Going On Rides
When I was a teenager, a teacher at my school was disciplined over an inappropriate (sexual, romantic) relationship with a student. It was a school huge enough to allow seven degrees of separation between me, an uninterested party, and the people close to the actual student involved. I remember, with vivid detail, the speech my homeroom advisor* gave about the matter. “When you interact with a teacher you should feel safe,” she said. “You should feel like when you’re little and you’re in the back of your parents’ car driving home. Like totally safe.”
When I was little and falling asleep in the back of my parents’ car, NPR was playing. Most of the programming went over my head, but I liked yelling along to the parts of A Prairie Home Companion that I recognized. These were mainly the jingles and the repeating slogans. It was, in many ways, an odd show. It was nostalgic for a time in radio most people are far too young to remember, including doing a weekly private eye drama. They played the same exact joke commercials for the same products, the joke being about unmarried male farmers. The monologue centered around talking about the weather in a place that didn’t exist, week after week, year after year, like they’d just invented winter. And yet it had its own charms, and a dedicated following.
Twitter is not a healthy pursuit in the least but it feels like the only thing fast enough to keep up with the news cycle of collective life. It’s fast because it is shallow and uncritical, zipping from source to source at a coke-fueled Mach 10. I followed the same pattern seeing Keillor’s name as I did Al Franken’s. I thought: is he dead? Then I read on and thought: well, in a way. The news might have been no softer had I been looking at it on paper, thoughtfully presented in longform. I never cared for Fox News, I was dimly aware of Harvey Weinstein, I openly scoffed at Anthony Weiner, Louis C.K. wasn’t my thing, and I’d never heard of many others. Keillor was closer to home and a little too close for comfort. Outside of Twitter, I have developed a weird relationship with reading the details of the allegations. Picturing John Besh gripping an hors d’oeuvre between his fingers and thumb to shove it into the mouth of some woman just trying to make a living made me nauseous. I closed my laptop and took a walk. Then I came back and read the whole thing. I’m not fact-finding, or looking for a Dos and Don’ts list, or trying to figure anything out. Writing a #MeToo post might be an important act of catharsis. But reading them can provide voyeuristic trauma porn, or perversely help abusers legitimize their actions, or it might do nothing.
Yesterday, WNYC announced the suspension of Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz over allegations of inappropriate conduct. No details were provided. It’s far from clear that interested members of the general public are owed such details, given that nobody seems to know exactly what to do with them. Incorporate them into useless sexual harassment seminars? Comb over the offenders’ production searching for clues? Tut over them at the water cooler as you try not to think about your own workplace?
The ‘Harvey Effect’ and ‘Weinstein Wave’ terms don’t fit exactly. Weinstein doesn’t work as a beginning point: the first domino seems to have been Bill O’Reilly or just before him. It’s harder to filter out oppositional reactions on Twitter than it might seem. The ‘witch hunt’ label is interesting. Historical witch hunts strike me as an example of men victimizing and silencing women, often women who were noncomformists in some way, or just unlucky. The witch hunts were public affairs controlled by a few private citizens. They revolved around irreversible punishments decided by a privileged few according to their own illogical heuristics. Nobody got to say they were addicts seeking treatment and go to ground somewhere.
I certainly have stopped reading the statements. Most of them are statements; a real apology includes the word ‘sorry.’ The statements give me more than nausea: it’s something closer to a stomach-borne disgust, tinged with a little betrayal. Can’t anybody just do their damn jobs? How many rides were we all taken on?
