Cosby, Witch Hunts, and Hollywood

The line-up of women accusing Bill Cosby of rape and their testimony has me puzzled, which is not the response I am supposed to have when a woman says she's been raped. So I'm uneasy with myself  for being puzzled at all.

But Hollywood is an interesting place with some interesting people. All that glistens is not gold, as Shakespeare wrote. And for some reason this series of allegations reminds me of the impetus and fallout of passed Hollywood witch hunts.

Most of us know about the ones conducted in the 50's by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but these were actually begun in the late 40's in the House of Representatives under Rep. J. Parnell Thomas and "evolved" into grander show trials in the Senate.

But there was an even earlier witch hunt, by a decade, rarely discussed, which had a congruent purpose to weed out a subversive element from the film industry. The witch hunt of the 30's came as a result of the Christian Church threatening a mass boycott of films in the vulnerable economic times of the Depression. The Church leadership did not like certain themes discussed in film, and said so; they did not like how certain plots were developed and resolved, and said so; they loathed certain actors who exemplified these themes, and they blacklisted them in billboards nationwide as "Box-Office Poison".

The film studios, run by right wingers, like LB Mayer at MGM and Ray Cohn at RKO, fearful of the affect of the promised boycott and the visible affect the cultural blacklist was already having, set up in conjunction with the Christians the Hayes Office. This was a censorship tool to ensure the Church got what it wanted.

The Hayes Office ended in the late 60's when the motion picture rating system replaced it.

In the meantime, film scripts had to follow a certain formula. Topics were made off limits. More over, the film colony that developed since the Talkies was decimated. With the Talkies, producers looked to the New York stage community for actors, and what they got were beautiful speaking voices but basically the sort of people the Church despised: freethinkers, communists, homosexuals. I don't think I'm overstating this.

But with the new climate, the studio moguls not only demanded scripts be cleaned up but also the actors' public lives. Where possible, heterosexual marriages were quickly arranged, and gossip magazines feminized women and masculinized the men into red-blooded heteros.

The models and role models, the Golden Age, the Tinsel Town that we are told ever after to revere is really a horrible confection of lies and charades, hiding truths about the lives many of these actors lived. Of course, some careers could not be rehabilitated, and they either returned to Broadway or disappeared altogether.

That in the 30's was the first purge. The second came with Rep. J. Parnell Thomas in the House of Representatives a decade later. You have to know about the first purge to appreciate the second, more infamous one.

The threat of subpoena and blacklist got a lot of people who should have known better to come out and Name Names - and they should have known better because maybe at one point in their development they had been freethinkers or communists or affiliated with either. They certainly lived and worked alongside them daily.

But with the threat of a lost career they had to maneuver themselves away from the scrutiny of this witch hunt and offer a sacrificial lamb. Many to their shame did, and we really should memorialize their names in a Wall of Shame at an Academy Awards ceremony.

But what does this have to do with Bill Cosby? Maybe nothing. But knowing that behind the public relations departments of the studios and talent agencies press releases is a reality we are rarely treated to, Cosby among them. We believe the Make Believe. We believe in Dr. Huxtable or even the creator of Fat Albert. We do not believe in depression, sexaholics, group sex games, partner swapping, recreational drug use, serial abortionists.

I know if that same Christian mafia that started the original purge in the 30's was able to look today under some sheets and behind some closet doors they'd have epileptic fits, speak in tongue, and see their Jewish messiah.

When one of Cosby's accusers speaks about being in a hotel room with him in his bathrobe, accepting a pill from him, taking the pill, then drinking wine BEFORE SHE BLACKED OUT and woke having had sex, I am not directed immediately to call the Special Victims Unit. Did Cosby take a pill too? She doesn't say. Were these sexual games he played with others in the film industry? He's alleged [by her] to have been in a robe.

The scenarios only tell me that Cosby possibly had the sexual appetite of, say, John F Kennedy, whose rape victims have never come forward; or many of the film producers [and many more pretenders!] who coerced young male and female actors in auditions into having sex [rape], but rarely do the famous come out and Name Those Names.

That what some hyper-moralists would call sordid while they became wet between the legs is is all I am willing to accept as occurring ... so far. My jury is out.

