Weinstein, Epstein, Trumpstein
The Grammy Record of the Year for 1985 was Money for Nothing by Dire Straits, which goes:
That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free
Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Obviously, some guys don’t have everything workin’ right and the chicks just don’t seem to come for free. Speaking as a man who lusted after far more women that ever wanted anything to do with me, I can honestly say that those testosterone-filled days are thankfully a thing of the past. Steve Coogan has a very funny bit about his movie with Paul Rudd, called Our Idiot Brother. The title comes from the thought that we all have an idiot brother (our libido) that comes and stays with us at various times in our lives and makes us do things that are absurd and shameful for the simple sake of momentary satisfaction. That humor is transcended in this day and age with the Me Too movement leading the charge. One might say the men of the moment seem less like Steve Coogan and more like Jeremy Irons from the 1992 movie Damage. Irons plays a British MP of escalating importance who allows himself to get involved with his son’s girlfriend (Juliet Binoche). The outcome leads to the death of his son and ruination of his life. The sex seemed consensual (how’s that for a double entendre word?) in 1992, but in today’s environment would be seen as power-driven and thus, out of line.
1985, the year of Dire Straits’ hit song, was in the early years for Harvey Weinstein and his Miramax film production company. He only made one documentary movie and was still nine years from his breakthrough Pulp Fiction in 1994. Harvey Weinstein has now gone two years since the initial stories broke about his mistreatment, abuse and manipulation of Gwyneth Paltrow and what now amount to another 80 (yes, 80) other women. That take-down has spawned the Me Too movement that has brought down countless other harassers and abusers in media, finance, sports and politics. The notable exception to the movement’s impact has been the escape of Donald Trump, who has been accused by no less than twenty-two women. Bill Cosby got his comeuppance and Bill Clinton got his impeachment, but so far, Donald Trump has only had to take down his pictures of Stormy and Jeffrey as punishment for his deeds.
Harvey has since been indicted and was supposed to go to trial yesterday, but that has been deferred until January. That trial could end Harvey’s freedom for the rest of his natural life. It has already caused the bankruptcy of The Weinstein Company, the company founded by Harvey and his brother Bob. Bob has now been revealed as having sent Harvey a pleading letter in 2016, before his world came crashing down, asking him to clean up his act and clearly acknowledging his predilection to sexual addiction. He accused his brother of bringing shame to their family. He might have thought to mention all the harm he had inflicted on countless women as well, rather than just thinking of shame as the worst of it.
Harvey was known to have partied with Jeffrey Epstein, who recently ended his own life while incarcerated without bail in lower Manhattan. That jail is a mere mile or so from Harvey’s home in lower Manhattan, but Harvey is out on $1 million in bail since he is apparently not considered the flight risk that Epstein was. Just looking at Weinstein and Epstein would seem to confirm that Harvey can’t run as fast or as easily as Jeffrey even though they are both almost the same age…that would be about my age, members of the Eisenhower Cohort again. That all makes me wonder about how they were raised and what might have contributed to their sexual predilections.
I was raised in a family of women. My mother was a powerful and adventurous career diplomat working for the UN out of Rome, Italy. I came to full puberty in Rome while reading a purloined (or at least bootlegged) copy of The Tales of Casanova. For any who have not read about Giacomo’s exploits, I will warn you that it is the deep end of the risqué pool. From there I had the normal high school years with the exception that I lived in a feminist household where the greatest sin was to raise a hand to a girl (a.k.a woman in today’s parlance). Think about this, the late sixties, in the free-wheeling European capital of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, in a family of liberated women, attending a Catholic boy’s prep school and driving a motorcycle from the age of fourteen on, as allowed under Italian law. I’m not sure how I even survived those years. Surely my diplomatic card would have kept me from arrest and imprisonment (as it occasionally kept me from traffic tickets, much to my mother’s chagrin), but I would only have been subject to arrest if Tom Cruise could have issued a Minority Report about the goings on in my brain. And that’s my point, what I could not make happen in real life, stayed in my head and went nowhere else. I was not wealthy, good looking or particularly popular, so there was a lot of desire lodged in my head.
On my worst days I think I look a little like the scraggly Harvey Weinstein. On my best days I can’t come close to looking as handsome as Jeffrey Epstein looked. What is that about? Harvey would likely have had a harder time attracting women, but then he was a movie mogul and did have lots of money, so there was certainly a “normal” ability to satisfy his libido. Obviously not enough for his tastes. Epstein was smart, rich and very dashing. He probably never had any trouble with women, but then he must have allowed himself to get more and more voracious and take pleasure from the bestial pursuit of younger and younger girls. These are depravities that come with dogs that have caught the proverbial mechanical rabbit and are driven mad by the age old question, “Is that all there is?”
For some of us, there has always been more to chase and more to accomplish. Fortune favored us by not granting our every wish and driving us into the depravity of excess. For Trumpstein that took a tragic turn for us all by turning him towards politics at just the right moment when the American population (or at least enough of it) was disaffected and searching for something more. He was the beneficiary of the Putin push to disaggregate democracy, the anachronistic Electoral College and, the invisible shield of the presidency against the Me Too movement’s long arms. It remains to be seen if the longer arms of Congress will make him pay for his dalliances.
So now we have all learned that money may be for nothin’ for some fortunate few, but the chicks are never free. The women come with a cost and as Aretha Franklin sang quite convincingly, that is spelled R-E-S-P-E-C-T.