Jian Ghomeshi – frustratedboomers

And a Happy New Year!

by Roxanne Tellier first published 21/12/2014 on Bob Segarini’s Don’t Believe A Word I Say …. So here’s what was happening, mostly in Youtube and music, 9 years ago!

This year it falls to me to be the last voice of 2014. Still decked out in my new holiday outfit, and digesting our early family New Year’s dinner, I’m parsing my memories of the events of the last 365 days. Some incidents filled me with joy, while others had all the appeal of an ugly, if ironic, Christmas sweater.

Now, that’s MY kind of Holiday table!

Life is a seesaw; for every up, there’ll be a down. Revelations and accusations of chronic sexual abuse of women were aimed at celebrities Woody Allen, Jian Ghomeshi, and Bill Cosby, as well as at pro footballers, politicians and university students. But in the music world, women took a strong lead, garnering awards for their abilities, and sadly, often attention for their willingness to literally expose themselves to the world. (What is it with our obsession with big butts, she asked rhetorically?)

One of the biggest winners of the year is Taylor Swift, who transitioned from introspective and observational country songs to pop and fashion diva . “She released a best-selling album, took on Spotify, performed at the Victoria’s Secret show and turned a tabloid reputation for man-trap desperation on its head, emerging as a single-and-loving-it cheerleader for girl power.”

“Ms. Swift’s latest album, “1989,” her first under the aegis of pop, arrived in October and in its first week sold 1.287 million copies, more than any of her competitors in first-week sales, and more than any album in that time period since 2002.” (The New York Times, December 2014)

I’m still not convinced. And I like this parody of “Shake It Off” better than the original.

On the country scene, Maddie and Tae’s “Girl In A Country Song,” hit number one on the Country charts December 20, 2014 after 23 weeks of climbing said charts. The song is a satire of the contemporary “bro-country” trend, where the biggest male country stars objectify their downhome ladies.

Meghan Trainor’s another female with a Nashville background. Only 20 years old, she previously wrote and self-released two albums, and has had song writing cuts with Rascal Flatts, R5, Sabrina Carpenter and others before releasing the mega earworm “All About That Bass.” Unfortunately the follow up, “Lips Are Movin’ ” is pretty much a virtual remix of “Bass.”

Iggy Azalea has cornered the market on Australian white woman rap. Her song “Fancy” reached number one on the U.S. charts, with Azalea becoming only the fourth solo female rapper ever to top the Hot 100. Jessie J, Ariana Grande & Nicki Minaj work the same street, and their joint effort, “Bang Bang,” debuted at number one in England, and reached the top 10 in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Bulgaria. The song now sits at number 3 on the U.S. charts, and has been nominated for 2015’s Grammy Awards for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.

On the adult contemporary front slash latest Disney song to drive parents mental, both Idina Menzel and Demi Lovato had hits with “Let It Go,” the first song from a Disney animated musical to reach the Billboard top ten. The song, from the smash hit Frozen, has sold 3.5 million copies as of this month. And still counting.

This adorable mother/daughter duo’s video went viral (4.5 million views) when they lip synched to another song from the movie, “Love Is An Open Door.”

Still bubbling on the charts, Sia’s electro-pop hit “Chandelier” video has enchanted viewers with the help of Maddie Ziegler, a young, fearless and apparently boneless 12 year old dancer. The track was certified quadruple platinum by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) and platinum by the Recorded Music NZ (RMNZ) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It’s hard to take your eyes off young Maddie, as 397 million hits will attest.

Madonna had a hissy fit this week, when her new music hit the Internet prematurely. She posted this on Instagram on December 17, “This is artistic rape!! These are early leaked demos, half of which won’t even make it on my album. The other half have changed and evolved. This is a form of terrorism. Wtf!!!! Why do people want to destroy artistic process??? Why steal? Why not give me the opportunity to finish and give you my very best?”

I guess she had it explained to her, because two days later she released six songs from her upcoming album Rebel Heart. Genuine outrage or publicity stunt? Who knows. Or cares.

It wasn’t all good for women this year. Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kim Kardashian, and more were digitally hacked in August 2014 and their nude selfies were posted all over the Internet. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was cancelled after Mama June was found to be dating a sex offender – again.

Women were largely unrepresented at the 2014 Grammy Awards, although Lorde’s “Royals” won Best Pop Solo Performance and Song of the Year. Alicia Keyes won Best R&B Album, and Rhianna picked up the Best Urban Contemporary Album. But overall, it was a Grammy sausagefest, as Daft Punk, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Pharrell Williams cleaned up in the main categories.

Speaking of Pharrell, his famous hat sold for $44,100 at an eBay auction to fast food chain Arbys The money is going to From One Hand to Another, a charity that helps children learn through technology and the arts. Unfortunately, he also seems to have sold his ability to generate a followup hit to “Happy” (Song of the Year at 2014 Soul Train Awards.) His new song, “Gust of Wind,” is pretty gustless.

