Stormy weather, or how things change

I noticed something years ago about the sexual revolution: by the time I arrive to take part in the seminal social conflict of our time, the revolution has packed up and moved on. This happens to me a lot, I fear, and it is tremendously disheartening to be always a bridesmaid and never a bride. So you can imagine the joy I felt when news of the Stormy Daniels affair broke. I was finally going to fight the narrow moralistic bluenoses who couldn’t stand the idea that someone here in America was enjoying a bit of fluff on the side. I mean, really, didn’t we all go through this twenty years ago? Wasn’t there a national uproar about a President lying about extramarital sex?  Didn’t Congress impeach the President and the national life of the country come to a near halt so that we could all learn more than we really needed to know about the President’s sex life and what the meaning of is is? Didn’t anyone learn anything from that experience? 

Apparently not, so this time I was ready for anything the dirty-minded neo-Comstocks had to throw at me. The President’s affair, if you can dignify a one-night stand with the title of affair, was consensual on both sides. President Trump saw a chance to grab some you know what and Ms. Daniels was not averse to having her you know what grabbed, so what’s the harm here?  It was just sex, after all, and sex in private is the business of the people involved and no one else. Yes, it was adultery, and adultery is on the Top Ten list of things that people should not do, in particular a married man whose wife has just given birth—there’s no way the guy in this situation comes off as anything other than a complete and utter sleazeball—but then again, none of us is the Lord and therefore who are we to judge?  Remember that the Bible says that it is better to pull the speck out of a neighbor’s eye than to pull a beam out of the eye of a Camel, especially an unfiltered one, and don’t you forget it, buster. Moreover, we should remember that the President was not the President then and that Ms. Daniels was not some poor naïve teenage girl duped or bullied into dropping her panties in front of a movie camera; she was an experienced performer with a lengthy filmography behind her. So how is this anyone’s business but theirs?  I think it is time we all took a deep breath and just moved on.

Well, I may think it’s time to move on, but it seems that I am the only one who thinks so. I went forth to battle the new Puritans who seek to oppress us all with their retrograde religious morality and found that they agreed with me, for the most part, and that the sexual revolutionaries were the ones foaming at the mouth about what two consenting adults chose to do with their genitalia. I found this more than a little confusing, to say the least, and so I had to sit down and eat Chinese food (the roast pork with broccoli and wonton soup were very good, thank you for asking) in order to relieve the cognitive dissonance and sort out just what in the blue blazes happened here in this our Great Republic while I was not looking.  Someone changed the rule book somewhere along the line and no one bothered to tell me that Comstockery was back in fashion. Well, everything old is new again, as the saying goes, and there is no new thing under the sun, but I cannot help but notice that the new version of Comstockery is remarkably like the old libertinism complete with extra servings of wanton soup, with the singular difference that the new Puritans didn’t mind when a President they liked and supported did this sort of thing while he was actually President and they do mind a great deal when a President they loathe and despise did the exact same thing when he wasn’t President.  Nearly a quarter of a century separate the initial inaugurations of these two men and much can change in a quarter of a century: the Internet barely existed in 1993, film photography was photography, I was forty pounds lighter—really, I am not making that up—and so I am sure that this sudden concern for the private morality of public people is the product of a generation’s coming of age and rejecting the immature ideas and commitments of their salad days. Or the new Puritans could be just a bunch of sleazy hypocrites. That’s always a possibility, you know, especially if you are cynically inclined, as I tend to be.

Interesting times we live in, aren't they?

Well, it has certainly been an interesting few weeks, as few weeks go, I think.  You don’t generally see the President of the United States of America or his Secretary of State make complete asses of themselves on live television, to be sure, and you certainly don’t see both of them make complete asses of themselves on live television in the same week.  You also don’t find the President of the Russian Federation writing op-ed pieces for the New York Times every week, especially op-ed pieces in which he chides the President of the United States of America for calling America exceptional, invokes the blesses of the Lord upon us all, and makes it clear that he is laughing up his sleeve at America and the putative leader of the Free World. The former junior senator from Illinois probably does not recognize the fact that Tsar Vladimir II is laughing at him, of course; a man of Senator Whilom’s monumental self-regard cannot process the idea that he might be the object of fun, or worse yet, mockery, and if the idea did penetrate the mental screen somehow He would ascribe the cause to racism. Racism is The One’s security blanket, the all-purpose reason for everything that might conceivably go wrong, although He will to make it clear that nothing has gone wrong.  It would be racist to think something like that, you see.

