The ability to recognize context is a key to winning, no matter what the game is. Blackjack? Know the odds and how they change with every hand. Basketball? Where are the mismatches between offensive and defensive players? Courtroom trial? How will a jury perceive a defendant? The corollary is that a failure to recognize context is a recipe for losing: Runner gets suckered into a pace that’s too fast too soon. Old line retail chain doesn’t account for the Amazon effect. Soldiers don’t spot an ambush. In all these situations, less than optimal outcomes are assured. I’ve got a feeling that the shit-canning of Al Franken by the Democratic leadership is a failure to honor context, and that their continued failure to do so will play, over time, into the other party’s pussy-grabbing hands.
There’s no bringing Franken back of course, not that I can see, and I’m not arguing for it. What I’m saying is that we can learn from how it was handled. Real learning always includes improvements, and one of those improvements can be better sensitivity to context next time..
The #metoo movement has done a heroic job of serving sexual predators and workplace harassers a long-overdue dish of justice a la mode, and Franken’s behaviors do not get a pass. There’s no excuse for un-permissioned ass patting, or for slipping a tongue into a stage kiss. It needs to be called out, and Franken had to be held accountable, no question, no doubt. What bugs me about the way it was handled—even accounting for the bias that I, too, am a white male originally-from-the-Midwest who wears glasses and has made a living in the entertainment business—what bothers me is that the Dems lost a promising legislator, a tough questioner, a savvy media presence, a champion of progressive and feminist causes, all in the name of ideological purity. We diminish our advantage when we do this.
How did progressives diminish themselves by forcing Franken to resign? Ideological purity is the other party’s thing. Dividing the world with a single line, a border, a difference, is their specialty. Ours is honoring and celebrating our differences.
Republicans thrive on narratives that divide blacks and whites, rich and poor, Christians and Muslims. They ask voters to chose between two sides, always. Sides defined by nationality, sexual orientation, gender, by a future to be feared and a past to be longed-for. That’s their game, and preserving their privilege is why they play it. And make no mistake, they play to win, not to be correct in the eyes of the law, or of women in the workplace, or of anyone but the people on their side of their gerrymandered lines, people gullible enough to believe their hypey and hypocritical lies.
Let me give you context for the model-actress-radio host’s accusations that led to the Franken resignation.
First of all, it was a USO show. It was written and performed for thousands of horny, homesick, young mostly-male soldiers, and followed a long tradition of USO shows filled with sexual innuendo and bawdy sketches. Sexually-charged production companies were rampant in the entertainment business of the ‘80, ‘90s and early ‘00s. The ass-slapping, boob-joking, dick-referencing, sexual double-entendre’ing was an industry idiom since Bob Hope.
I have seen women humiliated on sets and in offices. Anyone working in any kind of business during that era did. And women stepped over the line, too. Witness:
- I’ve seen a woman CEO smack the ass of her male CTO, who was walking in front of her on our way out of a meeting, as if he was a racehorse who’d just finished a good workout. Maybe he had. The company ran a horse race betting website and the CEO had been referencing her CTO as a sex object throughout the meeting the way a thoroughbred’s owner might reference a prize stud.
- I watched Snoop Dogg’s crew select the most beautiful young women from a crowd of extras on the set of Old School, and escort them back to Snoop’s motor home where he was playing Madden and ignoring the scene while his scenesters partied and smoked weed with the young women. This, mind you, was our workplace. Smoking blunts with Snoop’s crew came with the job description. I don’t think he had an HR department.
- The first time I met the actor, Oliver Reed, he spent part of our our meeting dry-humping his girlfriend, who was lying on her back on the bed in their hotel room in Monte Carlo, wearing a terrycloth bathrobe, reading a magazine. She never put the magazine down, only said, ‘Ollie!’ a couple of times in mild protest. But she didn’t stop him from performing his pathetic and deeply insecure schtick in front of the film’s producer and me, who’d stopped by to introduce ourselves.