We lost a lot of good people in 2014, including Joan Rivers, Shirley Temple, Lauren Bacall, Peaches Geldof, Jan Hooks and Maya Angelou. Although the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mickey Rooney, , Richard Attenborough, Harold Ramis, Sid Caesar, Casey Kasem, Tommy the last Ramone, Phil Everly, Pete Seeger, David Brenner, John Pinette, and others were silenced, it seemed that the loss of Robin Williams hit people the hardest. His last cinematic performance, in Night at the Museum; The Secret of the Tomb, debuted December 19^th.

We also lost the services of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who withdrew from the race after being diagnosed with a rare tumour of the abdomen. Brother Doug Ford officially signed up to step into his place just minutes before the deadline for candidates to submit their registration papers. But it was John Tory who won the position. We’ll have to see how well Mayor Tory runs the city, but in the meantime, it’s been a refreshing and nondramatic breath of fresh air for the Big Smoke.

In the ‘States, a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in the August killing of teenager Michael Brown. And an Ohio special grand jury decided that no officers would be charged in the death of 22-year-old John Crawford III, who was shot and killed inside a Wal-Mart while carrying an air rifle sold at the store. In New York, a special grand jury decided to not bring charges against the officers involved in the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died in a chokehold during an arrest. This week, Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins wore a shirt calling for justice for two black Ohioans (John Crawford and 12 year old Tamir Rice) recently killed by police, onto the field before a game against the Cincinnati Bengals. With racial unrest and worldwide protests over the apparent lack of justice, all eyes will be on the grand jury called to decide if the police offers who shot Tamir Rice will be indicted.

At the cinemas, the monster hits primarily had the first initial “G” – Guardians of The Galaxy, Gone Girl, Grand Budapest Hotel. Non-G movies included Ida, creepy 70’s cinema throwback Nightcrawler, Jon Stewart’s Rosewater, and Snowpiercer, with a dramatic ending making the political statement that sometimes you’ve just got to blow it all up and start all over again. What we won’t see this holiday season is “The Interview,” pulled from it’s planned December 25^th opening by Sony Pictures Entertainment, after hackers leaked several other then-upcoming Sony films and sensitive internal information. The hackers, whom the FBI believe have ties to North Korea, demanded that Sony pull the film, which it referred to as “the movie of terrorism,” and threatened terrorist 9/11 style attacks against cinemas that played it.

On December 19, Craig Ferguson’s final episode of the Late Late Show aired, but was largely overshadowed by the finale of Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report. Both shows will be very much missed.

What will the new year bring? Here’s hoping for a lot less controversy, and a lot more quality entertainment. Will the ladies take their current success to the 2015 Grammy Awards or will Sam Smith’s album win Record of the Year?

I’m keeping an eye on several groups that I hope will break out this coming year, including Vintage Trouble, who knocked us dead at Lee’s Palace in September; St. Paul and The Bones, who just keep getting better and better, and alt-J, a group I first saw on British TV who are starting to get airplay in Canada, after scoring several high profile late night spots on American television.

And of course, I remain infatuated and enthralled by Bruno Mars, who’s latest outing with Mark Ronson is racing up the charts. With nods to Nile Rodgers, Nelly, James Brown and early Prince, it’s a more classic funk that can’t help but pull you out of your chair and on to the dance floor.

So that’s it … goodbye 2014. Wishing all Don’t Believe A Word I Say readers a happy holiday season, and a bright and shiny New Year!

Happy Holidays to all! And to all a superior New Year!

When Babies and Bath Water Fly

And once again, we’re having to dodge the flying babies and bathwater. Oh my, dear readers, when will we learn to take a collective deep breath before opining on the veracity and morality of what we read on social media?

The cause célèbre of the last several weeks has been the rash of sexual harassment/attack accusations being launched at some very powerful people. This is not a new thing, but it is a good thing, in how it is being conducted. For too long, pretty much every accusation put forward by a woman against a powerful man has simply been met with denial.

Even in the cases that were adjudicated in the courts, the female accuser would most often be slandered and humiliated, and the powerful male would walk away, legally unimpeded.

Not true, you say? Well golly gosh gee, why don’t you ask Anita Hill how she thinks the 1991 Clarence Thomas trial turned out? Pretty sure he wound up on the Supreme Court, and she wound up being condemned as a liar, despite there being four other female witnesses ready to testify, but never called.

Or cast your mind back to the 2016 Jian Ghomeshi trial. Like Miramax‘s Harvey Weinstein, Ghomeshi’s penchant for sexual harassment was legendary, an ‘open secret’ to most women in the Toronto media biz. Still, Ghomeshi walked, although his reputation was badly smeared.

But now, in the final months of 2017, a flood of accusations against bad actors in the entertainment, corporate and political world has been unleashed. It would be business as usual, except that this time around, we’re not waiting for the accusers to have their day in court. Instead, we’re actually believing the women who’ve come forward.

Since the first explosive charges against Weinstein, the hits have kept coming against other powerful men … this is, without a doubt, the biggest national conversation on sexual harassment since the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas battle of the early ’90s.

