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| The
revelation that Weinstein and his enablers are pigs is no surprise. | |
The Courage of Cowards
Nobody displays it more vividly than the Hollywood pantheon.
Approximately
15 years ago, I had a really sweet and cushy job. The job was easy. The
hours very reasonable. The pay comfortable six figures. And, for people
who did not know what the work environment was like, the job actually
was quite prestigious. People begged me to help them get interviews
there, to meet the power behind the throne, even just for phone access —
just, please, the phone number.
The problem was that I had to get
out of there. The environment of the workplace was amazingly hostile to
women. I actually saw women there crying. Those among them who knew
that I also am a rabbi spoke with me privately, women of varied
backgrounds and faiths, asking me to do something. I did what I could. I
pressed as far as I could press. And then, six months into a job that I
had anticipated I would cherish for years, I decided that, since I was
having no impact on the corporate culture, I just had to get the hell
out of there.
I did. I left that job. I just walked out. On the
way out, I counseled and advised one more time, and I encouraged others
to keep my phone number and, meanwhile, to consider getting out, too.
Some did. Some didn’t.
Five years later, I found myself employed
in a significant role within a very different kind of corporate
structure where, it came to my attention, one of the Board members, a
singularly powerful figure in the body, had been harassing women. Two
separate women came to me privately, each separate from the other, each
telling me her respective account — and their accounts were verifiable. I
went home and said to my wife: “I think I am in another one of these
spots. If I report to the rest of the Board what I now know, there is no
doubt in my mind that they will have no choice but to demand the guy’s
immediate removal from all Board influence, and they never will be able
to let him on that Board again. But I also have no doubt that, once that
dust settles, they will come after me for blowing the whistle. So I
have to make a decision.”
My wonderful wife looked at me with eyes that essentially said: “So what’s the question? You know what you have to do.”
And she was right. There was no question. I am no feminist —
au contraire —
but this was not about the politics of vagina hats and burning bras.
This was a matter of human decency and the spiritual holiness that
exists in every person. I knew what I had to do.
I blew the
whistle internally. The Board appointed an internal committee to
investigate independently. The committee came back affirming my report.
The harasser’s role as an influential Board powerhouse ended. He never
returned to that Board, and he was demoted and sanctioned severely
beyond that.
Soon after, predictably, his friends’ backlash against me hit hard from within. I ended up leaving that place of employment.
Best thing that ever happened to me.
I have returned to thinking about those days amid the current Harvey Weinstein scandal. And my mind is struck —
not
by Weinstein but by the extraordinary cowardice that permeates and
oozes through every pore of the slime that we call Hollywood. The
revelation that Weinstein is a pig is no surprise. Just look at his
donations to Democrats, to liberals, to feminists up-and-down the left.
It is like listening to Bill Clinton preaching about treating women
respectfully or Hillary Clinton, after getting a child rapist off the
hook and giggling about it, rebounding to preach about how she deserves
to run the country because she is a woman.
What hits home the
sharpest amid this Harvey Weinstein scandal is the duality between the
leftist feminist, on the one hand, publicly attacking Donald Trump — or
George Bush (either) or Ronald Reagan or any decent conservative voice
or judge or lawmaker — and, on the other hand, standing up to a true pig
like Harvey Weinstein, albeit a liberal pig whose grease funds liberals
and Democrats, first and foremost among them the Clintons.
There
was Ashley Judd, less than a year ago, at a “Women’s March.” It was a
“Women’s March” that barred and disenfranchised the whole huge swath of
American women who do not share the radicals’ leftist agenda. Speaking
to those attending, Ashley Judd ripped into President Donald Trump. She
became profoundly obscene, reciting a “poem” that bore fantasized
intimations of perversion and incest. Oh how brave she was — “speaking
truth to power” — by regaling a leftist crowd, whining men and women and
whatever pronouns now are persondated (not “mandated”) in California —
with a hateful radicalized leftist attack on the Republican President.
That
is not “courageous.” That is not “brave.” There is no downside for a
Hollywood figure to attack conservatives, Republicans, Christians, the
Catholic Church, or Orthodox Jews before one of their hooting echo
audiences. Those audiences lap it up. They love it. They reward such
attacks with adulation and iconization. It is the “courage” of
late-night talk hosts lambasting the President or the Republicans to
their self-selecting echo chambers of leftists, while knowing full well
that the conservatives and the Republicans are not in the Stephen
Colbert audience or viewing on television when they instead can be
watching Fox News or reruns of
Last Man Standing or
Quick Pitch
on MLB or the cooking or other food channel or a movie on Netflix or
Amazon Prime or Hulu or reading a book or even going to sleep at 11:30
p.m. because, as many conservatives do, those people have to get up in
the morning the next day to go to work for a living.
There is no
courage in attacking the President or the conservative justices of the
United States Supreme Court or Republicans in Congress at Academy Awards
night or Emmy night or Tony Awards night or Grammy night. There is no
courage in mocking the traditionalists on
Saturday Night Live.
When a person arises amid an echo chamber of same-minded Eloi in a time
machine that is stuck in an Obama era that has passed, and sneeringly
feeds the clods who get their news from Comedy Central their liberal
mantras, he or she simply is feeding fish to clapping seals. That is not
courage. That is pandering.
Instead, courage is when an Ashley
Judd is pawed by a Harvey Weinstein who has power over her career — and
she decides that, whatever may be the price to be paid, she will stop
this pig here and now by blowing the whistle. And that is the kind of
courage that a coward like Ashley Judd lacks. Courage is not when Meryl
Streep at a Hollywood Awards ceremony mocks President Trump’s perceived
approach to women, based on the brash person he was decades earlier,
while she extols Roman Polanski as an artist who has suffered far too
long, even as she calls Harvey Weinstein “God.”
Rather, courage is when
the same Meryl Streep wins the confidence of women in her field who can
go to her, as women came to me in my less famous role, to tell their
horrific reports of sexual assault and violation, knowing that she will
leverage her voice in Hollywood to extirpate the pig from the public
arena. And the coward Meryl Streep does not have that courage — not
unless it is printed out for her in dummy cards for her to read
emotively into a camera.
In all these cases — the phony cowards
like the Ashley Judds, the Meryl Streeps, the Hillary Clintons whose
political races and foundations have been greased by pigs like Harvey
Weinstein whose identification with Bill Clinton is
all-too-comprehensible — the cowardice is overwhelming.
Shivering,
sniveling, gutless cowards who actually have been positioned for years
and years to take down this pig. Had they done so, they could have
spared dozens more women the shame and trauma of subsequent Weinstein
assaults and outrages. But they were too cowardly to endanger their
stations in Hollywood. Dared not speak out against a mogul, a “God.”
Shivered, kept silent, perhaps endured silent nightmares and cold
sweats. But nary a word. Because, while safely “speaking truth to power”
from safe distances, they never would risk their own tuxedoes and
glittering dinner gowns, their jewels and diamonds, and their access to
invitations to the next Hollywood gala. Too dangerous. Too risky. Better
to tweet a dismembered bloody head depicting the duly, lawfully, and
democratically elected President of the United States.
And
then at the Awards ceremonies and the “Women’s marches” they
congratulate themselves for their courage to wear vagina hats and
obscene tee-shirts, to recite filthy “poems” and to speak of blowing up
the White House.
That is not “speaking truth to power.” It is the
courage of cowards. And it is the sniveling, shriveling, shivering
cowardice that even the Wizard of Oz could not heal.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/10/weinstein-sex-addiction/542619/?utm_source=atlfb
