Hey all.
The first thing I promised to you listeners in this new season of you’re listening to radio revel, in the series called Mature audiences only was “irony“. Something we more mature folk should be pretty familiar with and actually pretty good at.
I kind of remember back in high school hell, maybe it was Mrs Lindsay’s English class, trying to get my head around literary irony. Like in the Greek tradition, letting the audience know that despite what a character may be saying aloud, the opposite is what is being said while that character himself has no idea he or she is being ironic. I kind of remember that I really didn’t get irony at all. And I’ve kind of felt that way throughout my adult life.
Before I sat down to do this episode, I told myself I’d have to go look up irony in the dictionary to make sure I was sure of what it was. The definition is surprisingly clear and easy to understand: the expression of what you want to say through saying the opposite. Like a mother saying to a teen who has failed terribly in school: “You’ve really progressed a lot this year, haven’t you?” Something akin to sarcasm I guess.
So, I have to wonder if irony is what I want to point out here. Full disclosure, as they now seem obliged to say on the news, this writing is taking place in mid-February, and is based on stuff going on right now. Yeah, I’m ahead of schedule here. So, by the time you hear this the events will have probably played out a lot more than what I’m commenting on, but I’m just going to let my fingers vomit out a bunch of stuff I’ve been thinking about and then come back and decide if what I am describing is really ironic.
A certain President of the United States, let’s say Clinton, was being investigated while in office over some real estate scandal or other. Then a special prosecutor was assigned to the case, and the investigation took a wild turn towards sexual scandal. That President had engaged in sexual activity in the Oval Office. Okay, would he have been the first? We’ll never know. However, many other Presidents had sex scandals before him…. what made this one different?
Well, the other person was a young intern. Was he abusing a mentor/mentee relationship there? And what about his vows to his wife? And it’s the Oval Office, if there’s a sacred place in the US, that’s certainly up there as one of them, isn’t it?
So, it was suggested that the guy be ousted from the job because of a sexual indiscretion or two. Yeah, he lied about it, but he later split hairs, what he did with her was sexual, but actually she did the sexual stuff and it wasn’t really like they had sex. Still, it was a scandal. Clinton got off the hook though and even got reelected, seems, as had been the case with men like L.B.J., J.F.K, F.D.R, Grover Cleveland, it wasn’t that big of a deal at all. At least he apologized for having lied. The lying part seems to be what people disliked most about Nixon, ugh, can you imagine a Nixon sex scandal on top of that other stuff? What was really erased from those 18 minutes of magnetic tape….
Now, let’s fast forward a bit. The Presidents that followed Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama, they were pretty clean-cut, no sexual stuff going on there. The first might have fudged a bit on his military experience, the second gave great speeches but didn’t really get much, let’s say, done. Bush Jr had all the 9/11 shit to deal with, along with his finishing up his dad’s war in the Middle East. Obama, hmm, the Affordable Care Act, can’t remember much else than him observing from the situation room as Bin Laden was ambushed. Was that Obama?
Then you all decided that the best thing to do was to give that Donald Trump guy the job. I’m still not sure if the USA as a collective consciousness has caught on yet that that was probably a pretty bad idea. I was never a real New Yorker, though I lived there for about seven years of my adult life. Still I was enough of a New Yorker to know that someone who’s fame was set in the New York tabloids was probably not best for the Chief Executive job.
Before Trump came down the golden escalator in Trump Tower, I basically ignored US politics. I’d left the States, as I’ve probably mentioned somewhere else, in part because of the politics surrounding Ronald Reagan. Hey, look, another President with a pretty clean sexual record. I just didn’t like his policies and felt impotent in the face of the shit that trickled-down from them.
But when I found out that Trump was running, that changed completely. Since that fateful day in 2015, I’ve been sitting up in the upper balconies watching the drama play out. The day after he was elected my boss (a Spanish man who couldn’t care less about American politics) was worried about how I had taken the election results. I was, like many thinking Americans, feeling pretty defeated, even in a bit of shock. How could that man have won? Or, better put, how could that many Americans have been so unable to read the tea leaves? Leave the Electoral College aside, nearly 63M people voted for Donald Trump in 2016. A little over 74M in 2020.
On October 7th, 2016, we became aware of the infamous open mic Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump brags about being a sexual predator. I wrote several essays about this back in the day, right after the election. A general theme that had nearly gotten a previous President expelled from office, unacceptable sexual behavior, has now been exposed in the current candidate. But do Americans really care about this kind of thing?
