counter commentary
ME TOO

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
-  Germaine Greer –

Sinnerman’s turning himself in.  He can’t take the pressure of thinking that one day soon Mary Lou Phillips is going to come out of the woodwork and turn him in for the crime of pulling her pigtails, 40 years ago, back in the fifth grade. What can I say? Sinnerman was not only too young to apologize in words then, but probably too inexperienced to know all he really wanted was for Mary Lou to get pissed enough to overpower him and sit on his face. Maybe that was the secret fantasy that drove Andy Kaufman into his inter-gender wrestling fixation? Or maybe that was the rise Louis C.K. was looking to get out of his passive audience of assistants? Or maybe one goofy Al Franken needs to qualify one kinky way or another in order to get in the Bad Boys Club for real, now that he’s been expelled from the real human perversion of back stabbing corrupt goody two shoes Hall Monitors?

It should go without saying that while no sexual abuses against women should ever be tolerated, it also should be noted that unless the Me Too movement is going to throw all offending pervs under the same bus, in one fell swoop, it’s necessary to match each case up with each so-called offense, before deciding what punishments the acts really deserve. Obviously, neither butt-patting or rape should be tolerated, but they don’t belong in the same category of abuse either, and if not patently separated by long gone common sense from the gestalt, could easily be lumped together by the Trotskyites of the movement, before flushing all offenders careers down the shoot and locking the offensive pricks up in the right designated penalty box, or cock cage, as the case that fits their particular unacceptable actions be.

Before you jump to the conclusion that Sinnerman is about to defend any of his already on record brother swine, it should be noted that, whether the Ethics Police have the balls to go for it for real or not, he’s sure every tricky dick out there who hasn’t already been shot down in the prime of his precious Perv Place, will realize he can’t just keep on thinking he can do what he’s been getting away with doing and outrun Mommy Nature. If you haven’t noticed, Mommy’s pissed, boys. Not just promising Daddy’s gonna kill you when he gets home-pissed either, because she’s finally figured out Daddy is a born again perverted fuck-wad-doofus too, who probably spends all his spare time at home either rearranging all the hidden dirty books and magazines in his closet, over and over, or is out in the garage jerking off over fantasies of getting it on with the kids’ babysitter, so if she wants anything done right in this world, she’d better fucking learn to do it herself. And that does not include watching Louis C.K. masturbate in front of her to make up for the fact that her prude hubby won’t do it with her watching.

Let’s face it, on the surface, most of us were brought up as uneasy (with desire) puritans in a prurient society, until the lucky ones found something or someone along the way who unleashed and naturalized their “unnatural” desires. Those who don’t find a way out of their family oppression are usually the ones who sublimate their uptight cravings into something totally different, until one day they explode into grizzly tabloid headlines. If you’ve seen it before, most likely you’ll see it again, with a totally different, but very similar, cast of characters. It doesn’t take much more than the weather to change for most pervs weenies to start wiggling, and realize the reason they’re moving is filled with natural contradictions of not so easily recognized contradictions, transmogrified generation after generation, from harmless natural born cucumbers jerked up from Mother Nature’s fine earth, to differently spiced pickles always on the look out for trouble. So if we are going to take sexual abuse serious, we better get used to making fun of it, and us, too. Not that if C.K.’s case, for example, were examined closely, he would be eligible for some kind of existential parole for the crimes he willingly confessed to, but maybe it’s worth asking for an explanation because of the incremental evolution of the balls that he exhibited and couldn’t stop demonstrating while exploring the dark side of male-female relationships, in his work on stage and screen, and unfortunately in the work place too. But unless you want to compare his gross mindless or pre-meditated conscious act of self-destructive public self abuse to those of Dr. Larry Nassar’s physical examinations and manipulations of under age girls in the training room, even Mommy, in her enraged sweeping indictments of the creeps, wouldn’t go that far. Though she’s not quite ready to put the gross comedian in the “we can work with that” place that Matt Damon (http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/matt-damon-opens-harvey-weinstein-sexual-harassment-confidentiality/story?id=51792548) tried to put both C.K. and the sacrificially defrocked Democratic Senator from SNL’s school of How Not To Get Laid, in an awkward voice of reason interview he gave trying to break through the hysteria of the bandwagon, and chill everything and everybody out – though hysteria isn’t exactly the right word to chill Mommy), much less appease Mommy’s heightened sense of finally being pissed off enough to demand JUSTICE NOW.

