You Fools! You Scoundrels!

The Sexual Counterrevolution. The end of life as we know it. A Covid-19 reading list. And the Rolling Stones ...

May 06, 2020

The lady doth protest too much

If you were curious about that long essay—The Years of Living Hysterically—but not sure you were curious enough to pay to read it, here’s another section to help you decide. Part five: “The Turn of the Screw.”

It’s about the Kavanaugh hearings, the notion of affirmative consent, and the legal principle lex retro non agit. I thought all of this had long since been overtaken by events, but I was wrong.

It’s preposterous that we approach the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes, probably the most consequential since 1860—at a moment we all understand to be a hinge point not just in American history but in human history—we’re devoting a significant amount of time, thought, newspaper column inches, research, conversation, and public debate to the claim that Vice President Joe Biden sexually affronted or assaulted a woman named Tara Reade in 1993.

It’s nothing short of astonishing that the Democratic Party has backed themselves into a corner such that they cannot run any candidate against Donald Trump, because no candidate can pass the purity test they themselves have established.

Consider this column in the Washington Post:

Our presumptive nominee stands credibly accused of sexual misconduct. It’s a nightmare in an election cycle that has already seen the impeachment of the sitting president and a global pandemic that Trump is utterly unequipped to handle. Lives hang in the balance of the outcome in November.
And yet Democrats should still insist that Biden step aside. Democrats must apply the standards we elaborated during the Kavanaugh case to our own side.

That’s just too insane—too weird, too striking—to brush aside. That’s not “just another day of nuthatchery in the nuthouse.” How did the Democratic Party, in many ways a sophisticated and well-oiled machine, manage to lay such a cunning and elaborate political trap and then spring it on themselves?

Lyz Lenz, the author of the this column, genuinely does not understand that no matter the nominee, it is inevitable that someone will rise up to accuse him of sexual harassment. That the Kavanaugh hearings would boomerang in this manner was absolutely predictable, and as you can see—here it is, in writing—I predicted it. Yet such is the passion of the anti-priapism crusade that she can’t figure out where it went wrong, or even that it went wrong. She’s willing to follow its logic to the very end.

It would be so healthy, so refreshing, for Democrats now to admit, forthrightly, that their treatment of Kavanaugh was lunatic, that #MeToo has been a mass hysteria, and its political exploitation has been disaster for American democracy, and we have serious problems to solve. Would you not weep with relief to hear someone say that?

One of my readers recently sent me this email:

I actually can answer your set-up questions—and I’ve been meaning to.
Why is liberal democracy in retreat?
Because a lot of the post-Cold War extrusions were shallow-rooted, because of affluenza in the more advanced ones, the elite failure at myth maintenance, and the accompanying erosion of deep literacy accompanied by the media-abetted specticalization of politics.
Why is the West divided? When has it ever not been absent American leadership?
Caesarism? See The Republic, Book VIII.
There, that was easy.

I agree, yes.

Opinions are infinite, but time is finite. We have a limited amount of time before we choose our next government. We have 181 days to hold a national debate about what we collectively wish our country to be, and which of the two presidential candidates is best-suited to make this vision manifest. We have a finite number of minutes to discuss the fate of our lives and livelihoods, and even the union itself. It is an open question whether the American Republic will survive another four years of Donald Trump. We need to use this time to ask ourselves if we even believe in liberal democracy anymore—and if not, what do we believe? If we still believe in it, how will we sustain it in a world where the lights are going out one by one?

Yet we’re spending our time on—Tara Reade? Seriously?

Journalists are lending over their entire columns—precious vehicles for commanding the very limited and fragmented attention of American citizens in the year 2020—to luxuriate in this insanity.

“Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden demand action,” writes Elizabeth Bruenig in our newspaper of record:

Democrats who subject Ms. Reade’s allegations to a level of scrutiny not widely applied to accusers in similar circumstances—such as Christine Blasey-Ford, who famously came forward during the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court to allege that he had sexually accosted her in high school—also open up past and future cases to reproachful disregard. Conservatives, like my colleague Bret Stephens, can see the plain gulf between how Democrats have approached sexual assault in politically advantageous cases versus Ms. Reade’s, and the evident hypocrisy threatens to discredit the entire enterprise.

She concludes that to protect the “entire enterprise,” that is to say, #MeToo, Democrats should “start considering a backup plan for 2020,” the nature of which she doesn’t specify, but which obviously would mean ignoring the clear verdict of Democratic Party voters—who, recall, after a long and vigorous primary contest and in a presumably free and fair series of elections, chose Joe Biden to represent them.

Rather than admit there is something about this movement that has been in error, something that has not been on the up-and-up, something that is not getting us anywhere we want to go, she proposes in seriousness that Democrats knife themselves in the gut, jettison their commitment to democracy, and willingly sacrifice the election. All to protect “the enterprise.”