Kevin Spacey, James Toback, Ben Affleck, Chris Sovino, Roy Price and then NO! not Mark Halperin! No! Not Matt Lauer! NO!! Not Louis CK! Oh it’s just all too much!

What’s a liberal to do?

And then, the lowest blow of all … Senator Al Franken. Not Al Franken! This one had to be the worst accusation of all. Franken has been the only bright light worth watching or rooting for in the congressional vetting of Trump’s horrible string of nominees, each more disgusting, unqualified, and oblivious than the next.

Within hours of the Franken Fracas, the liberals on social media had staked out their martyr’s place, and had decided that Franken would have to take up residence on the cross, post haste.

Wisely, the Senator has expressed concern for how these events have been remembered and described, and he has demanded that a full Senate Ethics Committee investigation be launched .. upon himself.

What does the Senator know that his critics do not?

I will not take a side on the LeeAnn Tweeden/Al Franken situation; there are simply too many reports, photos and timelines around the event to consider it anything but suspect.

I will say this, though – if it turns out that Tweeden’s accusations were more politically motivated than deeply felt, she will have done an incredible disservice to the brave women who are actually coming forward, at great emotional cost to themselves, against powerful people who have been abusing their power.

And there is absolutely no moral equivalency between Franken’s actions, and the criminal intent and pedophilia of Roy Moore. Franken’s crimes seem to have been a taste for low comedy and an over-abundance of Midwestern bonhomie. A prank, faked “boob grab” photo simply does not rise to the level of assault. Let’s not whinge on about slut-shaming and victim blaming if the reality is that the accusers are actually hard-core political operatives. The investigation will tell us which way that wind actually blows.

I don’t care how ‘woke’ you are, it’s time to take it down a notch, because right now, this is all starting to look and sound a lot like the Salem Witch trials .. a whole lot of hysteria, self-flagellation, and possibly politically motivated accusations. And when it’s over .. just a lot of red, shamed faces, and the dead bodies of the innocent to show for it all.

Yes, we need to believe women. No, all offenses are not equal. You don’t get to be more offended than a victim. I get it .. we’re all giggly because wow .. finally! The bad guys are getting outed! But be careful what you wish for – the furor will die down, and Trump will still be president. That should tell you more than any other thing you read.

Here’s the thing, though …

There have always been bad people accused of bad actions who simply chose to deny the claims. Trump did it last year during his run for President. Roy Moore is doing it now. Men like those are the sort that will continue to deny what they have done, even in the face of audio and video evidence.

(this just in … President Donald Trump now claims that the Access Hollywood tape on which he boasted of sexually assaulting women may not be genuine, according to a report in The New York Times. According to the Times, the president told a senator earlier this year that the tape was not genuine and repeated the claim to an adviser recently.)

The rich and powerful will always try to keep their victims powerless. Trump is in the process of attempting to rewrite history, and to rig the legal system in his, and other abusers, favour.

” The clearest example came in March. It received little coverage at the time. President Donald Trump reversed an Obama-era order that forbid federal contractors from keeping secret sexual harassment and discrimination cases.

The 2014 rule prohibited these companies, which employ about 26 million people, from forcing workers to resolve complaints through arbitration, an increasingly common method businesses use to settle disputes out of the public eye.” Huffington Post

So we’re in an interesting position, we liberal thinkers. On the one hand, we need to keep the pressure on, believing the courageous women who come forward with statements of abuse, and demanding justice; on the other hand, we have to beware of those who will subvert these times, and force us to throw our own best people under the bus.

We cannot play into the Republican playbook of deflect, deflect, deny, deflect. We have to be better than that. Right now, Roy Moore could be found with a dead 14 year old’s body in his trunk and he’d deny it. Not us liberals … we’d lead the blood hounds right to the trunk.

It ain’t a level playing field. Don’t pretend that it is.

It’s asking a lot of us, emotionally. Perhaps this might be the time when we take a deep breath, and wait for a little more information before we take to the ‘streets’ of social media with our torches and pitchforks.

Power Corrupts

Not feeling quite myself these days – it’s like there’s a flu going round. Some sort of energy-sapping, soul-sucking, misery-laden, bone-crushing, muscle-rending miasma, that’s keeping a lot of us from feeling our best, or even very good.

Oh that’s right; Trump is still president. There’s your trouble. Or at least, one steaming pile of it.

It’s almost beyond comprehension that the orange shit gibbon continues to rampage thru the White House halls, especially considering how dangerous his demented ravings are to the planet. Not content with merely twitter goosing the perpetually paranoid North Korean dictator, he thought he’d start another pissing match with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Way to honour your presidential oath to protect and defend the constitution .. or the people. The Nuclear Clock edges closer to midnight, and what we’re hoping is dawn’s early light might just be the glare off a pyrocumulus mushroom shaped cloud.