It was merely a matter of time, once she spotted an opening big enough to drive HARVEY’s motherfucking fat ass out of the movie business he dominated, on a spit, like the pig he’s always been, through three decades of bullying everyone – not just women – that he had leverage over, while forcing everyone who worked for him to cover up the humiliating sexual crimes he used his power to plan, commit and get away with, until after 30-fucking years of his shit, women, thanks to Rose McGowan, for one, finally started standing up and calling the tub of shit out for the scumbag he’s always been. Even on an  aesthetic level, he’s offended puritans and perverts alike for the lack of his imagination in his sexual crimes, repeating the same lame faux seduction scenario over and over and over, to get what he wanted (to be able to sing, I feel pretty?), without anywhere near the deviation of the movies he produced. Horrifically BORING! On every level of abuse. Why it took this long to nail him is not hard to say; the currency of bullies like Harvey is fear – You’ll never work again threats were more than threats with this prick (and historically, for this chickenshit industry as a whole). The threats were real every time this inhuman bowl of dog shit didn’t get what he wanted.

But now that it’s out in the open, there’s got to be some hard core lessons for the good, the bad and the ugly abusers, illuminating them for everyone to see and make fun of, until they all feel totally psychologically derided. If the humiliation of getting caught doing whatever kinky little thing you do is not enough to stop any of you low life pervs out there from humping the shark, before you end up in the jug with the real creeps, perhaps some new kind of humiliating, inverted-Mount Rushmore monument to sex offenders will do the trick – How about their photos digitally installed into urinals & toilet bowls all over the country, for the duration of their sentences? Incarceration without shame is merely a vacation for these pricks. They’ve got to feel it for what they did, not feel it for getting caught doing what they did, if the message is ever going to connect.

Despite all the bad shit that’s coming out now, there are still a lot of good men, out there who could be accused of going over a line they didn’t even know existed. And yes, there are a lot of bad ones that knew exactly what they were doing too. Just from his business reputation alone, we could all see that Harvey Weinstein was a humongous scumbag, without even realizing just how big a sexual predator the fucker was too. Whether it was sex or business, apparently he bullied everybody like they were his own personal bitch. No doubt. Kevin Spacey’s reputation as an aggressively out in the open big time dick flit proceeded his talent for a long time, but couldn’t really be pinned down as long as he played the free wheeling closeted guy game, and refused to admit he was gay. But if Kevin sat down at a bar next to a straight man, instead of a gay man, and out of the blue grabbed his dick, what would be the reaction if the man pulled out a pistol and shot Kevin right where his third eye would have been, if the man hadn’t pulled the trigger?  What kind of crime is that? Does what happens next depend on whether the bar was in Dallas or NYC?

Justice, for as long as we’ve known it (outside Hollywood), is unprepared to answer, since justice is obviously a pipe dream we have to continually work at if we want it to live up to the high falutin ideals this country preaches, but for the most part doesn’t practice.  Everybody who walks away has always had their hands and heads buried in the trough.

Harvey Weinstein is one thing, of course, Kevin Spacey is another, but Charlie FUCKING Rose too? Who even fucking knew this workaholic was human, much less had hot & horny desires toward sentient beings? At least that weren’t related to his obsession with work? He seemed to have worked 36 hours a day non-stop for the last 40 years, interviewing everyone who was anyone about everything anyone (not everyone) ever thought was newsworthy, but I don’t recall any of it having anything to do with sex, one way or the other. Yet despite the fact he was his own genre, a lot of the time he didn’t know what he was talking about – on so many different subjects that it almost seemed like he was either a drunk or an alien from a different galaxy using the interviews he did as an opportunity to learn about everything human on this planet – particularly talent, which he seemed to have a fetish for, but could never understand what it was or where it came from and why it couldn’t be learned by someone who didn’t have it, contrary to Malcolm Gladwell’s entertaining, but decidedly crank theory. As for sex, he certainly didn’t have time to go out and, as the putz in power put it before he was in power, grab pussy. So he obviously succumbed to the age-old Woody Allen solution of ordering in when he had an itch that needed to be scratched. Surrounding himself with interns he was attracted to only seemed like common sense, even if he wasn’t knowingly plotting his own demise, by shitting where he ate. And while I wasn’t a fan of the way he did his interviews, he was the only one doing them, so Charlie, no matter what goes down, you moron, I’m gonna miss knowing you’re on, even if I missed your show more often than not, when it was on. You’re as iconic to New York City as the Union Square Green Market or Grand Central Terminal is during the holiday season. A human gargoyle who unfortunately couldn’t keep his dick in his pants when he wasn’t pissing.

