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Monday stuff.
Author: Raine    Date: 02/12/2018 14:09:06

First, make sure you read TriSec's Saturday Blog. I was thinking these same thoughts over the weekend, you know, when I wasn't seething about how poorly this administration is dealing with the issue of domestic violence.

So, let me just say this: both sides don't do it. One personally commits an act of violence and the other person is the victim of violence.

Will Bunch nails it in his column.
The 1977 skit gently mocked the women’s movement and less gently mocked the patriarchy with a TV talk show called “You’ve Come a Long Way, Buddy” that promoted the work of male painters like Vincent Van Gogh (who “influenced many artists. And he was a man.”) while music written by men, like Beethoven, played in the background, The skit reached its absurdist crescendo when a cigar-smoking John Belushi appears as a character who’s launched a 24-hour rape hotline … for men who’ve committed a rape. Belushi’s “Sam Montgomery” says the hotline gives rapists “an opportunity to talk to someone who understands what he’s gone through” — and it’s completely anonymous.

“Very often, to be known as a rapist is a social stigma, and it can ruin a man’s life.”

That’s a quote from SNL and what was supposed to be biting social satire, in a time when the future absurdity of Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, was beyond the ability of comedy writers to imagine. But when Trump addressed reporters on Friday who asked about Porter — who’d funneled America’s most important secrets onto the president’s desks for months while top aides knew his sordid past had blocked him from a security clearance — his words could have been ripped directly from that farcical skit four decades ago.

“We wish him well, he worked very hard. We found out about it recently and I was surprised by it, but we certainly wish him well and it’s a tough time for him,” said Trump, showing his not-satirical concern for how the social stigma of wife-beating can ruin a man’s life. “He did a very good job when he was in the White House. And we hope he has a wonderful career and he will have a great career ahead of him. But it was very sad when we heard about it and certainly he’s also very sad now.”
(snip)

That’s an unconscionable message, not just to “our wives and daughters” (which is what male writers always say) but to the more than 160 million human beings who live in America and who are not men. There are many ways that Trump has blown up the contract to be a president of all of the American people, but this mindset that leads the president to offer his well-wishes to a credibly accused wife-beater is particular abhorrent. November’s midterm election will be a chance to prove that a would-be autocrat can’t succeed by suppressing a majority group, but I’m also sick and tired of well-meaning men waiting for women to save America at the ballot box. It’s time for men to acknowledge we haven’t come a long way, buddy. Let’s all work together to topple Trump’s United States of Men.


and
Raine






 
 
 

33 comments (Latest Comment: 02/12/2018 20:47:38 by Raine)
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