This TrumpPlague is virulent, and it’s debilitating effects are immediate. You see it’s incapacitating effects most evident amongst those people that feel a strong empathy for people in need, regardless of their race, sex, creed, colour, or age. But even those who like to pick and choose just who gets to receive help and support are starting to notice a pattern in TrumpLand; there’s only one entity that is worthy and/or deserving, and that is the Hairy Sunburnt Marshmallow in control, he who manages to be simultaneously all powerful and yet the only victim in any situation or crisis.

It is a stunning example of someone who could do so much good for the deluded populace who eagerly put he and the Republican Party into power, consistently managing to stop short of ever benefiting or enriching anyone but himself. His specialty is senseless destruction in the pursuit of profit, and the ripping away of any semblance of a social safety net or security that the people may have enjoyed. His belief is that the people he rules over – no matter how young, old, vulnerable or infirm – deserve nothing unearned.

Which is pretty rich, coming from someone who’s never wanted for anything since the day of his birth.

The plain truth is that any idiot can destroy – raise their foot and demolish what others worked so hard to build, or fire a gun and kill a human it took months and years to bring into existence. It’s easy. What’s not easy is creation, and the protection and nurturing of human beings and the good that they are capable of doing.

We’ve seen evil morons force their will upon the vulnerable before. Trump’s
abuse of absolute power is nothing new .. it’s just new to those who refuse to see a pattern of abuse of power in their society.

Abuse against people of colour; immigrants, and the DACA children who have never known any other home than America; mothers who were forced to give birth to children they cannot afford to raise; women and children who have had any sort of medical aid stripped from them in a fit of pique and carelessness; football players who dare to protest racial inequality; journalists who seek to provide information and truth while government agencies conspire to spread disinformation and outright lies, and conspire to conceal their plans to manipulate gullible citizens; Puerto Rican and US Virgin Islands citizens who have the nerve to expect to be treated with the same respect as other U.S. citizens in their time of need…. it’s a constant stream of abuse against anyone who is not HIM.

The TrumpPlague is nothing new. The current wannabe dictator is not an anomaly; he conforms to a pattern of political abuse of power that has been ignored or treated as a quotidian part of North American society since the first American elite signed off on the constitution.

“America, the Empire, … imagined itself as it wanted to be, as it had claimed to be in its infancy against a cruel and despotic king in the late eighteenth century.
It reshaped itself into the rebels, not the imperial overlords.
It shaped itself as oppressed, fighting for freedom.
But America, like every nation, has its ages of psychosis. It has fits of indecision and periods of self-delusion.
Consider how presidents spoke movingly of ‘freedom from tyranny’ while personally holding hundreds of men, women and children in slavery.
Or imagine Jefferson, the Sage of Monticello, who was the father of half-Black children, at the same moment as he wrote, in his only book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” that Black people were essentially nonhuman, a species related to the orangutan. (Does this mean that he saw himself as being into bestiality? Or did this mean he really thought his children were, well, half monkey?)
Americans, like any people, are subject to delusions.
….
In the grisly aftermath of a war that tore millions from the face of Asia, all to cover for the corporate exploitation of Vietnam’s bauxite and other natural resources, the imperial shock trooper, the imperial metallic death’s hand, was father to the rebel.
The were, in fact, more than related.
In truth, they were one.”

(Star Wars and the American Imagination; Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2015.)

But here’s what’s interesting: while we are attempting to make some sense of this current overriding entitlement that abuses everyone who fails to bow down to the Trump throne and proclaim undying loyalty and fealty, our attentions have been caught by something we feel we CAN have a say on, something society likes to pretend that they DO care about and always HAVE cared about, but really only gave lip service to …
the abuse of power over women.

Although we may be powerless to remove Trump from the presidency, at least we can all get behind getting incensed and excited about those who’ve been accused and tried in the public eye for sexual abuse. Right?

Oh, you’ve always been against those with any kind of power forcing themselves on women and children? You mean, while 60 women came forward to accuse Bill Cosby of drugging and raping them, but were ignored and reviled until a male journalist actually had Cosby admit in print that he’d done so? Or when you cheered on the (female) lawyer who got Jian Ghomeshi off the rape hook with her clever manipulation of his weeping victims? Or maybe it’s when serial pedophiles, like former U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert, served just 13 months for a bank fraud conviction linked to his effort to buy off the accusations of a former student he sexually abused during his days as a high school wrestling coach. Like Al Capone, they just couldn’t get him on his real crimes.

Or billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein, the child molesting ringleader of a sexual human trafficking ring, who was allowed to freely leave jail during the day and only come back to overnight at his Palm Beach Country jail for the mere thirteen months he served of an eighteen month sentence in 2008. Two felony counts of soliciting underage victims for sex would get the average person twenty years in federal prison. But not if you have money and power.

These instances, and many others, are why I welcome those, who now call themselves allies, entering into the discussion. Sadly, though, I can already see the future, when the charges are downgraded, the sentence is a wrist slap or commuted, and it all goes back to where it was before this small moment of ‘enlightenment.’ What has gone before tells us that somehow there will always be some devious, quasi legal, way of placing the blame not on the monster that abuses power, but on the helpless victims of the predator.