I have to stop here, before I dive any further into the soup ‘de’ grope, I need to get a serious thorn removed from my paw, by acknowledging there’s just no denying that this whole breakdown CALL OUT has been a long time coming now, before it was brought into the open thanks to the one and only fucking dirty Harvey. Outside of the pre-meditated sex crimes he’s been getting away with for three decades, he was such a pure ugly-bullying piece of shit in his business life, the only reasons he wasn’t ratted out a long time ago was because this monster movie mogul and big time political donor bought his right to abuse women specifically, and as I’ve said over and over, generally did it to everyone else (excepting a few star buddies whose careers he made) who worked for him – actresses, actors, directors, staff – and all those whose others whose jobs forced them to work with him – journalists, critics, the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, to name a few – because this was just being Harvey. Just like Jack the Ripper was just being Jack the Ripper. The only difference being, Jack got away with it, and fucking Harvey got caught.  At this point, neither of the fuckers have seen the inside of a jail, much less a court room.  But as the list of celebrity sex abusers continues to grow every day, one thing is apparent here, there is more than one thing going on that needs common sense to deal with it in this ancient battle of the sexes.  Particularly now. Since there are so many other cross gender issues that need each other’s understanding and support to deal with them, if we don’t want to end up living in the next Syria. Obviously Kevin Spacey has to be judged by his peers in the LGBTQ community. LGBYQ has got to set their own guidelines and rules, instead of letting the gay-hating right-wing closet-queens attack them, to hide their own their self loathing, like they have forever. I can’t even talk about Jello pudding prick Bill Cosby without thinking that all his hypocritical preaching to the black community about taking the right actions, and living the right lifestyle, was in its way at least as bad as his drugging and raping woman after woman for years. Trying to rate this great humanist’s crimes is hopeless, however. Living your whole life as completely the opposite of how you really are is a crime so abhorrent to Mommy Nature, it makes prick-to-everyone Harvey seem almost honest. If that’s not an indictment of your lack of soul, I don’t know what is. Obviously, not one rule fits all, even inside the spread in their own categories either, from Dustin Hoffman to Russell Simmons to Matt Lauer to the millennials own smarmy James Franco to cyber-sex addict Anthony Weiner, it’s impossible to name them all, outside the obviously extreme crimes of Dirty Harvey, Jello Quaaludes and Dr. Larry Nassar, who can generally be lumped into the same category as Jeffrey (“What’s for lunch, Mom?”) Dahmer.

Outside of aggressively prosecuting violent sexual assault, it’s a lot easier to say this whole situation could use some rules, than it is to create and execute a rating system to base new laws on, which like it or not, no matter its intentions, will more likely violate than protect human rights, since right now all over the world, America is more known for its hypocrisy than anything else but its hard-on for fairness.  That’s a hell’va dichotomy to grow up and live with your whole fucking life. If traffic lights gave the same mixed signals as human beings, the morgues would be so full they’d probably start turning the bodies into breakfast cereal. But I’m not meaning to make fun of problems in human behavior, when civilization – already on the brink of so many other catastrophes it doesn’t seriously know how to deal with – can’t even finish this sentence, without faking it. We could start with coming up with a system that tries to make it clear what you can do and what you can’t, but you have to remember that one man or one woman’s ceiling is another man or woman’s floor, so that idea might lead to not only a never ending debate on what’s kosher and what’s not (outside the obvious crimes), and who says it is, and who says it isn’t, in the human meat market, like it or not, we’re all part of.  And the last thing any of us want is to have our belief systems enforced by some ass backwards freak who’s so deep in a religious closet they don’t know whether they want to fuck us where we breathe or us to fuck them where they breathe.