The month began with our erstwhile Illinois Incitatus doing His impression of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty, which I thought was very good, followed by His impression of Chico Marx telling us all who are we going to believe, me or your own eyes, an imitation I thought less than credible, but then few people can do Chico Marx well these days.  There was no red line, you see, when it came to the deployment of chemical weapons in Syria, none whatsoever, or maybe there was a little red line, but it had nothing to do with anything of any importance.  This brought up an interesting discussion of what exactly a red line actually was, with various and sundry spokespeople pointing out that red lines are not red lines when soaked first in lemon vinegar and a nice wine sauce, and then washed with a detergent with bluing for extra whiteness. This was a wonderful discussion, far more interesting than the discussion of whether or not the IRS should investigate asparagus farmers for the right-wing political proclivities of their produce. And then…someone in the media, oddly enough, produced the videotape of our prairie solon using the words red line in a sentence that had nothing to do with college basketball and everything to do with what this our Great Republic would do if the Assad thugocracy used chemical weapons against its enemies. Faced with the evidence that He had, however inadvertently, drawn an actual red line, He then said that he did not build that red line, it was Congress’ red line, although no one had asked the Congress about red lines one way or the other, and it was the world’s red line as well, even if no one had consulted the world about the matter.  In fact, it was everybody’s red line, yes it was, just as long as it wasn’t His red line.  This argument flew in much the same way that a side of beef pitched out of a twelfth story window does not, and yes, I did shoplift that bit from Douglas Adams, who lifted it from P.G. Wodehouse, and thank you for noticing. So the former junior senator from Illinois began to lay his case for military action against Syria, recycling President Bush’s arguments about going to war with Iraq in an apparent attempt to achieve a sustainable green war environment in the Middle East without anyone noticing that He was using President Bush’s arguments about going to war with Iraq. I’m not sure why He did that; perhaps He thought no one would remember a time before He blessed us with His numinous Presence. It’s as good an explanation as any, I guess.

As is His wont, however, He did mention that He did not need Congress’ permission to bomb Syria; bombing Syria is one of the perks of being the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, like unlimited golf time and free drinks at the White House canteen.  The Congress, suitably surprised that The One was even deigning to notice that they existed, said this interpretation of the Constitution might not be the case and that they might want to have a chat about it amongst themselves before committing to anything one way or the other.  His Elective Majesty then declared that He did not need Congress’ permission to bomb anyone He felt like bombing and permitted his Secretary of State to make the case for His bombing anyone He felt like bombing to those parts of the world He does not choose to bomb at this time.  His Secretary of State, a man borne to the purple heart and married to a ketchup bottle, thereby decreed that yes, the Leader of the Free World, which is not an amusement park in Edison, New Jersey, but is a strip club/auto repair shop in Spokane, Washington, or so I hear, did not need Congress’ authorization to bomb whoever He felt like bombing. The Secretary delivered this bit of bilious Botoxed bombast, a Secretarial specialty for those of you not paying attention, even as His Kumquat in Chief was strolling around the White House grounds ignoring the Do Not Walk on the Grass signs and deciding that instead of not going to Congress to get their unnecessary authorization to bomb anyone He felt like bombing, He would go to Congress for their unnecessary authorization to bomb anyone He felt like bombing.  And all of God’s children would say, Amen, but to do that everyone would have to be on the same page in the missal, which doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Well, the Secretary of the untaxed swift boats, which sounds a bit Homeric, now that I give it some thought, disguised his nonplussment, if that’s even a word, and began to make the case for Congressional authorization without so much as batting an eyelash, an act that may well be impossible for the Secretary to perform until the shots wear off. In addition to this, the avatar of Jake Lingle proclaimed on one of the Sunday morning chat shows that the former junior senator from Illinois had wrought a political miracle by making the Republicans responsible for another war if they voted yes and responsible for mass slaughter if they voted no.  Mr. Lingle’s avatar, a greasy Chicago political hack who would give greasy Chicago political hackery a bad name if such a thing were possible, rubbed his hands with glee at the prospect I've just mentioned, or he did, until it became apparent that the Democrats in Congress wouldn’t support Senator Whilom’s urge to bomb Syria either. Such an outright repudiation would be an outrage—everyone who was anyone in the Democratic leadership said so—a massive political calamity that would undermine The One’s credibility throughout the world, as if He hadn’t done that Himself by selling Twizzlers to everyone involved and then claiming that the item in question was cotton candy. Oh, what to do, what to do, boys and girls?!  Illinois Jones is about to fall into a vast pit of GOP snakes! How will He make His escape?  The audience cowers in fear as Our Hero dangles at the edge of the abyss, trying to think of a way out of His predicament.

And then, miracle of miracles, the cavalry comes riding over the hill to save the day…well, okay, if you want to be technical about this, it’s not the US Cavalry, God bless every man jack of them, it’s the Cossack cavalry, with a shirtless Tsar Vladimir II in the lead. I wonder why Vladimir Vladimirovich hates shirts so much. You’d think a Russian would love shirts, what with the Russian winter lasting for fourteen months out of the year. Well, there’s no accounting for tastes, I suppose.  In any case, Vlad comes sweeping in and offers Illinois Jones a deal: Syria will eliminate the chemical weapons it used to say it didn’t have, young Bashar Assad will not face a war crimes tribunal, the United States will not have to bomb anyone, and the United Nations will come in and do something suitably vague and high-minded.  Our erstwhile Illinois Incitatus gives the deal the cold once over and immediately accepts, as it gets Him away from the snake pit with His swash, His buckle, and His backside intact, in a sideways sort of fashion. Of course, the downside to the deal is that Vlad looks like the Man on the Strong Horse, the Iranians think that our Elective Majesty is a weak sister, and all those Syrian rebels attending English as a Second Language classes now know the meaning of the expression, getting the shaft. On the upside, though, after years in reruns the Not Ready for Prime Time Players are back on live television and Our Leader, the Duke of Plaza-Toro, can go back to perfecting his golf game. Makes you feel all warm and mushy inside, don’t it?