TMV columnist Shaun Mullen wrote a poignant question about media today: “Is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a sex scandal story about a certain presidential candidate that could blow the campaign wide open? Rumors about the story – which apparently does not involve a certain guy who gets $300 haircuts — have been circulating in Washington… the Times apparently doesn’t know when or whether to let it rip.”

He goes on to say that caution, carefulness, is critical in such matters, and I agree.

But, analyzing photos of candidates’ with their families over the last year, tells me, if there is a ’sex scandal’ it may be time we prepare for BDSM to come out of closet into prime time…

For media to have a true, flashpoint story about a presidential or senatorial person’s sexuality or sexual enamourment, it’d have to be highly unusual… for surely gay liaisons and all else have become like the f-word…the f-word once created tsunamis when it was uttered, but now barely makes water move in a teacup.

Though some citizens are still shock-interested in the private and personal sexual life activities of others… many more people are deeply concerned about real murders, mismanagements, and destructions that affect millions. For the latter, it’s, “Gay, ho-hum. Wide-stance, schmance. Whatever presidential candidate wants to put sexual tab A into tab B, or tab C, we could care less. Next.”

But, just to introduce a note of levity, I cant also help but think since it’s Halloween… the time people prance out in their alter-egos, if so inclined… Maybe we ought to diagnose everyone, including presidential candidates, by their choice of Halloween costumes. How would that be? Diagnosis by dress-up.

I know a guy who dresses up like Elvis every year. He is now way older than Elvis ever was, but still wears the chrome sunglasses with the portholes in the ear pieces with the fake-fur sideburns attached to those ear pieces. Someday he will be an 80 year old Elvis hobbling around on Halloween. But, he so enjoys walking around now using ‘the voice of the King,’ saying “Thankyouverymuch” as adults drop candy into his grandchildren’s trick or treat bags.

I don’t know, diagnose guys like that as good souls who’ll do anything to make others laugh.

We all probably know people for whom Halloween is all out artistry. I know three women who chew black licorice and dye rags shades of brown and go out dressed as the Witches from Macbeth.

One fellow I know, about 6 foot 5 inches tall, goes to Halloween parties every year as The Mummy, with plaster-laced gauze all over his entire body with some trailing behind, and…I have to say, ‘explain me,’ as my immigrant family used to say when they didn’t quite understand something… ‘explain me’… because women flock to The Mummy like ants to sugar water. I personally think maybe because he’s sculpted himself into an encased phallic symbol, but that may be too penalizing a viewpoint. (ok, ok, I know)

Myself, I seem to be in costume today for Halloween as a dominatrix, but last year I was a

mouse, a very feminine mouse, but a mouse nonetheless. A few years back I was Esmeralda (all Gina Lollobrigida-y, only not even close to as beautiful, but with my own long dark hair and regulation cinch belt and off the shoulder peasant blouse, and how shall I say it, highly constructed spike heels). That Halloween, on the way back from the party my car broke down on the open highway outside of Cheyenne… um,

…quite an adventure all alone with all my rags and hair flying out in the wild night wind that swoops down from the mountains there. I was picked up by a evangelical Christian couple … and, well that’s a story for another time. Just this: hiding skin is impossible if there wasn’t enough cloth to begin with, and you cannot, no matter how hard you try, wish yourself invisible in the back seat of a two-door Ford Focus with a fish symbol on the trunk.

So, maybe media should just research and write an article on “Past and Present Halloween Costumes of Presidential Frontrunners.” Commenters could send in pix of themselves in their past and present Halloween duds. Then we could all share the same diagnosis; imaginative and strange.

However, I would also point out, and in all seriousness, that barring child molestation or a criminal activity, in human sexual development it appears that intelligence, imagination, and soulfulness often go together.

So, whatever any presidential candidate has done, is doing, or hoping to do with their own or someone else’s ‘tab A, B, or C,’ may only be one big astonishing outrageous “Interesting if true, but so what?” to those whose minds are occupied elsewhere, or with developing their own resonant sexual natures, rather than yipping in high dungeon, forgive the pun, about someone else’s.

Not to mention media giving far more emphasis to turning toward the critical world and local issues that are not ‘Peyton Place perseverations,’ but are real… and terribly needful of their and our insights, voices, intentions, and actions.

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CODA
Just a small note: Most of us who work or/and write about some of the worst of human atrocities and devastations, could not keep going if we didn’t also cultivate some M.A.S.H.-like humor sometimes… I just completed an interview with a worker from a center in Cyprus who works with victims of torture. I am in the midst of one with a Buddhist nun who has lived in Burma. Somewhere in an ongoing witnessing to, what shall I call it?, charnel? there has to be a small space somewhere on a star far from here, for some tiny rest and humor. This article, that spirit.