That of course is J. Edgar Hoover territory. Can you imagine a civilization stupid enough to let a spiteful closet freak like Hoover dictate mores to the masses? That was our country for the second half of the 20^th Century, bimbos. And I know, I know, Hoover had enough down & dirty on every politician in Washington to call the shots for all of them, no matter what he did that should have not only gotten him booted out of government, but thrown in a cell with Jeffrey Dahmer himself.  We’re still not over all the harm Hoover and his FBI did to the country, so it’s kind of ironic that we’ve got what’s left of the so-called left defending the FBI from the always wrong right wing putz-in-power’s attacks on them now. Much less during all this time after Hoover death not having someone like a Mueller stepping up to call out and clean up the historical hypocrisy of The Bureau, before creating a much more equitable – out of the closet – system for one and fucking all.

In the center of all the other turmoil over things that obviously no longer work – like congress, healthcare, the infrastructure, gun control, the judicial system, mental health, the imperial fucking presidency – it looks like we’re all standing on the precipice of remaking ourselves again. Seeing how far we can push the old envelope before it finally gets mailed out – probably on the day they finally close the fucking (but loveable for its service all the same) United States Post Office, so Amazon can deliver the mail instead, is that the strategy?

If Fragmerica has one logo, it would probably be, DON’T DO ANYTHING UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE. Just going by the archaic laws we have on the books now, obviously Harvey not only crossed the line of human decency, he shit on it every time he did, and made everybody who worked for him lick it up to cover his pecker tracks, and became more & more emboldened & entitled every time he got away with it. Will the scumbag be able to buy his way out, like King Turd Trump is still doing, without everybody in the fucking country standing up to him? There’s no doubt, thanks to dirty Harvey, the distance between a rock and a hard on is not what it used to be, is it?  All the natural playfulness has been drained from our swamp, burkaroos.

NEW YORK CONFESSIONAL SCHOOL BRINGS IT ALL BACK HOME

No one gets out of this scot-free. Not men, not women, not you, and certainly not Sinnerman. Don’t laugh, but he always felt like he was more of a feminist than any woman he’d ever been involved with, solely on the basis of saving every issue of R. Crumb’s LENORE GOLDBERG and her GIRL COMMANDOS. Of course he could have been prejudice. He could have been right in theory, but negligent in practicing what he preached in certain situations, for any number of reasons, valid or not, that if taken out of context would have made him a male chauvinist (haven’t heard that word flapped around for some reason, for years) while the pig part never seems to die, in one kind of reality or another, that’s not normally Sinnerman’s. Though he realizes by now he could easily be categorized as one by any number of different female snipers out there, who feel differently about the things they were once cool with back in the day. Sinnerman absolutely hasn’t got a clue how, why, where or when those feelings changed, or will change again on a dime and transform his old relationships into some kind of scorpion & frog scenario, but he’s been stung enough times in the past to know going down in the old glug-glug-glug can happen at any moment, out of the blue, in human relationships. But maybe the reason he hasn’t fully taken that possibility into account is that he’s ignored the all’s fair in love & war factor, and he just wasn’t on top of it when love turned into war. As the failure of all his successful relationships with all his so-called significant others went down the tubes specifically, even when he sensed the end was coming, he was surprised when they ended. He’s certainly been stung by the scorpion enough times by now to always think things are over before they’ve even begun. He’s not saying it was all their fault that these relationships quit working, or never got off the ground, because it generally isn’t anyone’s fault when the past stops the present cold, and prevents the future from happening. For the sake of avoiding the ever popular Point-Counterpoint on whose fault it is, Sinnerman will take half the blame, without nit-picking over the percentages. Don’t call it cowardly on his part, because it’s possible that chivalry could be mistaken for cowardly, and chivalry has something to do with it, since that facet of male-female relationships was ingrained into him growing up – Give the Lady your seat, Dumbo; Open the door, Schmuck; Take out the trash, Loser  – before he even started the first grade, and he learned from that point on it was his job to pick up the check.

True, that point of view got somewhat bumfucked once puberty kicked in, but no matter how any of these relationships shook down before they broke down, the (thinly veiled) chivalry lingered, and could have been mistaken in the age of the shrink for being passive-aggressive, or just uninterested in the conversation, both of which he’ll cop to, at certain points, in different situations. Learning he couldn’t, he shouldn’t, he wouldn’t be able to speak for his partner once she ws gone was a hard one to digest. All the shit he knew about relationships (except the great gimme of chemistry), had to be unlearned, before he could learn how to operate from a different perspective. It wasn’t as hard as quitting smoking, but it took a conscious concentrated forced effort to give up that paternal chivalry, because women coming into their own consciousness found paternalism in any form offensive. Dr, Ruth never talked about this shit. Nobody did, in fact, except whoever the woman Sinnerman most wanted to be on the same page with, just as the binding of their bond started unraveling. And by the time that happened, the conversation wasn’t a conversation anymore either, it was a war, by any other name. And if he didn’t recognize it for what it had turned into, it would be him left dead on the field of battle. So if you out there can’t really believe she’s trying to destroy you, she will destroy you.  Watch The War of the Roses, know it is possible, and believe it, even if you don’t understand the reason why.

