Off With His Head

--The Red Queen has spoken

Well, I talk about boys, now,
What a bundle of joy!  
--Boys, The Beatles

 One way or another I’m gonna find ya
I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha 
--One Way or Another, Blondie

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes.
There's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
--Henry Kissinger

 'Cause I gonna make you see
There's nobody else here
No one like me
I'm special, so special
I gotta have some of your attention 
give it to me 
 --Brass in Pocket, 
 The Pretenders 

And you're boring, and you're totally ordinary, 
and you know it.  
--American Beauty (1999)
______________________

The Game of Cat and Mouse: Can't Have One Without the Other

Subtitle: It really IS an Idiot Box.

Today, we'll peep in on the Battle of the Sexes, cos, hey, the news outlets say it's news. We are RangerAgainstWar after all, and in the annals of martial history this one has been going strong since time immemorial, with nary a durable truce. (And just like the Wars on Poverty and Drugs, it has a zed chance of conclusion of hostilities.)

Comparatively, in the longevity arena, the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is a piker.

My stupefaction at what passes for media news is boundless. Over the past couple of weeks, the news ventured credulously into the oft-lurid territory of power and sexual dynamics, games as old as the day is long.

That commentators like Public Television's Mark Shields and David Brooks must feign shock and play "Captain Renault" to the female anchors tests the limits of credulity.


This is not an apologia for the Droogs

In last week's Public Television's Friday news roundup, Mr. Shields perhaps unwittingly let some ray of sunshine fall upon the Trump Administration when he circumambulated around the story, trying to tie up the requisite disparate parts.

Saith he, because Mr. Trump is who he is, he may be making male rutting behavior that much more unpalatable to the masses. Well, certainly he gave it a college try, but for attributing any Good Thing to the current White House, Mr. Shields will no doubt get a wrist thumping .

The thing is, since most of these newly-revealed sexual improprieties occurred many years hence -- many during Democratic presidencies -- are we to assume that Democrats have a certain "Penis Protection Society" for its wayward male members?

Why were we not shocked then? Perhaps the slippery morality of the bobos allowed the secretive behavior to continue. Are we entering a more morally black-and-white time?


Do you think that you're made out of gold and-uh, can't be sold? -- Jimi Hendrix

The horreur du jour is simply: Powerful men are taking sexual favors from guileless women. Are you as shocked as I?

Mrs. Clinton may not have won the election, but the press is giving her revanchist acolytes their moment in the sun to skewer the feral (mostly) White Men via yet a new avenue.

The doughty liberal women rejoice as they lasso the powerful men like so many head of steer. Those leading this charge have been handed the Consolation Prize in the never-ending Liberal Collective Anger Sweepstakes.

These bruised yet stalwart Hillary Clinton minions are trying to make the power-money-sex troika sexy headline news again, some 50 years hence.

The Bad Boyz have been dropping like flies. Senator Al Franken, Hollywood's Harvey Weinstein, newsmen Charley Rose and Matt Lauer, etc. And no longer are the accused innocent until proven guilty.

So horrid is their behavior that the trap door must be opened as if on a Vaudeville stage and the perp must then disappear presumably into a gulag run by female prison guards like in a bad Russ Meyer film.

Feminists demand this behavior -- Who knew? -- stop, and that the alleged perpetrators be summarily dismissed from their area of operations. A hundred years on, The Perils of Pauline have been re-packaged for modern consumption, with Wonder Woman to the rescue of the hapless Pearl White.

The press states that Mr. Trump qua Trump has ripped the scab off some great festering disease in our society committed by men much like him. As an archetypal powerful white male, he is the great abettor and enabler of this great undertow of exploitation.

Don't buy it.

First it was the press's frightening indictment that the President was responsible for a renascent white supremacist movement. Now, it is as though the fictional character Don Draper from tv's Mad Men has infected American men with some new, as-yet unseen, aggression.

We secretly yearn for that ur-Male, but want to castrate him when he arrives. Just look at the number of military programs, movies and video games produced in which the macho protagonist fights and gets the girl(s), too. It is the whole cake and eating thing.

The heady combination of power and sex is as old as Salome's dance and Delilah, and then some. It is capitalism at its finest: Opportunity meets availability. Consumption occurs 'til satiation, or until the Next New Thing comes down the pike.

Since one may not re-engineer the chemical makeup of the human being, one would need some broad, consistent and formative re-education to change unwanted social behaviors. Unfortunately, the United States is burdened by both a highly-sexualized, and a highly Puritanical background, resulting in some deep schizophrenia regarding relations between the sexes.

More to the point: why is this headline news, and why when the alleged offenses are often many years after the fact? Rather than some great awakening on behalf of the offended, it is not hard to imagine that powers arrayed against these powerful men troll about to find these women, offering the correct incentives for their testimony.

Of course, we are talking here of grown women, not minors. Consenting adults. It is a game they chose to play when they entered the fray of competition (in Hollywood, politics, etc.), and a price many are willing to pay, to give favors in order to receive.

It is an understood if unsavory quid pro quo. Don't cry wolf when it is you who walked into the wolf's den.

This is all nothing new.

And who are these men? Does power confer privilege only occur among the entertainment and political set (entertainers of their own sort)? Does sexual favoritism and exchange not transpire among the more mundane, simple folks like you and me?

How does everything old get new again, entering our never-ending chorus of outrage and indignation? Are there not other topics more worthy of coverage on the nightly news?


Does Anyone Really Need to Say This?

Watching the media coverage evinced no response so much as, "be an adult, and be smart. If you don't want to get dirty, do not play with dogs or pigs."

Shame on the press, for they know that firing at this target will leave them with Maggies Drawers flapping in the breeze every time.


[Update: An unedited cy. of this piece went on 12/4/17.]