A Fine Frenzy

When political propagandist and Fox News entrepreneur Roger Ailes' career came crashing ignominiously to earth in July 2016 in a blaze of sexual harassment allegations and a law suit from no fewer than 10 women involving not less than $45 million in settlements, no one rushed more quickly to impugn the motives and integrity of his many accusers (when the legal gags on the women were in place) than ostentatious Catholic Bill O'Reilly.  Eight months later, O'Reilly himself was out of his long time gig on Ailes' former network, himself accused of sexual harassment by at least 6 women , on a list that overlaps in part with Ailes'.  <Pause to shudder violently for the poor women>.  Almost as repayment for O'Reilly's earlier service to him, Roger Ailes, now living comfortably off his severence in forced retirement, seized headlines again by dropping dead days later at 77.

Later in the year, in the wake of an onslaught of outings of behaviors ranging from creepy to pathological to criminal involving Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Louis CK, Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, Al Franken, Pixar Chief John Lasseter, and Charlie Rose for starters (leaving aside for the moment the lurking, grabbing alleged rapist-in-chief), pioneering power tripping pervert O'Reilly had to pause from promoting the latest in his series of low-cal fanciful histories in an interview on the Today Show with Matt Lauer to discuss the allegations that had felled him, explaining that in spite of the widely-known reason for his dismissal he had received "not one complaint" against him in 42 years of harassment.  (If you doubt that multi-million dollar payouts to accusers for signing of non-disclosure agreements, including $32 million to Lis Wiehl alone, challenge Bill O'Reilly's comment to Lauer that he'd never received one complaint, turn on your between-the-lines radar and watch this conversation between former O'Reilly colleagues Janet Huddy and Megyn Kelly.  Some details of the accusations that prompted O'Reilly's settlement are here.)

Although Lauer did not pull many punches in the O'Reilly interview, it's interesting to contemplate what was going on in his mind if anything other than compartmentalization in a scenario that must be playing out in other guilty or self-deluding minds across many industries, for within short weeks after his O'Reilly interview, the clean cut Lauer himself was abruptly dismissed on multiple credible allegations of sexual misconduct at NBC.   The following day, Lauer received support from none other than Geraldo Rivera via tweet - the same Geraldo who postulated to Sean Hannity that Harvey Weinstein's accusers might have been motivated by career ambitions; predictably, by the end of the week, Rivera too was exposed anew for his own "unseemly" misdeeds.

This 6 degrees of separation timeline has been brought to you courtesy of a prevailing mood of doneness with acquiescence to the grabby whims of very badly behaved people, cascading outward from the women for whom it is and has always been an all too familiar tale and gripping the whole culture -- certainly those with ears to hear and eyes to see.  The alleged perpetrators come in "all varieties" -- if you like white, rich, male and powerful.  The reports keep coming.  Rebecca Traister of New York Magazine offers particularly salient insight into the apparent materialization out of thin air this year of a long and growing list of names and more importantly the shaping forces behind who makes the list and when:

Here is something you should know, from inside a publication: For every one of these stories of harassment and predation finally seeing the light of day, reporters are hearing dozens more that will not be published, because women won’t go on the record in an industry still run by the people they want to name, or because the men in question aren’t powerful enough to interest those who are powerful enough to decide what has news value, or because the damage these men are alleged to have done seems insignificant on a scale that has recently been drawn to accommodate the trespasses of Harvey Weinstein, and of writer-director James Toback, named by more than 300 women (whose accounts he denies).

Traister's essay is especially sharp in drawing a connection between the shameful treatment of women in the flesh and the shameless promotion of agendas advancing the cause of rich white powerful men like themselves:

Then, of course, there are Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, men whose work to bolster the white-male power structure was always direct. Through Fox News, they worked to promote a Republican Party bent on reinforcing the power imbalances that left men like them in charge of television networks and as anchors of television shows, and so powerful and so rich that years of complaints of direct harassment and abuse could land, get muffled, or be settled and paid off with barely a hitch. That both men finally lost their jobs, and that Ailes is now dead, offers little relief; the party and candidate they labored to create and sell to America are now in power.

There's an especially satisfying justice in having these two men in particular who made careers out of the  dubious project of duping unsophisticated rubes into complicity in their own oppression, being called out for and falling flat on their faces just for being flat out creeps.  There's a world of them left standing for the moment where those two were, but also a thirst for justice that is barely slaking.  As Traister puts it:

This tsunami of stories doesn’t just reveal the way that men have grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it shows us that they did it all while building the very world in which we still have to live.

Is a propensity to sexually harrass women just an unfortunate characteristic coincidentally shared by so many of the otherwise gifted and generous men who shape our society?  Or is it the case, as is becoming more evident, that the utterly poor quality of our current state can be directly attributed to the same poor character of the cadre of men who have been assuming power since time immemorial--the very character defect that also accounts for their entitlement with women? Indeed all the while the list of outed sex offenders in power grows, we are daily reminded of what happens when bad little boys are in charge.  Only our kind is allowed in.  If you can pay for it, it's yours even if 'it' is the oppression of others. If you can kill it, you can own it. If you can grab it, take it. If it feels good, try and stop me from doing it. Why grapple with nuance when force will do?  The accelerated pace of exposure of offenders has happened in parallel with a frenetic burst of grabby unpopular unsolicited decrees and legislation.

If the obvious correlation between sex offence and sociopathological policy making is not merely coincidental, is there a glimmer of hope to be gleaned from current proceedings?  To more immediate concerns, will the President-- as fetid and festering an example of the slime we're talking about as can be imagined-- succumb from taking liberties with his office and the American people, or will he be done in by his propensity to take liberties with women?  Will he alone get off, or will we?