Sinnerman would like to confess and apologize now. Though he’s not rich or famous, and too uncouth to be sure whether he should apologize first, then confess, or vice versa.  He does know Mary Lou Phillips is coming for him though, because she already did.  Not Mary Lou per se, but someone who didn’t exactly come for him either. Just was a girl he had known when he was growing up who he thought was stunningly beautiful then, over a 25-hundred miles away, and 30-years earlier. He had no idea what had happened to her, and frankly had never even wondered about her once since he left the old hometown for good, since their lives were only situationally connected to each other anyway, but when he accidentally learned she had lived all that time on the same getaway he often visited during the summer, he felt obligated in some way to give her a call and ask her how she was, say hello and what other rationalization for a bad idea you can come up with. She had been 17 or 18 when he last saw her, but now she was pushing 50, married with kids. Their parents had been friendly, if not actually friends, she’d been in his younger brother’s class in school, three grades behind him, and for a time, their houses had been within backyard walking distance of each other. What else? Age difference being what they were in those formative years, they hadn’t exactly run with the same crowd, but she’d had a crush on a friend of his, who had no interest in her at all. And had told him that over and over, every time her name came up.  Knowing this, one summer night, when he was home from college, he invited  her to a drive-in movie. Even though his friend felt the way he felt, he felt guilty he hadn’t told him he was going to take her out, even though the whole night turned out to be such a big fat nothing, there was nothing to say about it. At least to Sinnerman.

But when he went to have lunch with her all those years later, he discovered she didn’t feel anywhere near the same. As she glared at him face-to-face, from the moment they sat down, he was the swine who had ruined her life.

“What?” Sinnerman stared at her in disbelief.  She was no longer the rare teenaged beauty he remembered, but almost the spitting image of the neighborhood mom who had been friendly with his mom.

“I’ve been waiting to tell you this for the last 29 and a half years.”

She had to be kidding.

But she was dead serious, and began telling him how that night at the drive-in movie had scared her so bad, it took her until she had children to put in perspective.

“That is hard to believe,” Sinnerman said.  “Nothing happened that night.”

“Think about it!” she demanded.

The only thing he could think of was that he had never told his friend – who wouldn’t have cared anyway – that he had taken her out.  There was no need to even bring it up, since nothing had happened. Over half-way through the movie – he believed it was Jason And The Argonauts, but wouldn’t have sworn on it – he put his arm around her and moved into kiss her, when all of sudden, the worse smell he’d ever come in contact with, enveloped the entire car. It was pure skunk, the love fragrance of Pepé Le Pew (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lsQfTaStcs&list=RD1lsQfTaStcs). He casually tried to disentangle himself, without being obvious, and asked her if she wanted popcorn, or Milk Duds, or something he couldn’t remember, then quickly got out of the car to go to the refreshment stand. That was all he remembered of the night.  That was all she remembered too. To him it was nothing, except his first experience with the dreaded pussy fart of yonder yore that he had heard about from older guys for ages, and always thought was just a gross joke.  To her, it was the night that drove old Dixie down.

“I trusted you,” she began to weep.

“I’m sorry, I really am, but I don’t understand what I did.”

“You ruined my life.  I’ve had nightmares about that night for years.”

“But what did I do?”

“I trusted you!”

There had to be something else.  But he couldn’t find it.  He shuttered at the thought of how many other situations were out there in the past that he was sure he didn’t do anything wrong in, but looking back from their point of view, they were sure he did. Whatever was beneath her accusatory words was totally above his lay shrink pay grade, but he didn’t doubt she believed what she was saying. Though he still had no idea what he did when he said his sorry goodbyes and left her that day, he didn’t doubt whatever it was, it had scared the shit out of her, as she kept telling him he had ruined her life, repeating over and over, “I trusted you!”

© 2018 Mike Golden

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