Let’s pause for a moment and just list some other men whose lives have been turned around because of inappropriate sexual conduct in recent days:
- Newt Gingrich, congressman (resigned)
- John Edwards senator / presidential candidate (campaign damaged)
- Anthony Weiner, congressman (resigned and convicted and served)
- Al Franken, comedian / senator (resigned)
Not long after the Access Hollywood thingy, in the final days before Election Day, Trump made a $130.000 payment to a porn star to ensure her silence about a sexual encounter she says they’d had years earlier. Two sexual strikes on the guy; yet, despite the constant Puritan hangover in American society about stuff we do when naked with one another, that guy got the job. Seems in only matters sometimes….
Let’s pause and look at four politicians who’ve had sexual shadows since Trump won in 2016:
- Jim Jordan, congressman, sexual misbehavior of another while in a position of authority, no consequences up to this date
- Madison Cawthorn, accused by multiple women, video of some strange nude behavior in bed with another man, no consequences up to this date (well he did lose his reelection campaign)
- Matt Gaetz, congressman, sex with a minor related to a pimp friend who is now serving, no real consequences up to this date, though he is being pressured….
- Lauren Boeburt, congressperson, no accusations, but she did slip her hand into her date’s crotch on CCTV in a very public place….
Some 11 other not-so-loud-mouthed politicians did see consequences, resigning or not running anew. Most of those were of the same political party as Donald Trump. Does being loud-mouthed act as a kind of force field against consequences? Maybe having a scandalous personality overrides any particular kind of scandal a person may be exposed as having?
Now Donald Trump has got a team of lawyers desperately looking for what we’re nowadays calling an “offramp”. Those lawyers have no chance of finding a way of defending Trump against credible accusations of election interference activity. We’ve all seen all of the evidence in this case, heard witnesses testify, it’s pretty clear what Trump did here, and that any other citizen doing the same would have long ago ended up in orange. There’s simply no valid defense. So, what does that team of lawyers do?
They find a sex scandal! Seems the Attorney General and the guy she chose to prosecute the case against Mr Trump engaged in a tryst. They had lunch and dinner together several, no multiple times! They went on vacation together! They even had intercourse! Then they broke up. And what’s worse, the whole “romantic relationship scandal” was purportedly based upon that guy getting the job and then using what he earned to pay in part for their romantic excursions, sometimes for both of them, sometimes they went Dutch, the AG paying him back. The description of the economic scandal sounds pretty mundane…. yet behind it all is the “relationship”. And I wonder, what does the AG’s sex life have to do with her doing her job? What’s more, what do Trump’s saucy sex scandals have to do with trying to coerce election officials to change results, to “find 11,780 votes”? I’m having a hard time here connecting the dots.
So, is it ironic that Donald Trump and a few brazen others, can be given leeway despite questionable sexual attitudes, activities, win the Presidency and even get the chance to run again, while an AG trying to hold his feet to the fire for doing something that we’ve all known about for almost three years get’s dragged through the fire herself because of some relationship she had with a guy she also trusts to carry out a specific job for which he will be paid?
Call me naive. I personally think those two, the AG and the prosecutor guy, should have kept their pants up and hands to themselves. The prosecutor guy was going through a divorce, the AG is a single mom. Was it that important to suddenly start playing kissy face, in the face of the case they wanted to bring against Trump? I’m struggling to consider either of them particularly bright, considering that both should have known better. Wait until you’ve put the guy in jail, then go out and celebrate and then go home and ruffle the sheets!
I had a woman after me for a full year at university. She’d known me since 8th grade, though I didn’t know her back then. I directed her in the lead role in Ibsen’s Ghosts and we got to know one another pretty well and she confessed that she had a crush on me. I told her, and she agreed, that it would be best if we didn’t become an “item” until after we had finished with the show. We kept that pact. It wasn’t that hard. Considering how our relationship panned out, we had made the right decision, as it would have certainly had an impact on the work we were doing together creatively.
But all that aside, is it really ironic, you think, that the guy who got to hang gawdy gold curtains in the Oval Office despite sex scandals is inventing sex-based scandals of a prosecutor in order to get away with crimes obviously committed? Are we really going to accept that because that AG and prosecutor had a private life that included sex, Donald Trump is no worse than she is and thus should be forgiven for his non-sex-related crimes? Did high school English teachers stop teaching irony in Literature class?
Nope, I think simply double standards have become the standard. Do as I say, not as I do. Sit down and shut up.
Well, got that one off my chest, didn’t I? You’re listening to this now about a month after the events, maybe what I’ve complained about has been resolved in a way that not only highlights that irony, or hypocrisy that Americans seem willing to accept as how things are. Could have gone on about the Biden age thing or the new AI video software, but this one came up first. Probably best that a month has passed.
Cheers,
revel.
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