Why is that?

Women and children do not hold some mysterious power over the male penis. The real power is not inherent in the one allowing or denying open and unasked access to his or her genitals .. it is in the one doing the hiring and the firing, making decisions, controlling our work environment, and deciding how much to pay women, or even whether to treat women like humans or adversaries. It is in those who would rather take what they want, by trick if possible, by force or coercion if necessary, and then deny any culpability in the abuse.

Where’s the power, once the predator has ejaculated into whatever tunnel of love or potted plant they’ve chosen to empty their sperm within, when all they need to do is turn over and sleep, a good sleep, despite now needing to spend the rest of their lives concealing what they’ve done, from those who would make them accountable?

Is it with the ‘powerful’ victims, who then get to clean up the mess, do the ‘walk of shame’ home afterwards, and try to live with the reality that they have been treated as no more than a convenient receptacle for the lust of a powerful person who has neither the need nor desire to control their own sexual drives?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m really glad that there are many powerful people, both men and women, who are now willing to stand by the victims. But hopefully you can forgive those of us who fail to believe that the uncloaking of predators like Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, and yes … the Dear Leader Trump … will change how society will go forth from their current days of reckonings. We know how this game is played – you will forget, and they will rise again, somehow, somewhere. They are merely the figureheads, the most powerful in their fields, the ones who got caught … this time. This abuse of power goes on every day, and in every sphere of human life, from the homes where children have to be wary of their own lust driven parents or step-parents, to your local MacDonalds. It’s happening in small and large business, and in places of government … anywhere where some creep with a modicum of power uses that power to take what they are not willingly offered.

And, lord help me, I don’t see it ending anytime soon.

“Incest and other forms of prolonged sexual abuse are such profound violations that they provoke a different form of disbelief than the kind that women often face when they talk about sexual violence they have experienced; when you tell your mother you’re being raped by your father, as the author of The Incest Diary does multiple times in her adolescence, you are disbelieved not because your mother is casually misogynistic, in keeping with her culture, but because she can’t believe you and uphold her understanding of the world. Incest is a violation so profound that it breaks knowledge. In these cases we disbelieve not because we’re so inured to a world where men take sexual advantage of women that such abuse seems normal, but because we can’t conceive of a world in which what we believe is normal could be so defiled.”
(https://electricliterature.com/who-gets-to-write-about-sexual-abuse-and-what-do-we-let-them-say-928dfbd184d6)

For many, the exposure of the Cosbys, the Weinsteins and the Ailes comes as a surprise. The knee jerk reaction is to disbelieve the victims, as if this sort of abuse is an aberration, a gross accusal of wrongdoing that is impossible to fathom, given the position, power and wealth of the accused. Such disbelief speaks to a naiveté and privilege that belies the reality of what we call first world civilization.

Power, fame and wealth do not bestow intelligence, empathy or humanity. In many cases, in fact, they are diametrically opposed.

We so often hear of those that can only believe an accusation of abuse from a women if it has happened to one of their own .. their daughter, their sister, their wife. Then, and only then, is sexual assault scary and disgusting. Consider how comforting that is to those of us whom you don’t consider your ‘own’ in some fashion.

I would like to think that this depressing interval in history can be a time of revelation, a time when the abused and oppressed can tell their stories and be believed, when the realization that women are people as valuable and respected as men – indeed as equal – is accepted as fact, even if just from this day forward.

But I’m not holding my breath.

” My friend was so ready to excuse the actions of this man as normal—he was a relatively new acquaintance, I might add—that he waved me off and acted as if my extreme discomfort was negligible.

Never mind the fact that he was already doing harm, by ignoring my wishes to be left alone and making me feel vaguely unsafe during an otherwise pleasant evening. Never mind that I wasn’t asking for my friend to beat his ass (a show of magnanimity, I thought!), or that I wasn’t going so far as to scream rape or otherwise suggest that I was in danger of him sexually assaulting me right then and there (even though my spidey senses told me he certainly might, if given the chance, since “no” clearly wasn’t in this guy’s vocabulary)..”

(https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/i-have-been-raped-by-far-nicer-men-than-you-1819412131)

One of the saddest things I’ve read in recent days was on my own Facebook page, in a thread where the discussion of Weinstein’s abuse of power was inevitably compared to Trump’s, with a meme that quoted Trump’s own words, spoken on that Hollywood Access tape, before … BEFORE .. the election that saw him crowned King of America.

The (American) woman who commented on the post was incensed. She could not believe that Trump had said those words – in public, on video tape, irrefutably – and had still been elected as President of the United States.

He did. He was. And he is.

We’ve all got the TrumpPlague. And it may be the death of us.

