I have to admit that it was a bit of a cultural shock to see ultra-MAGA Rep. Margorie Taylor Greene at the podium speaking forcefully on behalf of something I also passionately believe in: namely, the need for all the records in the Jeffrey Epstein case to come out. It happened at an emotional press conference in D.C. Wednesday where a number of victims of Epstein and his collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell, among the hundreds of victims in total, spoke in public for the first time telling their personal stories and demanding justice on behalf of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
But it is indicative of the kind of non-partisan passionate concern that is exactly what needs to be amplified if we are to defeat what has evolved into a menacing evil that is increasingly gripping our democracy.
The lust that drove the highly criminal and inhuman behavior of so many of Epstein’s clients and friends to systematically rape and abuse underaged girls is the same generic lust that is turning our democracy into an indifferent and cruel dictatorship. Sadly, our president has spoken openly about his fixation under the grip of this menace. Anyone who can talk boastfully of grabbing the private parts of a women because he can get away with it, as Trump did in 2016 as most of the world heard on tape, is fully capable of rape, whether of an underaged girl or of a democracy.
As was made clear by some of the testimony in Wednesday’s historic press conference, however, it was not only powerful men who were responsible for what was permitted to happen. Law enforcement and even the media were culpable in allowing the Epstein criminal enterprise to go on. The ugly reality is that this is due to a culture of male supremacy and its counterpart, female inferiority, that we live in. Ultimately, this mentality is what is bringing down our entire culture and our experiment in a democracy that recognizes the fact that, as our Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence, “All (persons) are created equal.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Even then, in 1776, most understood that “men” referred to all persons, even if the extension of that fundamental notion has taken centuries to be extended to all.
What best binds all humanity is this Enlightenment notion that coupled with the rise of science and reason inflamed the passions that led to the revolution to create the United States of America as a constitutional republic.
The alternatives that defined this revolution then can and must become the grounds of an overwhelming majority of Americans in these days, as exemplified by the overwhelming reaction to the Epstein affair now.
It should be asserted that what divides us today is not our political parties, but human identities defined by one of two different world views and behaviors. I have called them Promethean and Dionysian. The former is the identity that generations have been raised upon and lived their lives accordingly: lives of dignity, decency and virtue, up to this day. The latter is the enemy of democracy, grounded in a nihilistic anarcho-hedonistic identity that was allowed to run rampant in America in the 1970s.
Trump rose to a modicum of personal power in those 1970s, under the tutelage of his attorney and friend, the aide to the poisonous Sen. Joseph McCarthy, named Roy Cohn. Cohn was the seminal nihilist who operated by stripping away any and all moral suasion to achieve his objectives.
Promethean, as in life-giving, versus Dionysian, as in achieving personal pleasure by overcoming moral or decency boundaries, are our choices as a nation.
As a gay man, I’ve lived through and fought the effort to drive our movement into the grip of a hedonistic identity and culture that persists to this day. I’ve asserted that we are fundamentally Promethean, instead.
The same is true for all of us, while Epstein and Trump epitomize male chauvinist licence and hedonism.
