Some people don’t understand how funny they are. Consider Harvey Weinstein, motion picture producer and marketer.
Backward as I am, before October 5 I had never dreamed of his existence. Then, like all other good Americans, I was astonished and deeply saddened to learn that this Hollywood mover and shaker had, for many years, been one of the worst sexual predators, harassers, and, to use the technical term, pigs in Tinseltown. When first assailed by these charges, Weinstein conceded that he might have a few tiny faults, including an anger problem (otherwise known as issues with anger), but indicated that he knew how to remedy it: “I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I've decided that I'm going to give the NRA my full attention."
Picture a big, fat, ugly loudmouth who spends his life pushing other people around, and who now attempts to solve his public relations problem by aiming all of his destructive emotions at one target.
I suppose it all started with Freud — this picture of human beings as bottles full of lethal liquids that are constantly seeking channels through which to vent their nasty stuff. Or maybe it was some other quack who originally suggested that civilization, which has unfortunately been built on the dismal swamp of primitive aggressions, can be kept from returning to the primordial ooze if it is equipped with little pipes and ducts and hoses — art, science, religion, model railroading, writing for the New York Times, and so forth — to draw off the ugly fluid. But no matter who thought up the idea that mental health comes from plumbing, not thinking, it remained for Harvey Weinstein to make the final, irresistibly funny, application.
Picture a big, fat, ugly loudmouth who spends his life pushing other people around, and who now attempts to solve his public relations problem by aiming all of his destructive emotions at one target, so that instead of 50 little hoses spewing filth at 50 different targets we’ll see one giant firehose channeling it all at one of them. Yes, that will fix things, won’t it — especially when you realize that this man’s victims won’t be people in the public spotlight: pretty actresses and rich celebrities. They’ll be old ladies in Detroit who are trying to defend themselves against people who want to hurt them. The fate of elderly black women won’t cause a national crisis of conscience, will it? Apparently not. It never has.
Maybe it was some other quack who originally suggested that civilization can be kept from returning to the primordial ooze if it is equipped with little pipes and ducts and hoses.
Weinstein’s brother and business associate Bob brought up an interesting question about the link between language and conscience. He charged that the politically therapeutic language appropriated by his brother from any of a million sources merely indicated a lack of emotional or moral referent:
I don't feel an ounce of remorse coming from him, and that kills me too. When I heard his written, lame excuse . . . Not an excuse. When I heard his admission of feeling remorse for the victims and then him cavalierly, almost crazily saying he was going to go out and take on the NRA, it was so disturbing to me. It was utter insanity. My daughters all felt sick hearing this because we understood he felt nothing. I don't feel he feels anything to this day. I don't. . . .
He lived for this business and he lived for the outside. There were no insides to this, as far as I can see. So unless there becomes an inner person inside there, I have no idea what he'll do.
This is close to Ayn Rand’s insight: people who live for the approval of others — even if they don’t try to bully or trick them into giving it — are empty vessels. It’s not that the plumbing doesn’t work; it’s that the plumbing doesn’t exist. Maybe it did at some time, but it can’t be located now.
You may think it’s strange to mention conscience and then bring up Hillary Clinton, but her life has taught us a lot about the subject. She has demonstrated that lack of conscience doesn’t keep you from public office. It doesn’t even keep you from being funny. On an entertaining page of his letters, Lord Chesterfield describes the kind of person who is incapable of understanding how to behave. When he goes to a party, he inevitably chooses the wrong clothes, unerringly finds the worst places to sit or stand, and makes certain to state with emphasis the very things that will make him seem most ridiculous. Mrs. Clinton is one of those people.
She it was who defended her husband from charges of immorality by saying to, among other people, millions of country music fans, “You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” She it was who said that she’d solved the mystery of why some people didn’t like her husband: it was all a “vast, rightwing conspiracy.” She it was who thought she’d made a hit when she responded to congressional questions about what caused the attack in Benghazi by shouting, “What difference does it make?” She it was who gave a campaign speech in which she asserted that 25% of the American electorate is morally “deplorable,” presenting this analysis with a thoughtfulness and solemnity that made it impossible for anyone to dismiss it as just one of those things you say by accident.
This is close to Ayn Rand’s insight: people who live for the approval of others — even if they don’t try to bully or trick them into giving it — are empty vessels.
All of these blunders were carefully staged; all of them were intended as climaxes of rhetorical art. And there was no reason to stumble into any of them. No one asked her to comment on Tammy Wynette or to theorize about conspiracies or to assess the significance of cause and effect. And although many politicians have hated the voters, none but Hillary Clinton ever made a point of saying it to them.
Of course the voters struck back; they crippled and then killed her political career. But she never learned. She has never learned. She’s like one of those animals that seems constantly, solemnly, and innocently discovering its tail; and, not being able to conceptualize such things, remains at a loss about what that object could possibly be.
I’m sorry to take so much time with Hillary Clinton. If she were just a blatherer, like President Trump, the comic interest would soon have faded. But what was said of Cleopatra can be said of her: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.” Like the perpetually inappropriate man in Chesterfield, she is always finding new ways of making herself ridiculous. Having chronicled her antics on innumerable occasions, I still had to cling to my seat when I heard her recent remarks about Mr. Weinstein: I was laughing so hard I almost fell off.
All of these blunders were carefully staged; all of them were intended as climaxes of rhetorical art. And there was no reason to stumble into any of them.
