The media is driving the story line but we all are caught up in the moral drama.
We seem to have entered a period of nonstop mutual denunciation. This is particularly useful to the media, which can fill pages and airtime with nonevents that reporters and pundits invent and then cover. It is useful, too, in providing simple moral guidelines by which a person can establish superior virtue without having to do anything.
.. Yet Democratic condemnations of Al Franken began flowing within minutes of the story’s breaking
.. Pundits speculate that Republicans would prefer Roy Moore to lose his Senate race because, if he wins, he will be hung around their necks for years. They will be called upon repeatedly to denounce him, repudiate him, distance themselves from him. Like Odysseus, they will be on a long, difficult, epic journey. Unlike the “Odyssey,” however, their story will have no end or point.
What mainly drives the events of the “Denunciad,” as the gods do the “Odyssey,” is the media, which has discovered an endless fount of news—a sort of fire hydrant of youth. Suppose that Person X makes an inappropriate remark, and you are a news director charged with covering the story. By itself, it’s liable to fade pretty quickly, yet there are 24 hours of live updates to fill.
.. But, objectively speaking, many other things didn’t happen today either. Editors don’t pluck other non-occurrences from the ether and then send people out to cover them. Why is Mr. Trump waiting so long to condemn the Hells Angels rally in Nowheresville? The president hasn’t denounced North Korea in the past six hours: Does that signal a change in policy?
What the “Denunciad” demands, rather, is a public performance of self-righteousness—a moral dramatization.
.. America’s very own national epic, like England’s “Dunciad,” seems mostly to deliver lessons about how concerned we are with keeping up appearances and establishing some sort of moral pecking order.
Democrats Move Swiftly Against Conyers Amid Latest Harassment Charges
“The allegations against Ranking Member Conyers are extremely serious and deeply troubling,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the second most senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “There can be no tolerance for behavior that subjects women to the kind of conduct alleged.”
A group of Democrats from across the caucus had pushed for such a move at the start of the year, but were beaten back by Mr. Conyers and allied lawmakers, according to House Democrats familiar with the matter. Since then, they said, it has been commonly understood that this term would be Mr. Conyers’s last atop the committee.
Mr. Nadler and Representative Zoe Lofgren of California have made clear to fellow Democrats that they intend to run to succeed Mr. Conyers should he step aside. After Mr. Conyers, they are the two most senior Democratic members of the committee.
.. Mr. Conyers also pointed to the amount of money paid to his accuser — $27,111.75, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed — in defending himself.
.. “The resolution was not for millions of dollars, but rather for an amount that equated to a reasonable severance payment,” Mr. Conyers said in the statement.
Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer who often works on sexual harassment cases, however, said the “outrageously low” amount illustrated deep flaws in the process.
“Even with these very serious allegations, the victim of harassment received a very paltry settlement, which is typical of what happens when people even with the strongest claims come forward,” Ms. Katz said.
Thanksgiving Gratitude for a Father’s Lesson
Many years ago, I committed an offense for which famous men are now being publicly, and rightly, shamed. I patted an office secretary on her behind. I won’t offer the usual lame defense that I didn’t know my advance was unwanted or that social attitudes were different back then.
My only excuse is that at the time of the incident I was about 7 years old.
I remember the moment because of what happened immediately afterward. The secretary, who worked at my father’s business in Mexico City, turned around and slammed a heavy stack of papers on my head. I marched indignantly over to my dad’s office to report her behavior — only so that he could march me over to her desk and have me apologize. He followed that up with a stern warning never to do anything of the sort again.
I don’t remember the secretary’s name. But what a service she did me by giving me a knock I’ll never forget, one that took courage and self-respect considering I was her boss’s son. What a service, too, that my dad defended her and gave me the talking-to that he did. It’s a lesson every boy should get — loud, clear, and early — from a male role model.
.. Oh, and be tender. Most kids endure a sex talk with a parent. Mine with him, on a winter’s evening drive when I was 12, was light on the mechanical issues but heavy on the subjects of gentleness, respect and love. I sat through it in mortified silence.
..How do men steer a path between the anachronistic prudery of a Mike Pence (who will not dine alone with a woman other than his wife) and the naked lechery of a Louis C.K., both of which share the premise that the central consideration in any interaction between a man and a woman must involve the prospect of sex?
.. There’s a long history for such ideas, dating at least to the 16th century with Baldassare Castiglione’s “Book of the Courtier.” But most books published today on the subject of gentlemanliness are about how to dress, not how to behave.
.. Other than the advice columnists at Maxim magazine, who are today’s male authorities on the subjects of consideration, modesty and respect? Who, in the age of Trump, is teaching boys why not to grope — even when they can, even when “you can do anything”?
.. The good news is that, thanks to some brave women, we are at a moment when a great many men are privately re-examining past behavior and wondering how to do better. In other words, we’re thinking about how we might act as gentlemen. For now, it’s an impulse based largely on fear. In time, it should become one based on hope — the hope of real romantic fulfillment through the creation of trust, the practice of courtship, the intimacy of love and genuine partnership.
How Jackie Speier used her own experience to shine spotlight on sexual harassment
Jackie Speier was a 23-year-old congressional staffer excited about her new job on Capitol Hill when her chief of staff got her alone in a room. The 50-year-old grabbed her face and stuck his tongue down her throat.
Now, four and a half decades later, the Peninsula congresswoman is leading the charge in Congress to clean up what she calls a culture of sexual harassment in the Capitol.
.. “I’m embarrassed to say it, but I think Congress has been an enabler of sexual harassers for a long time,” Speier, a Democrat who represents San Mateo County, said in an interview this week.
.. Speier is now the lead sponsor of a bill that would reform the Office of Compliance, the obscure congressional office that investigates — and, activists say, often covers up — sexual harassment.
.. The office “was really created to protect the harassers,” Speier said.
.. Her legislation would shake that up, prohibiting nondisclosure agreements as a requirement to start an investigation
.. The bill, which was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, has received bipartisan support.
.. “It does seem like it’s an Animal House up there right now — it’s disgusting.”
.. But Speier said that she knows that national attention can be fickle, and thinks that she and other advocates may have a limited window to pass reforms while the focus is on sexual harassment.
.. Leeann Tweeden, a Los Angeles newscaster, said she decided to publicly accuse Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, of harassing and groping her after interviewing Speier and hearing her story. Tweeden wrote in an article that she came forward because she wanted to have the same effect on other victims of harassment “that Congresswoman Jackie Speier had on me.”
.. Speier has said she knows of two current members of Congress, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, who have been accused of sexual harassment. Neither of those is Franken or Rep. John Conyers