Remember how the movie "Deliverance" (with Burt Reynolds) ended? Those guys finished their horrific vacation with the knowledge that a dead body might someday wash up from the river. So, they'd be haunted.
Today, ever since the whole Weinstein thing erupted, we see a like phenomenon. A whole lot of high-profile men are whistling past the graveyard. They know that in the past, they crossed a line in their behavior with women. The impulse today among many of us is to react by saying "well, they have it coming." Or, "they should have thought more about their behavior back then."
These issues are not as one-dimensional as they might seem. When Bill O'Reilly feels he has to pay a woman (Lis Wiehl) $32 million to make a sex harassment lawsuit go away, money enters the picture and that always clouds things. How many women have dollar signs dancing in their eyeballs? For God's sake, how did we get to this point, where a figure like $32 million comes out in connection to such a case?
I remember a friend of mine, a devout Catholic, bristling from some of the revelations about Catholic priest misbehavior, saying "what does money have to do with it?" Very good question. As a secondary issue, how can we view O'Reilly as some sort of representative of the common folk - the way he likes to portray himself - when he can get out his checkbook and do this? (I knew how to pronounce "Lis Wiehl's" first name as soon as the story broke - the same cannot be said of some cable news anchors.)
I exchanged emails with an old friend as we bandied about some of the recent sensational headlines. I made the point about how society has grown so unforgiving about certain forms of behavior that we once tolerated (or where we chose to look the other way). The World War II generation launched a lifestyle after the war that included a lot of smoking and drinking. Didn't the cigarette companies give free cigarettes to the GIs? Even without a lot of scientific data, people have long known that cigarette smoking was undesirable and bad for you. Didn't the baseball player Honus Wagner call for his baseball card on cigarette packages to be discontinued? Isn't that why that limited-distribution card became so wildly valuable?
And yet look at all the years that passed before we banned smoking from public places like restaurants? Such moves seem totally logical and natural today. We shrug and say, well, we had to pass these restrictions. I agree. But most of my adult life was spent in an environment where I might walk into DeToy's Restaurant and find the air to be blue with cigarette smoke. Most of my life was spent in an environment where seat belt use was voluntary. Today the Morris Police will chase down anyone they see not wearing their seat belt, to the point where their behavior approximates a high-speed chase. I would argue that it could endanger public safety. But this is where we set the bar these days.
Boy, only an idiot would not use his seat belt. But wouldn't that have been true 20 years ago as well?
At present, we may be seeing something like a witch hunt growing toward men who may or may not have engaged in sexual harassment in the past. Are we at the point where it might be risky to simply ask a woman on a date? I am extremely fortunate, sitting here at age 62, as I have never asked a woman on a date and I have never played football. I don't have to worry about my mind slipping away. I don't have to worry about a woman from my past coming forward and saying things that could render me unproductive for the rest of my life.
God created us with these crazy hormones that can induce such crazy or dangerous behavior. Look at the Catholic priests. Am I saying that I tolerate behavior that might be defined as criminal? No I don't approve of it, just as I do not approve of parents allowing their sons to play football. But football is still legal. The process of the sport's decline is slow but it is happening. And then someday we'll look back at our unenlightened tendencies of allowing our sons to play it.
My friend with whom I emailed challenged me, saying I ought not find a parallel between sexual harassment and certain other questionable behaviors. Obviously it seemed like I might be trivializing sexual harassment.
I'm just looking at the behavior in a context of the long-term history of our culture. We once lived in a culture where a police officer might see you driving erratically at 2 a.m. and ask you, "are you sure you're in good enough shape to get home?" Yes it's true. Secondhand cigarette smoke was assumed and common. The Bob Woodward character in "All the President's Men" asks Carl Bernstein, "Is there any place you don't smoke?" They were in an elevator.
And men like Harvey Weinstein felt empowered to behave inappropriately toward women. We had a teacher/coach here in Stevens County who spent time in prison for his inappropriate behavior with female students. We had a school administrator in Morris charged with first degree criminal sexual conduct - first degree! - in a case where charges were dropped with no explanation as to why.
The administrator's case was an embarrassment for our community and a serious inconvenience for our school district. How can you lose your high school principal in the middle of a school year? How would anyone else even know how his office was organized? Don't tell me that whole affair wasn't a logistical headache for our school, even if the board said otherwise. What would you expect them to say? I still feel the administrator should have been fired even with charges not resolved. The charges were just too sensational for any school district to live with. We have to consider the cost of putting the individual on paid leave also.
And now the school needs a ton of money for building maintenance. Money, money, money. Vote "no" and force the school to practice more responsible management. The school will try to vacuum money out of your pockets every time.
Bill O'Reilly says he's "mad at God." The brilliant David Brooks writes an odd column that subtly implies he has his own problems with sexuality. Sex is a big black hole where we feel fundamentally mystified. I am not trivializing misbehavior. But we must wonder why God created us the way He did. My generation of boys went to Annette Funicello beach movies and wondered why we were developing erections. I'm sorry if you're offended reading that - I'm just writing the truth.
Boys could enter a minefield where we'd be tempted to engage in inappropriate behavior. There was a "boys will be boys" credo out there. That is completely wiped out now.
If the new standards are so absolutely correct, why couldn't we have used better judgment in the past? If a prominent member of the community was known to be preying on young boys, there was a hush-hush reaction and parents were simply careful to tell their own sons to stay away from him. That was our old culture. Times change. As an amateur social scientist I carefully observe such things.
As young boomers we laughed at a Cheech and Chong bit about how an underage girl was mistaken for being older, by some klutz we were supposed to laugh at. It was humor! It's an outrage today.
The entertainment industry knows all about such cultural shifts. Poor Mark Halperin will never be seen on cable news again. I saw David Corn's name the other day. It's a purge. And purges are always scary. We need Corn on TV as an articulate progressive advocate.
I'll repeat what I have written before, that the mystery of sex is a manifestation of how the human species may be a hybrid between Earth primates and space aliens. Just think about that motorcycle gang in the Annette Funicello movies (LOL)!
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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