Harvey Weinstein is an old friend and strong financial supporter of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton therefore waited several days before yielding to the mob’s demand (I’m sorry; I don’t like mobs, no matter whom they intend to lynch) that everyone who had ever laid eyes on Weinstein should immediately denounce him. I thought that for once she might commit an act of courage, even in a questionable cause. But no. She finally denounced him, like all the rest of them.
Yet she couldn’t stop with that. Finding herself in a bad position, politically, since she’d taken all those contributions from the man she was denouncing, she insisted that attention be turned to the most compromising subject for her — politics. She compared Weinstein to her bête noir, Donald Trump, who in Hillary’s mythic incantations has acquired the stature of Trotsky, as viewed by Stalin; Lucifer, as viewed by Yahweh; and Phineas Quimby, as viewed by Mary Baker Eddy. Unable to understand that comments of this kind would simply prolong the nearly universal chants of “sore loser!”, she attacked Trump for supposedly admitting that he had “assaulted” women — a reference, perhaps, to his vulgar remarks to Billy Bush. “This kind of behavior,” she decreed,
cannot be tolerated anywhere, whether it’s in entertainment [or] politics. After all, we have someone admitting to being a sexual assaulter in the Oval Office. There has to be a recognition that we must stand against the kind of action that is so sexist and misogynistic.
Clinton’s syntax was particularly unfortunate — suggesting, as it did, that Trump had illicit affairs in the Oval Office, which is exactly where people picture her husband having them. And who tolerated that?
This was funny enough. Still funnier was her shock when her interviewer from the BBC pressed the political point that she herself had introduced. He brought up women who had complained about Bill, women with whom Hillary had not precisely taken a stand:
In your book, three women brought on stage [during the 2016 campaign] by Trump attacking your husband, you kind of dismiss them. Was that the right thing to do? Are you sure about that?
She did the best she could with the question, and her best was hilarious:
Well, yes, because that had all been litigated. That had been the subjectof a huge investigation in the late ’90s and there were conclusions drawn. That was clearly in the past, but it is something that has to be taken seriously and not just in entertainment.
How’s that for a cunning use of the passive voice? Litigated by whom? What conclusions were drawn? And how’s that for a climactic use of truism, cliché, and unconscious irony? Yes, her husband’s conduct was in the past (and still is), but I’m not sure that “it,” the only referent for which is “that,” i.e., her husband’s conduct, or the charges bearing on the same, is what she really wants to be taken seriously.
I have trouble taking anything about Mrs. Clinton seriously, and to me it’s doubly amusing that she never notices how many people have that trouble about her. After all these years, she still assumes that whatever she says will be copied down in everybody’s book of instructive sayings. How childlike! How adorable. And it’s so cute that she’s surprised by even the most obvious questions.
Still funnier was Clinton's shock when her interviewer from the BBC pressed the political point that she herself had introduced.
One of them was posed by Fareed Zakaria of CNN, often called the Clinton News Network. He had the gall to ask whether she was going to follow other leading Democrats and return the money she’d gotten from the now-odious Weinstein. She gave the answer that you would give to a moralistic child who’s been pestering you to return the quarter you found on the street. “Well,” she said, “there’s no one to give it back to.”
Really? Have you lost Weinstein’s address?
Zakaria kept looking at her, so she continued:
What other people are saying, what my former colleagues are saying, is they’re going to donate it to charity, and of course I will do that. I give 10% of my income to charity every year. This will be part of that. There’s no — there’s no doubt about it.
This is as close, I believe, as Hillary Clinton has ever come to acknowledging that normal, nondeplorable people might ever doubt any of the absurd things she habitually says. Realizing that there could be doubt, she immediately decreed that there is no doubt.
One thing she did not realize is that other people know arithmetic. Supposing that she does give the biblical tenth every year, I assume that her charity of choice is the Clinton Foundation, which has indicated in no uncertain terms that it isn’t giving any of Weinstein’s money back. But let’s suppose otherwise, and picture her contributing a tenth of her money to the Salvation Army. Now she can keep that money and substitute Weinstein’s money. And, of course, take the tax deduction. Neat, isn’t it? But normal people are unlikely to be impressed by this act of moral courage.
Realizing that there could be doubt, she immediately decreed that there is no doubt.
The Daily Beast, a leftwing journal, says that “the donations will be ‘part of’ the 10 percent of her income that she donates to charity each year, but it was unclear whether she meant that the money from Weinstein would be in addition to that 10 percent.” I wonder what the Daily Beast finds unclear about “part of.”
While the Beast is scratching its head, ordinary people are howling with laughter. Clinton has no means of knowing this. She thinks that other people are just like her. She’s hollow and impercipient; they must be too.
There are a lot of “leaders” like that now. Weinstein is one. An unconsciously ironic portrait of him has been communicated by a psychologist who worked on him in some “recovery” clinic in Arizona. This healthcare professional reported to TMZ on a week of treatment:
The psychologist says he helped Weinstein focus on "dealing with his anger, his attitude toward others, boundary work and the beginnings of work on empathy." He says Weinstein was "invested in the program."
I don’t know what “boundary work” may be, but in these cases “work on empathy” is certainly indicated. The problem is that empathy is the hardest thing to work on, because people who don’t have it don’t realize that they don’t. Little things like losing their jobs as heads of billion-dollar businesses, or losing a national election, never suggest to them that something might be wrong about the language with which they communicate with the world.
Under these circumstances, I’m not sure that psychologists will be much good at fixing all the pipes and ducts that channel stuff from one person to another. Some good might be accomplished, however, if other people just laughed in the faces of our cultural and political leaders. A few days of that might make some impression, and no one would need to be paid for it.