When Celebrities Attack

Ronan Farrow, son of film maker Woody Allen and actress Mia Farrow, recently published a strongly worded defense of his sister, Dylan’s, accusations of juvenile sexual abuse, and re-stated his belief that Allen’s celebrity and wealth have effectively whitewashed the director.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/my-father-woody-allen-danger-892572

Having read a wealth of copy, pro and con, on the subject, I have my own opinion, as do most of those who dabble in the world of social media. There’s no lack of outrage from either side of the debate. We will likely never know what really happened, so we tend to base our conclusion on our own ethical and moral biases, and, sadly, on which side recently presented the best defense for our review.

In a week in which Jian Ghomeshi, once a rising media star in Canada, now largely vilified despite a brilliant defense lawyer who shielded him from most of the consequences of his deeds, has once again skated ably and legally away from more dire penalties, it’s tempting to pick a side.

Throw in the sixty allegations of sexual abuse now pending against comedian Bill Cosby, the postmortem accusations against British radio and TV personality Sir Jimmy Savile, and decades of rumours and confessions from women who claim to have lain – whether in thrall or in fear – with famous musicians, actors, comedians, religious leaders of all faiths, politicians, and those with even a modicum of power, and it all starts to seem like a world in which anyone – and I include males as well – can be blithely used as nothing more than an inanimate object fit only to be a sperm receptacle, for the pleasure of anyone who can afford the price.

Take away the celebrity angle, and it’s just another story of objectification and abuse. Money and power can purchase, or simply take without compensation,any commodity, including the bodies of human beings. When challenged, money can certainly be used to cover up or play down criminal acts. Justice should not be blind, and especially should not be blinded by those who can intimidate, whether financially or through abuse of power.

Take away the celebrity angle, and our need to pedestalize the wealthy and powerful, and consider the reality of sexual abuse.

(all statistics have been obtained from this governmental report: http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/ccs-ajc/rr06_vic2/p3_4.html)

According to Canada’s own Justice Department, sexual assault is the crime least likely to be reported to police. 78% of victims never come forward, either afraid of further repercussions from their attacker, or in the belief that, even as they confide intimate and embarrassing details to authorities, justice will not be served. In those who do ask for police assistance, the request often comes long after the offence has occurred.

Women account for 85% of all victims of sexual offences, with 69% of women who reported having been sexually assaulted in childhood, being far more likely to be assaulted again after the age of 16. The male victims were also more likely to be children.

“83% of women with disabilities will be assaulted, sexually assaulted, or abused in their lifetimes.”

Those most vulnerable to predatory assault are children, children and adults with disabilities, the unemployed or those with low incomes, the single, separated or divorced, those who have been institutionalized, and Aboriginal women. In other words, people who are already disenfranchised and largely defenceless are deemed of such little value that their assault is as seemingly inevitable as sunrise.

Over the course of their lives, victims of sexual assault are more likely to require therapeutic treatment after the assault, due to psychological and/or physical consequence of these crimes. ‘Nervous breakdowns,’ suicidal ideation and attempts (1/5^th of rape victims have attempted suicide,) and post-traumatic stress disorders lead many individuals to seek professional treatment. And of course, once a diagnosis of psychiatric distress is on record, the victim’s recollections become less likely to be taken seriously by authorities.

There are so many disturbing factors in our interest in the misconduct of celebrities. Sex sells, so the media takes advantage of our desire to revel in prurient fascination with the sexuality of the rich and famous, secretly wondering how our own pedestrian genitals would compare. There’s a whiff of self-abasement and forelock tugging in our willingness to self-righteously defend the celebrity’s honour ,while dismissing allegations of misconduct as ‘preposterous,’ and the stench of envious defiance and schadenfreude in the opposite reaction, of taking pleasure in their comeuppance. A breathless focus on the celebrity’s well-being, present or future, refuses to recognize the basic rights and dignity, much less truthfulness, of the apparent victim.

And all of these elements distort a larger, uglier fact – the systemic abuse of the vulnerable by those who believe themselves above the law when it comes to the pursuit of their own mindless pleasure.

When celebrities are exposed as base humans, capable of denying the humanity of their victims, our own true feelings about the rights of our fellow beings are laid bare, and the deficiencies of a legal system still rooted in laws largely forged in times when women were considered second class citizens is revealed. The tender underbelly of misogyny shows itself in comments that claim the victim ‘loved’ the abuse, or begged for more , implying that the superior penises of those with money or power carries with it delights beyond our wildest dreams. Very often, the victims are reproached as vile seekers of fame by association, or derided as greedy gold diggers, only out to strip the beleaguered celebrity of his hard earned wealth. Certainly, the large majority of those who come forward begging for legal recourse are generally dismissed out of hand as liars, eager for personal gain, until either the weight of multiple accusations or the approbation of a male interpreter of the details of the assault enters the mix.

Meanwhile, the after effect on the bodies and minds of those who have been abused is dismissed as irrelevant.

Dylan Farrow’s plight should be an opportunity for meaningful discourse on societal values, and should serve to focus attention on a justice system woefully in need of fine tuning in respect to the rights of all citizens, not simply those owners of property or of the male gender.

