There are two issues that have been consuming most of my thinking these days and I do see the relationship between them to be of significance, both for understanding such things as causes and effects and for understanding sensible ways to conceive of remedies that might be better remedies than those that have not succeeded or only partly succeeded in bringing about meaningful resolution.
I posted the other day items that concerned aspects of American society that I loathe, the mistreatment of human beings by other human beings–here, in particular because of recent revelations about abusive behavior of powerful men toward women–and the indecency and inhumanity reflected in capitalism as it does business in the modern era, the drug distributors unconscionable streaming of opioid drugs into communities, the act killing people and making a great amount more miserable.
I blame our version of capitalism for both. Mr. Weinstein could not have done what he did, most likely, unless he was a wealthy and powerful man. Bad enough what he had been doing for years, the number of lives he hurt and those he outright destroyed. He and others like him had lots of rich and powerful friends, some of them in leadership positions in the society and keeping his friendship, hanging with Harvey was more important than doing what any good human being would do, find a way to make him stop what he was doing and make sure he and other like him were properly punished for their behavior.
Harvey bought people and the drug distributors bought people and, though there are predators who are not rich and wealthy, few of the first are able to live the best of lives while being the worst kind of people.
Hollywood, has we call it, is, of course bigger than Harvey Weinstein and the wrongfulness of Hollywood as a culture extends beyond the culture of Hollywood itself. The sports star culture, the music star culture, celebrity culture are elements of American society that are a part of its madness and not its goodness. But people who are stars in these cultures exert an incredible amount of influence on what the broader culture can be and is. It creates false notions of what leadership should be, of who should be at the center of the culture, who should have credibility in the culture.
And what is so devastatingly sick here is the fact that this ridiculous celebrity culture is not only at the center of American culture, it is the center of American culture and, because it is not necessarily a good culture or a smart culture or a caring culture, good and smart and caring have become personalities rather than real virtues of a meaningful society.
Weinstein, and Cosby and O’Rely, and Ails should never have been allowed to become big men in the society. Whatever their talents, they were not of the kind that should allow them to hold power, to have influence on the way people think and do.
I, personally, and fucking sick of this stuff because it is stuff that I have had to suffer as my reality for all of my life, form those days when idiots of another kind ordered water cannon and rifles to be turned on black kids down in the American south. I was told to respect generals and the presidents who hired them as they murdered thousands of young people for little more than the economic system that favored them and ego satisfaction. LBJ and Nixon said to those allowed to listen that they could not stand the idea of becoming the first American president to lose a way.
Yes, the problem is big people and disposable little people and this idea that this is a reasonable scheme of things is absolutely intolerable.
Even more intolerable is that fact that so many have and to continue to tolerate, even celebrate this dehumanizing society, some very much willing to think it the best possible and worthy of sending other off to die for it.
