The reckoning
by Tom Sullivan
Seen from a safe distance the Jeffrey Epstein saga echoes Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Or a subplot of Caligula, as Michele Goldberg’s headline writer suggests of the sitting administration.
Indeed, the Washington Post’s Helaine Olen references Eyes Wide Shut in describing how the Epstein scandal “blows holes through the foundational myths of our time.” No, not “greed is good,” although that is related:
The major lie of the age of wealth inequality is that the moneyed are somehow better than the rest of us day-to-day working schlubs. The aristocracy of prewar Europe had their bloodlines. Our latter-day meritocratic aristocrats, we are told, possess the modern equivalent, which is extraordinary intelligence. The slothful working class are slaves to short-term pleasure. The rich, on the other hand, are disciplined. They wake up early, and they refuse to live beyond their means.
Bullshit. All of it. It is a myth the rich build around themselves the way they build walls around their compounds. It is the excuse they give for hoarding wealth as a hedge against whatever demons haunt people like Epstein. Those who receive only crumbs deserve their crumbs. Winners have better genes, believes a game-show host of a president who, while he lives in a gold-plated penthouse, cannot even competently act president.
Epstein, a convicted sex offender, used money of questionable provenance and his network of rich friends and associates to obtain a sweetheart deal from Florida prosecutors and to avoid hard jail time. He returned to a social scene that tsk-tsked his conviction and allowed him to prey again and again on underage girls until his re-arrest on New York charges.
Olen doubts even seers could have foretold the end of this age of excess might unfold from a “scandal involving sex abuse of children.” She continues:
Our era is one of exploding and all but unpunished crime by the wealthy and connected. Millions of homeowners lost their homes to foreclosures due to rampant fraud among mortgage providers, but not one senior banking official spent even an hour in jail for the financial crisis. Women are treated not as equals but with contempt, potentially subjected to horrifying treatment in the workplace for the crime of wanting to earn a living and get ahead. The ongoing investigations into such characters as Trump, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen reveal few cared about cash laundering, tax fraud and shady financial scams that targeted working-class people.
It is premature perhaps to predict “the empty and sickening bromides [that] justify obscene wealth and power and privilege” will evaporate like the demons of Bald Mountain at the pealing of the church bell. But if rung clearly and loudly enough it may yet happen.
In fiction, there eventually comes a reckoning. Good triumphs. Wicked men face punishment. Witches melt. Nazis’ faces, too. Whether life will imitate art in these times remains in the balance. These are not normal times.
Nonetheless, the craving to see wrongs righted and good triumph remains hard-wired into a species that understands itself through its stories.
It is that craving that propels the joyful warriors who addressed Netroots Nation on Saturday morning. Women of color determined to right past wrongs told their stories of hardship and triumph. The fierceness they bring to the fight for justice is something not seen in this country in my lifetime.
What felt different this year in Philadelphia, the largest Netroots conference ever, was the sense of focus and purpose. More first-time attendees came than attended the first-ever conference in 2006. More diversity. More fierceness. More unity of purpose. More determination to cure the rampant inequities sustained by the excess embodied by Epstein, this administration, and a business culture that encourages victimizing others in pursuit of profit. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren says regularly (and did again on Saturday), it is a system that works great for the rich and powerful but not so much for the rest of us.
Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” The question that may decide whether a reckoning is truly at hand is whether Americans still have eyes to recognize the pornographic nature of the system that leaves Epstein, Ailes, Weinstein, Donald Trump, and other rich and powerful men and women unaccountable. The activists in Philadelphia want to end it. Too many Americans are still too hypnotized by it to see it for what it is.