But now, as with the Hollywood witch hunts before, a peculiar set of testimonies come one after the other, and another moral crusade seems to be afoot, and I just can't help seeing the ghosts of Louis B Mayer and Nazi Christians ready to set some new standards.

If the name Scotty Bowers means nothing to you, it shouldn't. It may mean nothing to Bill Cosby. But it apparently meant a lot to much of Hollywood for many, many years. Bowers was a former sex worker who turned his talents to procuring young men and women for Hollywood stars. He performed this pimp service for some time and with countless clients, some of whom he names in his memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of Stars.
Bowers isn't writing about one star with one secret.

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire the Real Dilemma of the Undocumented Immigrant

While I'd never consider the closed, militarized borders and xenophobia of the right-wing, the US left has its glaring problems when it comes to immigration. I'd imagine as with most official narratives there exists an establishment of mostly white business interests that massage a pro-capitalist angle that the left repeats without much self-reflection.

But before anyone gets too alarmed let me be clear that I not only believe the borders should be as open to people as they clearly are to corrosive finance and deadly military weapons, but I also think the border themselves and the nation-state that spawned them are a cancerous lesion upon humanity.

My issue is not with so-called immigrants, who in modern conversation are always Brown or Black. Interesting that we do not speak of Canadians or Europeans coming here as immigrants. Europeans coming to the Americas seems to be accepted as a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Immigration is a white problem of Black and Brown people. And this issue has been carefully managed to hide certain truths.

Post-slavery slavery. Last week, for example, I heard comedian-turned-activist, Russell Brand, defend the US allowing immigrants thus: we would no longer have access to cheap food. Brand is not the first leftist to utter such disturbing words - indeed, it has been uttered so much and for my entire adult life that this argument is taken as acceptable.

But why on the face of it is our needing cheap food a justification for a virtual slave system? Why is this an acceptable leftist or radical position? When did it become acceptable to doom castes of people to labor for a more privileged caste?

If the only way we can have access to cheap food is underpaid labor, then, like all of our minimum-wage jobs, this agricultural food system should be abolished.

Then what, you ask? Of course human beings lived for aeons growing their own food, and if returning to this system compromises other cherished phenomena, like the City, then so be it.

Our Son of a Bitch in Central America. Another lost point for the left is a critique of the countries these immigrants flee, and the social, political, and economic dynamics that create these countries of misery in the first place.

The Immigration Issue is really a refugee problem, only we call it immigration at home and label refugees people from the global South who cannot get out of the global South: when they dare to cross the Rubicon into the land of milk and honey it's an immigration issue.

Refugees are a political thing: they come from wars, natural disasters, failed states, military regimes - all of which, except maybe the nature - can usually be traced right to the capitols of the global North. A military regime is installed and armed to terrorize civil society to ensure compliance with Western demands. Disastrous terms of trade agreements demand the global South extract its wealth to enrich foreign elites while a basic domestic health system cannot be built. Et cetera.

Even natural and health disasters can often be laid at the feet of the global North because without the ability to build durable infrastructure, train technicians, poor countries are left that much more vulnerable to a tornado or a pandemic which might have less impact in the global North, except of course in poor communities.

Twenty-first Century Feudalism. And finally, the pro-immigration debate overlooks an analysis of the global Northern countries being fled to, which must include the nature of Western "democracies" as increasingly bastions of industrial feudalism and not democracies at all.

James Baldwin lamented being integrated into the burning house that is Western civilization. I am more than circumspect about the selling points of the United States of America as far as anyone goes, but especially my Black and Brown brothers and sisters in the global South. I know what really awaits them

By carefully framing immigration in these ways and relentlessly repeating its diversionary talking points, radicals avoid the key point that we not only need a revolution in the United States and abroad but also more over that these nation-states as we know them - the US, UK, France, Spain, etc, Western-designed African countries, Latin American states - as they are constituted by an elite who fundamentally worships at the altar of Wall Street, profit over people, and using various tech booms to make larger swathes of people superfluous, must die. They must be dismantled in that artful way anything obsolete or harmful to children is recalled and incinerated never to be considered again. They must perish in the spirit that the late Lakota Russell Means, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, said: for America to live Europe must die.