- Later in the production, Reed humiliated my girlfriend in front of me, and she ran out of a hotel bar crying. Half an hour later, when I got to our hotel room, she was still in tears. ‘Why didn’t you do something?!’ she cried. She wanted me to confront him. I had to explain to her that it was a business dinner [I was the film’s publicist] and that if I’d taken him on, he could get me fired within a day, and did she and I want to trade three weeks in the Swiss Alps for going to work back in smoggy old Burbank? She agreed that she and I did not. She dried her tears, and on we went, even as Reed kept up his act, culminating a few nights later in that same bar, when an Aussie stunt man pulled a knife on him, put it under Reed’s chin, and said, ‘Let’s go, Ollie.’ Reed’s patient bodyguard, Reg, pulled him away from the trouble, which it seemed to me was the biggest part of Reg’s job.
- I watched Robin Williams entertain the audience between takes on the set of Mork and Mindy while, behind him, Jonathan Winters tiptoed across the stage and pretended to fuck a stuffed giraffe. The audience went wild. It led to one of the funniest two-person improvs I’ve ever seen.
- Early in my career, there was an executive at a company the world knows and loves, who felt it was his prerogative to give a back rub to any female assistant or intern in our office—without asking! He’d walk up to them from behind while they were seated at their desk, and just start...rubbing. I know some of them welcomed it. I am sure others dreaded it. Even back then, the people of my generation thought it was disgusting, but we had no idea how to go about putting a stop to it.
- Around the time of Splash, I spent a day with the great John Candy on his farm outside Toronto. At one point in our conversation, John Mellencamp’s name came up. Candy did not like Mellencamp. Not one bit. Why? He told me when Mellencamp and his band had been guests on SCTV, he and his band thought it was funny to go around during rehearsal whacking people in the balls. Candy was a gentle soul. He was not down with the ball-whacking. Hated it. I’m pretty sure Mellencamp still performed on the show.
- I was doing an on-set interview with Drew Barrymore when her co-star walked up behind her and grabbed both her breasts and fondled them while my crew and I watched, wide-eyed. This co-star was a woman. Drew played along, and then we all, Drew included, shrugged at the over-the-top move by the attention-seeking actress, and resumed our interview as if nothing had happened. Because it hadn’t, really. Nothing unusual anyway. Life on a set or on location was a non-stop demonstration that we showbiz folk lived by different norms than the rest of the world.
- I once had a production designer on a TV series I produced tell me after the production had wrapped that she assumed I was gay because I never hit on her. Which tells you that the industry norm at the time was producers hitting on women whose employment depended on them.
Of course these behaviors have not been confined to the entertainment business. As Sarah Silverman points out in her commentary on her friend, Louis C.K., it’s just that the these are the most visible of the workplaces and maybe the behaviors are more extreme because extreme behaviors are a specialty of the trade. It’s exciting and long overdue that it’s getting called out, and that actions are being taken to dial it down. Change never comes without pain, though, and part of the pain is seeing people we love, like Louis C.K., and John Lasseter, get brought down by the transformation.
When this movement sweeps out a man of Al Franken’s skill and political conscience, a man who has clearly grown out of his ass-slapping showbiz days, we lose. When a paid Republican propagandist, a professional who can cry on cue, and was, herself, party to the ass-slapping and sexual context of the gig, can spin an Al Franken out of office, we lose political ground.
When a norm in one context can be re-contextualized to Republican advantage, the Democratic Party loses. The Republicans are interested in only one context. The context is not Doing the Right Thing to Pay for What Happened Years Ago. It is Doing Whatever Divides Us Today.
For Democrats to believe in equivalency, that the same blade that separates Al Franken from office will carve the corrupt Russian-pwned Republicans from power--dumb. The Russian-pwned Repubs do not believe in equivalency. They believe in white male supremacy, and that it’s better for them to own three of something and you none, than it is for them to own two of that thing and you one.
Their definition of success is that others must lose for it to satisfy them. It’s how rapists feel about sex.
I hate seeing Al Franken lumped into the same category as child molesters and sexual predators. Hate seeing a decent man brought down by a decision that will not have an equivalent on the other side of the aisle. The Repubs don’t do quid pro quo, they do quid pro nihil. It’s on us to establish a proper context in future scenarios and respond accordingly, with a decision making process that honors context. If we don’t paint in many colors, we are left with a brush and tar. That’s their palette, not ours.