Which side are you on?

There are a few lessons to be gleaned from the recent wave of allegations, confessions and apologies that keep pouring out by the day: one is that sexual harassment doesn’t have a political affiliation, a socioeconomic status, a race or a profession. It’s a problem across the spectrum that no one really seems equipped to speak tactfully about or do anything about, for that matter. Another is that anyone looking to celebrities and politicians for moral guidance would be better served visiting a shrink, a preacher, a used car salesman or some mystical hybrid of the three.
           
It happens in Hollywood. It happens in the Iowa statehouse. It happens in high-rise buildings in New York City and county courthouses in small Southern towns. But perhaps the most frightening detail of the entire fiasco is just how unwilling some people are to believe the accusations— that is, when the accused is on their side of the ideological aisle.
           
The timing of the Roy Moore and Al Franken stories could not have possibly been more perfect in demonstrating the balkanization and selective outrage epidemic in this country. Shortly after Franken’s alleged groping of TV personality LeAnn Tweeden hit the news, a conservative friend of mine, who I won’t name, texted me that he needed to step down immediately. I agreed and added that I hope he took Moore—who’s accused of sexual involvement with several teenage girls, including one who was 14, while he was in his 30s—with him on the way out. His response?
           
“Why don’t I see anything on Franken except Fox News?”
           
This message, in a nutshell, summed up the current state of American discourse. It’s no longer about who did right and who did wrong or equally applying the laws of basic human courtesy and decency to everyone. It’s more about constantly searching for hypocrisy in our political opponents (which is never hard to find) and shielding ourselves from any responsibility in the process. To pare this down into 2017 lingo, if you don’t like what’s being said about you, call it fake news and say the other guy is worse.   
           
Bill Dix’s recent press conference—covered in greater detail in a separate column on this page—is a prime example. If we just perpetually pass the buck, slap the perpetrators on the wrists and hire some outside agency to teach us how not to ogle every female that walks in, the problem will solve itself eventually. Magic!
           
Of course, the 2016 presidential election pitted the wife of an alleged serial sexual abuser who went out of her way to discredit her husband’s accusers and a man who bragged about doing certain things in a certain Access Hollywood tape that you’re probably aware of by now. If we’re trying to address the issue, we may not have chosen the best role models.
           
The standard response to all of this is to shrug, claim that the opposition didn’t get mad enough when one of theirs did the same thing and descend back into our rabbit holes in the comment sections at Breitbart and Think Progress where the alternate reality can continue uninterrupted.
           
I, however, don’t think it’s revolutionary to ask that both Moore and Franken step away from their positions of power (though, to be fair, Moore hasn’t won his yet), but I don’t expect either of them to do anything of the sort.
 
The cases are particularly fascinating for the real hypocrisies they’ve exposed: Franken, a blue-as-they-come progressive and former “Saturday Night Live” comedian from the People’s Republic of Minnesota, fancies himself a champion of women’s rights and feminism, and Moore, a disgraced judge with a rather dimwitted view of the Constitution, holds views on homosexuality so abhorrent that he’d probably fit right in with the Westboro Baptist Church.
 
In the 1993 film “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s character, a conceited weatherman, relives the same day over and over until he finally comes to his senses and changes his ways, and much of America’s history has followed the same trajectory. Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act and 25 years after the Rodney King riots, race is as present as ever, and 45 years after Vietnam, we’re embroiled in another endless nation building conflict that has little to do with national security.
 
Sixty years after the Red Scare, we’re still accusing anyone who drinks vodka, keeps a nutcracker doll at home or owns a copy of War and Peace of being a Russian agent.
 
Five decades after we elected a soulless Machiavellian with a heart of black tar and an apocalyptic vision of the country he was tasked to lead, we did it again, and just over a year into the Trump experiment, his supporters are still endlessly searching for dirt on his former opponent, bringing up her e-mails at every opportunity and acting as if she’s actually the president.
 
So, if we can just give this whole sexual harassment thing another 50 or 100 years, we’ll have it solved in no time. What could possibly go wrong between now and then?
 
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby