In The Mean Time
by Hart Williams

Horny makes you stupid. If you didn’t know that, I salute you for your lack of libido and mind-altering hormones.

I spent ten years in LA’s porn underground, and so sexting and tweeting “raunchy” photos doesn’t really do it for me. There’s not much that I haven’t seen, or that affects me with that visceral “ick” factor that seems the national obsession.

Parenthetically, I would hope that SOMEone, on SOME network would have realized that everyone else was going to do half an hour on Anthony’s wiener, and focus on some of the other news of the day. If you’ll click here, you’ll notice the small, wee story at the bottom of the Memeorandum page that wasn’t particularly worthy of notice, and affects me far more than a “scandal” in Manhattan, the Media Center of the Known Universe.

As 9-11 showed us, all news is New York local news, and if it doesn’t happen in New York City, it didn’t really happen at all. Mark Sanford’s hike up the Appalachian Trail might as well have BEEN in Argentina, for all the local impact it actually had in Manhattan. No: we’re doomed to weeks of endless echo-chamber feedback hum from the Big Apple. Here’s the minor story of the day:

CNN: 3 nuclear reactors melted down after quake, Japan confirms — Tokyo (CNN) — Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns at three reactors in the wake of an earthquake and tsunami in March, the country’s Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters said Monday.

OK: We’ve got our priorities straight. Granted.

But, while I’m not particularly scandalized by the eternal adolescent horniness of American males, sadism has always bothered me quite a lot.

I’m still processing the fundamental sadism of Dick Cheney accepting an apology for shooting a guy in the face … from the guy who was shot in the face. Now, it was kind of expected from Cheney, whose idea of hunting — I’m not making this up — was to go to “private game reserves” where hand-raised “game” birds could be slaughtered wholesale (Cheney once shot nearly a hundred birds — 70 pheasants in a morning — in a single day of “sport”). That is deep and pathological sadism — but a sadism that most boys grow out of.

Some few do not. And some of those go into politics.

When I was a kid, I saw gophers blasted out of their holes with firecrackers, bottles of lighter-fluid and matches used to incinerate ant hills, frogs put on railroad tracks and, yes, the wings pulled off of flies.

And that’s the peculiar sadism of boyhood. At the time I didn’t understand that it was anything but fun. That’s the way boys are.

And ants, frogs, gophers and flies pay a terrible price for it, but none are in any danger of becoming extinct soon.

What is horrifying, then, is when that latent, “innocent,” sadism is carried forward into adult life, and applied as liberally (pun intended) to human beings as it once was to anthills.

Today, Andrew Breitbart proved himself to be that boy/man. Politico reports:

Andrew Breitbart takes over Anthony Weiner news conference
By MAGGIE HABERMAN | 6/6/11 4:21 PM EDT Updated: 6/6/11 6:15 PM EDT

In a bizarre spectacle, Andrew Breitbart temporarily took over the press conference in New York that was supposed to feature Rep. Anthony Weiner Monday, declaring that everything he’s posted on his conservative Web site BigGovernment.com has proven to be true.

Weiner was supposed to come to the microphones at 4 p.m. but Breitbart commandeered the podium instead, criticizing the media’s coverage of the Weiner scandal and saying he had been “vindicated” even before the congressman spoke…. [MORE]

I recommend that you read the entire post.

Yeah. Andrew Breitbart whined that he was the “victim” in all of this. Being inconvenienced while he was ON VACATION (poor dear thing). Demanded an apology …

AND GOT IT.

Funny, he complained that he was vacationing in Palm Springs and answering all those media questions about this had “ruined” his vacation. So, he just happened to have taken a jet to New York, to be there for the Weiner press conference, after making sure that his NEW pictures started hitting the web every couple hours, like a terrorist executing hostages. Astonishingly fortuitous timing, that. (Or maybe he was posting while on the redeye).

Weinergate Bombshell: New Woman Comes Forward Claiming Cache of Intimate Photos and Online Communications with Beleaguered Congressman
by Andrew Breitbart

A new woman has come forward

[…]

We will be updating BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com throughout the day with photographs, timelines, and other clarifying details. However, we will not be releasing all of the material because some of it is of an extreme, graphic nature.

