’ve all born witness to careers that were killed in the poison of allegation.

            Still, on balance, no one is even trying to deny that Hollywood has too long gotten a pass, and now its day of reckoning has hit mid morning. Still dawning are myriad allegations of harassment in the business workplace. Silicone Valley has already been hit and Wall Street appears to be next.

            Following those will come Washington. But don’t hold your breathe for that one. Our POTUS remains in office unscathed, and Al Franken will survive his embarrassment. Both will continue to flourish because raising charges of sexual harassment in the nation’s capital would be like handing out speeding tickets on the Autobahn. And no one wants to open the lid on that one.

            Then there’s the military—the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines—with 96,000 allegations of rape or sexual misconduct (15% against men) with fewer than 5,000 cases ever brought to trial and only about 900 convictions. That’s a different universe of course where angels fear to tread. And no one wants their heroes brought down, so we—collectively as a nation—still choose to look the other way.

            And that’s the final point in all this. Our morality is selective. We too often blame the victim and grant almost unlimited leverage to these monsters of our own contrivance. We all worship the wrong kind of heroes and scramble in some orgy of cognitive dissonance when they inevitably fall from grace.

            But now we must face up to the fact that this is the world we have made. Only we can fix it, but it will come at a cost. We will have to set new standards. We will have to listen early and often to those who stand in fear. We have to resurrect our compassion.

            Mahatma Gandhi once noted that the “best measure of a civilization is how it protects those who cannot defend themselves.” The question remains: are we as a nation willing to be what we have promised to become? The rest of the world is watching. But we’ve got some retooling to do.

            And thank you Harvey for the wake up call. We’ll send you some roses in prison.