Random Reflections: Drinkers, Rapists, Potty Mouths

Trump’s personal assistant, a twenty-eight-year-old party girl — Reince Priebus’s party, that is — went out drinking with reporters, and lo and behold, she got a little drunk, whereupon she bragged and blabbed to said reporters about personal matters related to the Trump family. For this indiscretion, which she claims, pathetically, was supposed to be “off the record,” she has been dismissed from her White House position.

Naturally, the first thought on most people’s minds was probably the obvious, “What kind of idiot, working as a personal assistant to the president of the United States, goes drinking with people whose line of work entails spending every day of their lives digging for dirt on that president?” (Answer: The kind of idiot who gets hired by the kind of president who would accept the recommended assistant of the GOP establishment weasel who helped that president secure the party’s presidential nomination in exchange for a cushy cabinet appointment.)

My first thought, however, was a little different, since I already take it for granted that anyone working in this administration is a classless, soulless, unprincipled, sell-my-mother-for-material-gain bootlicker. For me, this story is just another amusing reminder of the real meaning of alcohol in today’s “advanced world.”

This drug is so necessary and essential to the comfort and sense of self-worth of most people today — from every stratum of society, in every age bracket, and at all levels of education and career achievement — that they would literally jeopardize their careers, compromise their nation’s leaders, and violate the trust and privacy of their employers, merely for another meaningless opportunity to pretend, over drinks, that they enjoy the company of people they neither know nor care to know, i.e., merely for the sake of holding onto a few “drinking friends” to keep themselves from looking (to the world and to themselves) like what they really are, and what most “recreational drinkers” actually are, in the final analysis: lonely drunks, regardless of how many fellow human shells they try to surround themselves with for cover. Hence the need to “loosen up,” to “join the party,” to “grease the social wheels.” All of these are euphemisms for pretending you have friends when you really don’t, or rather for pretending the humans sitting around the table are your friends, when in fact everyone’s only real friend present is the bottle or pitcher sitting on that table.


At the Venice Film Festival, Roman Polanski received his now-customary “drown-out-the-critics” standing ovation. In other words, the man who traditionally receives the most enthusiastic support from the cinematic art crowd is the only one who has actually been convicted — not accused, remember, but convicted — of child rape, and the only one who is living on the lam to escape sentencing for the child rape of which he was convicted.

When you hear the descriptive words, “was convicted of child rape,” I suppose it is normal that your first thought will usually be “Oh, well, yeah, people get ‘convicted’ of child rape all the time, but conviction and guilt are two different things; and besides, I think a man should be judged on the quality of his work, not on incidental questions like ‘Did he or didn’t he commit the child rape of which he was found guilty in a court of law?'”

Oh, wait. That isn’t your first thought? Well, I would wager it isn’t the first thought of anyone in the “art” community either — unless the subject of the discussion happens to be one of their own, and one whose “persecution” (as he calls it) is conveniently couched in political language about “conservative moralism” to evade the uncomfortable little whiff of CHILD RAPE that threatens to spoil a “brilliantly artistic” (aka inconsequential and middling) film career.


Stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle is often cited by “conservatives” for his witty takes on certain social issues. After noticing this over the course of the past few years, I finally broke down and gave him a try on YouTube this weekend. He is revoltingly classless and vulgar, with more “N-words” than I can count in any given minute, not to mention the inevitable spray of “m-er-f-ers” and the rest of the usual lexical gems found among those who know they would not be funny — and those who know they would not be laughing at the person on stage — without the cheap pseudo-shock value of the coarsest language, and even coarser themes. A waste of space and eardrums, enjoyable, or even tolerable, only to people who don’t like reading, listening to good music, thinking, talking with friends, experiencing nature, or enjoying art and philosophy. As Dave Chappelle might say, “Shut up, Mother-f-er!” He’s almost as brilliant and artistic as Roman Polanski — though without the extra high-class aura of being a convicted child rapist, of course.

(As for the English-speaking world that has made “mother-f-er” its most colorful go-to expletive for every situation, I can only say, to quote a character in the very non-Polanski-esque — i.e., enjoyable — film Best in Show, “Paging Dr. Freud!”)

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