Tempting Indictment by Association
When one sets out to imagine the most despicable acts a person might be capable of effecting upon another person, any number of gut-churning fantasies may come to mind. A human-centipede is up there. Some of the shit from ‘1984,’ head in a cage of rats and all that. Most of the movie ‘Seven.’ Various methods of historical torture including but not exclusively, water-boarding, nail-pulling, testicle removal, disembowelment, Judas’ Cradle (pyramid up the rectum), stretching and opening and expanding the body, sleep depravation, sensory depravation, social depravation, and good old fashioned scaphism, during which honey is rubbed upon you and fed to you so that insects eat and breed within your body cavity for your personal entertainment and horror as you rot to death.
As it goes, the rule of the game is the slower the horror, the more terrifying, the more painful, the captial-w Worse. The longer the victim lives while enduring the torture, the more effective the torture may be called. Bonus points if the torture is able to cascade from the victim to affect others in such a psychological manner.
Now under such a rule, no torture might be more effective (i.e. worse) than the statutory mind-fucky rape of a boy or girl under the age of 13, an admittedly arbitrary age but one around which an ego (for lack of a more accessible psychological term, though a.k.a. an ‘identity’ or ‘self-structure,’ or ‘way one relates to and interacts with and reconciles the world’) that will henceforth define this 13-year-old’s existence, perception, and reality begins its final stage of coalescence to make the person a real, actual, sane, functional adult, a stage as fragile and touchy as the steering joystick of a jet-powered car approaching Mach-2. And here, enter Jeffrey Epstein.
If you don’t think what Epstein did (even what he was convicted of over a decade ago) is tantamount to being the third link in a human centipede conga line, go read about the rape of Noa Pothoven, a Dutch girl who was molested and assaulted (on multiple occasions, she said) before she was 15, and who asked to be euthanized in order to escape her pain, and who eventually died this year as a result of her refusal to eat or drink. That was a girl who was engaged in sexual congress against her will. Perhaps counterintuitively, it may be worse if you’re mind-fucked into thinking it was your choice to gurgle sexagenarian testes, which is, as we now know from reports that he paid girls (i.e. kids) to recruit other girls into the sex-web, how Epstein operated.
We can forgo the ‘alleged’ chatter, one may assume, seeing as Epstein has already admitted and registered and done time for crimes of using underage kids for sexual purposes. He did these things. He’s also rich. Which means he didn’t get stopped soon enough. It means he attracted power. It means he was central to politics. It means he hung around people like the Clintons, Donald Trump, and various others who strived for powerful and public positions.
The immediate reaction across social media has been to knee-jerk indict these types of folks in the same paddy wagon as Epstein. And why the hell not? Enough of us hate each and every one of them. Enough of us hate each other. Enough of us hate ourselves and are willing to live comfortably with how gruesome we can be. But!
But let us offer another and far less popular, far more maddening position. Sometimes we don’t fully understand the proximity to evil that comes with any kind of power. What if the purpose of those who strive for power is not to stand steadfast as stone in the face of evil, but to alter that evil to the form of good wherever possible — and with that let’s concentrate for the remaindered of our time on a hypothetical situation with Bill Clinton, because the issue of Donald Trump may be too morally (and ethically) hazardous to unpack in anything less than a tome. (The again, and totally aside, it may be as simple as Donald is too banal for morality more complex than a Magic 8 Ball. TBD.)
Yesterday, Clinton’s office offered a statement on Epstein that said in part: ‘In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane: one to Europe, one to Asia, and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation.’ It went on to say the former Pres. hasn’t spoken to Epstein in a decade, and has never been to his private (alleged, we should say now) island of sexploits.
Contrary to that statement, there are reports that Clinton took as many as 26 flights on the jet. There’s no way of proving a certain number accurate, so let’s agree it’s sufficient to say he flew on the jet and he knew Epstein quite well.
Clinton’s work since leaving office has been with his Foundation and with the aforementioned CGI. Both of these are philanthropic organizations that depend on donors to function and to, as should be assumed, ‘do good.’
The notion of ‘good’ isn’t something we need to endure at the moment — but we do need to agree that it’s ambiguous and subjective, and that it’s often weighed as something called a ‘greater good,’ meaning the sacrifice of something small for something large.
It should come as no surprise that it sometimes takes a stomach for depravity combined with a intrinsic lack of depravity, itself, to do good. It sometimes requires a character who is willing to see that sticking to his morals means acting as though he has none. It sometimes takes an understanding that now is not always the time to act, and a memory that serves you at the correct time.
Therefore, in this hypothetical (and that should be underlined, almost to the point that he’s now a character in a novel) version of Clinton, where he is after an ultimate good for which sacrifices must be made, we might begin to understand a relationship with an evil like Epstein.
Clinton, in this half-fictional world, has undoubtedly had to live with and come to terms with some pretty fucking awful decisions — moments where he’s ordered deaths, ignored atrocities, played God as he weighed one life against another. That’s the nature of a certain job. (And the only person who should have such a job is the person who doesn’t want it at all.) So, do we stand in complete disbelief that a man burdened with this type of baggage could sit on a plane while a topless teen drops to her knees for a billionaire? Of fucking course not. But we’ve come to know Bill Clinton and some of these other characters around Epstein over the years. We can say they’re cowards; we can say they are horse traders; we can say they are opportunists and cheats and liars and pretty shitty guys. But, unless proven otherwise, they are not the root of this evil — and make no mistake if it wasn’t clear in the first few paragraphs, this is as evil as they come, this is generational evil that will have repercussions felt for a hundred years — Epstein is the root. Harvey Weinstein is the root. Kevin Spacey is the root. Bill Cosby is the root. Joe Jackson is the root. Fuck those guys. Get out the Roundup and pour it down their throats until their skin boils. Fine. Just consider using caution to indict by association (as politically and emotionally appealing as that may be), because sometimes a proximity to evil is more necessary than it seems.
And fuck Acosta.
And R. Kelly.