Instead, in Ms Farrow’s case, as in so many others in which the alleged victim has been left without a satisfactory conclusion, the healing never begins, and the pain never ends.

Peter Cottontail Has Left the Building

This week, leading up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday, has always been considered the Holiest of Holy weeks to Catholics. As a child, I looked forward to new shoes and a showy hat (women still had to wear them in church, back then) and a basketful of goodies – maybe even a chocolate bunny!

But that was then, and this is now, and it’s been a long time since anyone’s hunted for coloured eggs at my house. Peter Cottontail has left the building, and this week was a horror show all around, with bombings in Brussels, the ramping up of panic in America over both terrorism and Trump’s continued putsch to glory, interspersed with freezing rain, a dismal outcome (for many) to the Jian Ghomeshi trial, a Liberal budget that projects a $30 billion deficit, and a surprisingly negative response to the new Batman vs Superman movie. Oh, and the beer and liquor stores were closed for two days.

And you can add to that the shock accompanying hearing of the death of comedian Gary Shandling. At 66, he was far too young, and we were not ready for his genius to leave us.

You will forgive me if this has been a week I’d prefer to forget.

The loss of another celebrity, former Mayor Rob Ford, also captured attention. I’ve written about him before, and my feelings about his tenure remain unchanged. So do the feelings of those who admired him. However, Torontonians who dared to pen anything more than a non-committal noting of his passing were soundly excoriated by their fellow citizens for not prostrating at his bier with enough respect.

The world press had no such strictures.

Some people will try to convince you that their way to mourn is the only and correct way. I disagree. There is no ‘right way” to mourn, and demanding fealty at the point of a disapproving moral gun does not change the past. You would think that the unprecedented two day period of lying in state at City Hall (at the request of the family) would appease the bereaved, but apparently, that is not enough. Those who revered his blustering, bumbling ways would have us re-write history, in an effort to whitewash his misdeeds, and beatify him as Toronto’s savior.

It’s all so very reminiscent of the post-death canonization of Margaret Thatcher. Reviled during her tenure for her hawkish policies, key role in bringing about the first Gulf War, and advocating for the 2003 attack on Iraq, along with her ushering in of a period where the rich got richer at the expense of the poor, her influence negatively affected millions around the world. And yet, her canonization began just nanoseconds after word of her death hit the airwaves; she was lionized worldwide in the press, her state funeral cost Britain £3.1 million pounds, and Iron Lady statues made of actual iron were erected in places as diverse as the Falkland Islands , despite Argentina’s fury.

Meanwhile, the song “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” raced to the top of the British charts.

There’s a price to be paid for assuming a position of power – the admission includes having your life and history scrutinized and deemed worthy or unworthy, both by those who liked you and by those who didn’t, who still had to live with the impact of political actions. It is ‘misapplied death etiquette,’ as journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote, to be expected to apply the same moral high ground we do to the deaths of private individuals as we do when considering the entirety of the life of an influential public figure.

“There’s something distinctively creepy – in a Roman sort of way – about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. This is accomplished by this baseless moral precept that it is gauche or worse to balance the gushing praise for them upon death with valid criticisms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with loathing Margaret Thatcher or any other person with political influence and power based upon perceived bad acts, and that doesn’t change simply because they die. If anything, it becomes more compelling to commemorate those bad acts upon death as the only antidote against a society erecting a false and jingoistically self-serving history.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-death-etiquette

Ah, but the self-anointed social media judges and lawyers would disagree.

A video capturing an incident involving a young woman, confronted with parking in a handicapped space, went viral this week. Shot here in Toronto, in front of a Tim Hortons, the video showed her reaction to being caught – privileged outrage, threats, and the throwing of two cups of coffee at the videographer.

Surprisingly, many were more incensed by the videographer’s capture and sharing of the incident, than at the belligerent aggression of the scofflaw. Despite assaulting the photographer, and driving off in a huff, aiming her vehicle at the cameraman before swerving away, these commentators believed she should not have been confronted, but rather, that the photographer should have ‘minded his own business.’

As the video went viral, international viewers were stunned to see her rudeness … aren’t all Canadians pretty much nice and polite people, they asked? No, some, with possibly the best of intentions, are bullies.

Bullying in an attempt to force your morality, or personal and world views, onto others, is still bullying. I have one ex-Facebook friend who blocked my posts because her nephews follow her page, and she censors what they can see. Another Facebooker resented my questioning the morality of the actions of Israel towards Palestine, despite my information having come from a Jewish peace activist living in Israel.

And the culmination of the trial of Jian Ghomeshi unleashed some of the vilest comments I’ve ever seen directed at alleged victims of assault. The women were ‘liars,’ ‘manipulative,’ ‘shameful fame seekers,’ ‘femitards,’ ‘toxic bitches,’ and worse. Despite the fact that a total of 21 women had originally come forward to complain, with identical accusations, about Ghomeshi’s weird ideas on sex play, only three were brave enough to appear in court, and all three were pummeled with relentless demands to answer questions about, not just the attack, but trivial events of a decade past – what lawyers like to call ‘whacking’ – while Ghomeshi sat silent. (ghomeshi cosby.jpg)

The judge’s decision acquitted Ghomeshi, but also noted that his verdict did not mean these events ‘never happened.’ The judge simply didn’t believe the women’s testimony, flawed as it was by misremembered events, private messages between two of the accusers, and contact with the accused after the fact.