Posted Jun 6th 2011 at 3:02 am

You see, what was confirmed today was that Breitbart HAD all the photos a week ago — when this story broke, posted just after midnight Saturday of Memorial Day weekend by the anonymous Big Government workhorse blogger, “Publius” — who figured so prominently in Breitbart’s Big Government launch “story” and year-long death grip on ACORN.

Which tells you just how calculated this was.

Can be the internet, too

Halcyon Memories of My Childhood

When I was a boy, growing up in Laramie, Wyoming, my friend Tommy showed me his trick. Tommy used to get his cash from burning the insulation off copper wires and selling the metal for scrap, and probably grew up to be a pyromaniac. His trick was to buy a can of Ronson lighter fluid for twenty-nine cents, and get a free pack of matches (ofttimes asking if you could draw the pirate).

He’d stake out a big red ant hill, and use his bottle of lighter fluid as a flame-thrower.

Funny how cities look like anthills from way up

He’d figured out how to ring the hill with fire, and drive the ants to the entrance. And he’d wait for the ambulances to collect the wounded and hit the entrance with a gout of fire. He was very studied and scientific about how he tricked the ants into showing themselves and then incinerating them. Until, eventually, the can was empty, and he tossed it into the sagebrush.

Back to the Present-Day

I couldn’t help but think of Tommy, watching Breitbart today.

He had his can of lighter fluid, and chose the perfect picture to post on a Memorial Day weekend, when his partisans would have three solid days to form and shape the story before the “MSM” — the monolithic enemy known as the “liberal press” — were back at their desks, forced to play catch up.

And Breitbart let his prey squirm for a week. He’d chosen the perfect photo, just racy enough that it couldn’t be discounted, but not so pornographic as not to be shown. (Nonetheless many media outlets claimed it was, many showed it, and it was replayed over and over for a week like they replayed the 9-11 Twin Towers being hit and going down.)

You see, men have been getting into trouble with their penii going back and back and back. Think of David and Bathsheeba. Think of Arnie and the maid.

These are not particularly tawdry scandals. As Rachel Maddow showed her graph of scandals (with X and Y axes, respectively, more and less prosecutable, and more and less creepy) I was struck by just how white-bread/vanilla our national scandals actually are. They are less kinky than boring. And less tawdry than inconsequential.

But, whether it’s in a men’s room in the Minneapolis airport, or having a love child with a celebrity stalker, they are rather pathetically not the stuff of fiction. No self-respecting novelist would portray the horrible sex scandal that threatens to bring down the nation as parochial, bucolic and unimaginative as has been our steady diet going back to Clinton.

(Say what you like about the taxpayer-financed details of the Clinton sex scandal, at least it did not reek of amateur hour.)

Original model for the capitol dome,
before we made Liberty a Vegas chorine

No: what it particularly kinky here is the sadism of Andrew Breitbart, the gleeful manner in which the destruction of Andrew Weiner was planned and executed, calculated to achieve not political scandal, but p0litical destruction through the media, and then the sociopathic stalking, taking over the podium (because he believes that the story is actually about HIM, that HE owns it, and not that it is an embarrassing indiscretion by the New York congressman) in a Kanye West moment, and then DEMANDING (and receiving!) an apology from his vanquished foe.

If he stood over the congressman with an erection — as male wolves and many other male mammals do — to display his dominance to the vanquished foe, he could not have been more blatant.

Or sadistic.

And that is what give me the “ick” factor in all of this.

Andrew Breitbart, what are you
doing in my bathroom?

Because this is how he will attack anyone who he  considers (is paid to?) an enemy of his brutish form of “conservatism.”

Thuggery, we used to call it. Barbaric. Coarse, cruel, fierce, graceless, inhuman, lowbrow, primitive, rough, rude, tasteless, uncivilized, uncouth, vulgar, wild, or whatever else your thesaurus lists for it.

And the next bell may well toll for thee. Privacy is vanishing, and unless we do something about it, every secret you’ve got in your closet will appear any time somebody has a grudge against you. That scares me a lot more than sexting, truth be told.

Are chat sex and racy pictures comparable — in the sense of “danger to the nation” — to Breitbart’s gleeful sadism?

Your answer will tell where your priorities lie.

Courage.

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross posted from his blog.