Social and Cultural Rites of a Weird, Long-Perished Ancient Kingdom

If you were to pick up a dense ethnographic study of some weird, long-perished ancient Kingdom and read about the ritual in which we’re now engaged, what would you make of it? Imagine the tome, covered in dust: “Social and Cultural Rites of a Weird, Long-Perished Ancient Kingdom.”

“Little is known about the origin of the Ritual of the Singing Woman,” says the introduction, “but chroniclers of the Kingdom’s last days have left us with detailed accounts … ”

Okay, let’s learn!

You’d read about this civilization with curiosity, to be sure, but you’d think it very weird. What did it mean? Why did they do this? How did they understand this behavior—literally, metaphorically?

“Ceremonial life was a central preoccupation of the inhabitants of the Weird, Long-Perished Ancient Kingdom. In its final decade, the Ritual of the Singing Woman provided a sense that inhabitants lived in a Festgemeinschaft. Recent scholarship has challenged the notion that the Ritual of the Singing Woman originated as a fertility rite. As Smythe and Beanermaster argue in their magisterial “MeToo and Taboo: The Downfall of a Weird Ancient Kingdom,” the Ritual of the Singing Woman typically began when a challenger arose for prominent public office. Recent scholarship indicates, however, that the ritual was also performed in honor of aged entertainers with no clear connection to the throne or the court, which must be understood in the context of the complex and often entwined relationship between the Kingdom’s hereditary entertainer caste and its hereditary ruling caste. …

Weird, you’d think.

“The Singing Women often emerged from the marginalized retail-and-hospitality caste, and were chosen not for their beauty and fertility, as some 19th-century scholars surmised, but for their perceived embodiment of the quality of ರ್ಣಾಟ ಭಾರತ ಕಥಾಮಂಜರಿ, a notion that has proven particularly challenging for modern linguists and scholars to interpret. Literally translated as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” …

“That is a challenging concept,” you’d think.

… this fails to convey her status, simultaneously scorned and sacred, an object of fear and fascination among the public. Travellers to the Kingdom noted, with astonishment, that every member of the Kingdom understood his role in the ritual. The Kingdom’s residents believed the Singing Women were inhabited by the spirit of MeToo, a goddess hatched in a mysterious egg in the forest. The ritual Song of Denunciation was often elaborate and allegorical, but always faithful to the same motif—the challenger was accused of an Unclean and Taboo Act.

You flip a few pages and skim through the chapter by the ethnobotanist who wonders if perhaps the Singing Woman’s trance state was induced by the deliberate ingestion of grain fungus. Then you’d read that upon hearing the Song of Denunciation, the challenger would faint and repair to his chamber, thereupon he would emerge with a whole chorus of women, carefully selected to represent every caste in the kingdom, to sing in his defense:

So pure is his heart/
That we cannot conceive/
Nay it is an abomination/
to besmirch the name of this honorable man/
with the suggestion of an Unclean and Taboo Act.

That’s one weird, ancient kingdom, you’d think.

Then you’d learn that the man whose position of power had been challenged was expected to present a counter-chorus of women and eunuchs to taunt the challenger and sing bawdy tales of the Unclean and Taboo Act. The complete ritual took weeks, even months, to complete, during which the business of the Kingdom came to a standstill, warriors laid down their swords, ploughmen ceased to till the fields, and discussion of critical matters of state and commerce came to a halt. (You’d wonder if perhaps this was the very point of the ritual, but a distinguished anthropologist would assure you this speculation is “an inappropriate use of a modern lens to view a culture whose sacred beliefs must be understood on their own terms.”)

Indeed, the Singing Woman Ritual demonstrated the power of ರ್ಣಾಟ ಭಾರತ ಕಥಾಮಂಜರಿ as a unifying ideal. Elite and popular classes joined, in turn, the Chorus of Denunciation and the Chorus of Incredulity, the opposing songs growing louder and more frenzied, accompanied by the sound of pounding drums, until the contender collapsed in exhaustion and shame and admitted to the Unclean and Taboo Act.
Only ಆಕರ್ಷಕ, alone among the chroniclers of the era, registered frustration with the ritual, noting that because the crops went unharvested and the warriors put down their arms, the Weird, Long-Perished Kingdom starved and was overrun by another Ancient Kingdom, which is exactly why it perished.

For those of you who want to return to the modern world, here’s an outstanding Covid-19 research guide:

Presented below are links to a selection of research papers and articles pertaining to SARS-CoV-2 and the current crisis. The links are organized into four categories: the chemistry, molecular biology, or virology of SARS-CoV-2; the epidemiology of COVID-19 transmission; the political, economic, and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic; and the therapeutic options for the treatment of COVID-19. These lists will be updated regularly as new publications appear. They are offered here as a resource for researchers and interested readers.

This is a masterpiece. The anthem of the era.