For women of every political stripe, the decision was flawed, and the system biased. At City Hall, one naked protester was unnecessarily and roughly tackled to the ground, her nipples scraping the pavement as she was dragged away by the police. Despite nudity being legal in Canada, the uptight citizens must not be discomfited by the sight of a woman’s breasts.

From a story released by the CBC: “While former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi’s acquittal has sparked protests, many within the legal community are praising the decision, agreeing with the judge that the complainants’ credibility issues raised reasonable doubt in the case.”

By implication, stating that “many within the legal community” support the decision, dismisses by extension those who found the decision as to be ill-informed. In actual fact, many of those who have criticized the decision are academic and legal scholars.

Am I biased? Perhaps. Or is the system itself flawed? At the beginning of the month, a report filed by the Criminal Lawyer’s Association found that women were leaving the field of criminal law in dramatically high numbers, due to systemic discrimination.

“It found low pay, lack of financial support for maternity leave and being treated differently than male peers by judges and court staff as some of the reasons so many women are leaving private practice of criminal law,” reported Maureen Brosnahan for the CBC. “Many women also reported a lack of respect and being treated differently than male lawyers by court officers, police, crown attorneys and judges. One reported being called “little lady” repeatedly. Others said they were chastised for asking judges for time to pick up children from school whereas their male counterparts who made similar requests were not rebuked.”

Whether or not it is possible to change how sensitive cases are handled in an atmosphere where women are routinely marginalized, it’s still time for an honest reappraisal of how sexual assault cases are conducted in Canada, especially in the face of the numbers.

“In Canada, the low rates of conviction for sexual assault are an indictment of the system itself. As a 2014 Toronto Star article revealed using Statscan data from 2004 and 2006, 460,000 women self-reported sexual assault: 15,200 reported to the police, 5,544 charges were laid, with 2,824 prosecutions and 1,519 convictions. Again, that’s almost a half million self-reported assaults, and 1,519 convictions. Something is deeply wrong.”

Understandably – and not because we are stupid or legally naive, but because 1 in 4 women has experienced a sexual assault in her lifetime, and has a strong personal stake in how this case concluded – many women were incensed at the Ghomeshi decision.

Enter ‘mansplaining.’

Either unable or unwilling to see how angry and hurt many women are by the Ghomeshi decision, mansplainers flocked to the posts women made about their feelings on the ruling. “Read the decision,” they intoned, as though we were either too stupid to understand, or blind to the many gloatings of those who’d ‘called it’ from the beginning, and who were dancing in joy at both the decision and having been proved right.

Hey! Your side won! Now could you take your foot off my neck so that I can sympathize and empathize with women who feel as I do, stunned at the inevitability of once again, being re-victimized post-assault?

Are you so utterly deaf to the agony of people in pain that your only recourse is to repeat incessantly that ‘justice has been done?’

Or as one woman keened in her blog, “How can you be so blind? How can you insert yourself into a woman pouring her grief out, to tell her that legally, she has no case? That what happened to her, didn’t factually happen. To throw a smothering blanket on the fire igniting in her. She has no reality. The law is the reality. It is the neutral, the official record. It is gas lighting on a massive scale.

So I know perhaps the evidence wasn’t there, or that the burden of proof wasn’t met. And I don’t fucking care. This isn’t about this one case. This case was inevitable, like watching a lemming marching to its doom.

It’s every fucking time. Every time. The mundanity of the oppression, the predictability of the reaction, the backlash that follows. “ (https://afateofpossibilities.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/this-isnt-about-the-ghomeshi-case/)

It is indeed gaslighting. It’s telling people that their emotions are invalid, that what they see and feel has no weight. It’s a way to keep those who disagree with you off balance, wondering if perhaps what they perceive isn’t real, casting doubt on their mental stability, pointing to others that agree with YOUR beliefs as proof that THEY are in the wrong. It is psychological abuse. And it’s an ugly way to treat anyone.

The overwhelming miasma of this week – at least for me – has been one of outraged, self-righteous, phony, morality gone mad, and overwhelmingly imposed upon all in its path. Think as I think, believe as I believe, abandon your own truths and take on mine.

Whether it be Trump calling the beleaguered city of Brussels ‘a hellhole,’ or Cruz demanding strict policing of American Muslims in their own neighbourhoods; police manhandling protestors, or judges calling women deceitful and self-serving, it’s not been a good week to have a high Emotional I.Q., and a low tolerance for sanctimonious public principles forced upon the social order by the court of public opinion.

(first published March 27/16 (bobsegarini.wordpress.com/2016/03/27/roxanne-tellier-peter-cottontail-has-left-the-building)