Mark Twain: “Familiarity breeds contempt.”
What Twain said next:
“The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.”
I’ve been unusually quiet about the Trump/Epstein affair.
I mean, isn’t this the perfect moment for Medusa to let down her hair? Don’t I want a piece of the media action? Stake out my op-ed?
I have a reason for my up-til-this-moment silence:
Contempt.
I'm drowning in contempt. I’ve turned into a Biblical salt statue— the last broad out of Sodom, tongue still.
I won’t play the first media round of propaganda: to act shocked.
"Why, Miss Anne, you'll never believe what I discovered this morning! Wealthy degenerates are abusing girls in the corridors of power!"
Trump has been a lifelong advertisement for unchecked malignancy. This is the man who turned his tween-age daughter into lapdance candy for the tabloids, the pig who ran beauty pageants like a pimp, the candidate who bragged on an hot mic about grabbing pussy. The facts are known.
As they say: No one stopped him. Little Lord Fuckpants.
America, with immaculate consistency, doesn't care about women, children, the dispossessed— or anyone who can't write a seven-figure check. They’d rather file their nails and we all know it. The banality of sexual depravity.1
And as for the super-predators? —The pricks with private jets and smoky islands? That's just boys being boys with better lawyers.
The second rule of propaganda: Hide the ball.
The real-time news in the United States today is ethnic cleansing, concentration camps with alligators, and militarization of master-race fantasies.
You can add rape and sexual assault to each of those menus.
Ecological disaster without respite is also at the top of the list. The indifference to, and propagation of, infectious disease. “Fuck science” is the new Bill of Rights.
The bodies pile up, while the White House toys with whom to bomb next and which lies to tell about the weather.
Death culture is the new theism. COVID came through in 2020 like the Grim Reaper's advance man, and his message was simple: "I've broken you, and you're going to stay broken. No more cooperation, no more enlightenment. Welcome back to the Dark Ages."2
Trump’s sexy-tot-stitute circus? Bitch, please.
Even as I witness our species’ last gasp, I still wake with the cruelest curse: hope. A “hope-let,” perhaps. A shard of glass with maybe etched on it.
It’s a survival hack.
Here’s why I know every sordid detail of the Trump-Epstein pandering empire: The knowing is the living. The proof is in the survivors’ mouths. Sexual assault and grotesque exploitation are not breaking news. They’re . . . Tuesday. Yesterday. Tomorrow.
I’ve never met Trump or Epstein: I met their blood brothers, their cousins, their spiritual twins. I know these men like a crime scene.
Trump is the zombie embodiment of “treating women like pieces of meat.” Remember when he talked about his infant daughter, Tiffany? He laughed about how she had her mother's legs, but it remained to be seen if she'd "get the tits.”
Livestock humor. That’s his game.
Donnie’s id is not the quality of his sexual intercourse, per se. Or how many times he’s had the clap. It's Trump’s cuckolding appetite, the atrocity exhibition.
Trump’s money shot is humiliating women for the spectatorship of other men. He needs a wingman and a cuckold to get off.
Burn that into your brain.
If he doesn’t have one man to show off to, plus another man to degrade, he can’t get off. His heterosexuality is predicated on the men in the picture.
That's why Donnie and Jeffie were such perfect partners—two predators who got off on high stakes ball-breaking. Nothing made them harder.
I grew up on the edges of such a world, the Hollywood-adjacent division. I babysat for the kind of people who thought teenage girls were part of the household amenities. My friends’ parents. The bosses at my minimum-wage jobs. Dudes who’d follow young women home from the library, the bus stop.
Creeps were scoring everywhere, dreaming of how they’d impress other dudes. They’d invite an ingenue to a “party,” and then, voilà, she’s the appetizer tray. In Lebowski’s words, “Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women!”
I hitchhiked my way out of a couple of those soul-crushing orgies.
Yesterday I was talking online with friends, and someone asked, “Have any of you gone public about your sexual assault?”
We cracked up because the question was singular and our experiences are plural.
Once you're old enough, the assaults have piled up like unpaid bills. I've written about some of mine, a few. It’s too exhausting to do the catalog. I never called the cops. Hell, sometimes it WAS the cops.
Here’s what keeps me going: I'm not unusual. In fact, I’ve been on the lucky side! Live Through This.
If every survivor pressed charges each time, if each assault were written on the wall . . . The world as we know it, would not exist.
I would love to hear that silence.
Meanwhile, we learn and love to forget. We need to, right? We push the proof down and get on with loving the people we love and building the lives we want.
What’s the alternative? Vigilantism? Some days, it's tempting. Call Hothead Paisan for best practices.
Men themselves are destroyed by meat-market culture. Duh. I guess the perks are distracting. For anyone who didn’t get the hand-out: Male superiority is venom for men, too. Rape sucks. Have a good cry, get it out! Now, what are you going to do about it?
Would everything change if Trump keeled over tomorrow? I can’t imagine the party I’ll throw.
But the vipers that created Trump will still be here, churning out their Stephen Millers, Laura Loomers, and J.D. Vances— the production line from hell. Their enablers and toadies and weak sister opposition.
For the moment, I want their garbage off the front page.
I want a shunning of Epstein/Trump media propaganda. Their publishers are not interested in survivors, justice, or respecting women. Their Wag-the-Dog sexy times are a distraction from the profitable business of destroying the world.
Short-term profit, of course. Very short.
We will keep our eyes on the articulate resistors, the underground, the ones who call things by their real names. We're done with spit-drowning in lies. We are cooking the antidote. No more perfidy on my plate.
Remember, we're still here. Strangely. The lucky survivors. That counts for something. And something has to make sense.
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but rather the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
—Václav Havel
In Case You Missed It
On the Anniversary of Andrea Dworkin’s Death
Andrea Dworkin died on this date, near 20 years ago, leaving many mixed feelings behind her. Her catalog has never gone out of print, and filmmakers and publishers still turn her legacy in their hand, like a crystal ball.
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.” — Susan Sontag
