Andrew Sullivan, writing about the persistence of his Catholic faith.

And – citing dire statistics for American churchgoing – Amanda Marcotte writes:

The early Aughts saw the rise of megachurches with flashily dressed ministers who appeared more interested in money and sermonizing about people’s sex lives than modeling values of charity and humility…

Trump was a thrice-married chronic adulterer who routinely exposed how ignorant he was of religion, and who reportedly — and let’s face it, obviously — made fun of religious leaders behind their backs. But religious right leaders didn’t care. They continually pumped Trump up like he was the second coming, showily praying over him and extorting their followers to have faith in a man who literally could not have better conformed to the prophecies of the Antichrist. It was comically over the top, how extensively Christian right leaders exposed themselves as motivated by power, not faith. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Gallup’s numbers show numbers of religiously affiliated Americans taking a nosedive during the Trump years, dropping from 55% of Americans belonging to a church to 47%…

And many [potential churchgoers] are going to look at hypocritical, power-hungry ministers praying over an obvious grifter like Trump and be too turned off to even consider getting involved.

**************

Plus Trumpique que le Trump Matt Gaetz is also doing his bit to keep the hypocrisy banner flying.

“They are the unmasking of a long-standing hypocrisy that has fed off the resources and goodwill of a Christian institution while despising the truths it was established to uphold.”

Rev Garman nails it.

With everyone talking about Sonny Boy’s cock-on-a-yacht display, it’s time to remind you that the Trump-BFF president of Libertine University has long been a laughable hypocrite. (Only a few at Libertine seem to mind.) He got it from his daddy, whose valedictory Christopher Hitchens memorably provided in this famous clip.

As a few op/eds defending covid-flouting haredim straggle out of the gate, UD makes it a point to read them all.

They run the gamut from completely nuts to completely nuts.

UD has to read them for you because she knows you won’t read them. And why won’t you? Let us count the ways.

It’s just a few primitifs scattered here and there in the world… Maybe you saw Unorthodox and you know they treat their women like shit, but ladeedah… there but for the grace of god full stop. You’re vaguely aware welfare fraud rages and yeah ok their schools are a national disgrace but meh. The world is full of problems. Viewed from an anthropological lens, these people are certainly… interesting…

Oh, and here’s the most important reason of all. Play it again, Sam.

It is taboo in our society to criticize a person’s religious faith… these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I’m worried that our religious discourse – our religious beliefs – are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

Even when social practices are getting us killed, we don’t criticize them because they’re religious. Thus, indignant defenders of the haredim point out that these people live in appallingly substandard conditions, packed into tiny apartments without access to televisions, computers, or any news of the outside world, and that they get all of their instructions for how to live every aspect of their lives from a rabbi. These writers seem to believe that they are successfully arguing that since the haredim’s creation of some of the world’s hottest viral zones is simply an epiphenomenon of their faith, we are vicious anti-religionists to criticize them. But listen up, O Israel:

Haredi insularity, Haredi disregard for health authorities during a pandemic, Haredi poverty and population density — all the factors that render them especially vulnerable to the virus, and through them everyone else — are ultimately a choice. There are no external or environmental factors forcing Haredim into their isolation and poverty, only their own cultural and religious commitments. They are therefore not only victims of their current circumstances, but also perpetrators, in the full light of day and of scientific warning.

Rich countries like America and Israel have been rich enough to ignore/appease/tolerate ways of life belligerently at odds with everything modern democratic states stand for; but now that the anti-empirical, anti-state position of the haredim is literally killing us, something surely has to be done. No more bullshit about how it’s only a radical minority within a minority – that obviously doesn’t matter anymore. No more bullshit about how if you’re nice to them eventually they’ll assimilate more and more to normal society. No – as Sam Harris and Haviv Rettig Gur point out, these people believe what they believe, and it ain’t just ideas — it’s salvation.

In the full light of day, to quote Gur, socially destructive ultraorthodox practices must be exposed. We have to stop looking away.

...UD reads some recent words about him from her old buddy, Lisa Nesselson:

[The best] French film of the year, hands down, is Roman Polanski’s “J’accuse.”  Polanski is an absolute master of every aspect of filmmaking, he works with the best actors and technicians — which means they are eager to work with HIM — and the result is an incredibly important film that’s also thrilling to watch.  

I’m typing this on Jan 29th — the Cesar nominations were announced today and “J’accuse” leads with 12 nominations. That means that a majority of the 4,313 members of the Cesars Academy are in the mood to champion excellence. Whatever you think of Polanski himself and his confirmed and alleged bad behavior in decades past, it’s impossible to deny that “J’accuse” is outstanding.  I see no rationale that holds up to scrutiny for contending that he shouldn’t have been given the money to make it in the first place or that it shouldn’t be shown. The hypocrisy makes me ill. It has been a matter of public record since 1977 that Polanski raped then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer and now, all of a sudden, mostly young (but not exclusively) protestors are vandalizing the areas around theaters to write “Polanski is a Rapist” and “Theaters Are Complicit With a Rapist” on buildings and the street. The City has to remove that stuff — it costs money.  

For some useful perspective, I urge everybody to read Geimer’s excellent autobiography “The Girl” from 2013. She’s very smart, very funny, very self-aware and she was delighted when Polanski won the Oscar for “The Pianist” in 2003. Hey, protestors — that was 17 years ago! They’re hardly pals but the only person he owed an apology to was her — not us, not society, not people so ignorant that they think “Somebody else could have made that film.”  Geimer was delighted when “J’accuse” won the Silver Lion in Venice in September 2019 — “Joker” won the Golden Lion. We’re told that we must listen to women but hardly anybody cares to “listen” to Geimer — who is in her 50s and (understandably!) hates being frozen in time as a 13 year old to feed other peoples’ misplaced outrage. When she says that it’s pointless to protest or boycott Polanski and to please take your outrage elsewhere where it might do some good and make the world a better place, the but-but-but-he-raped-you-and-you’re-a-victim-for-eternity crowd won’t accept her own clearly stated assessment that being sodomized by a grown man at a tender age was highly unpleasant but not eternally traumatic.  

I think she’s a role model for overcoming the fallout from sexual assault but hardly anybody wants to view her that way. By the transitive power of faulty reasoning, an awful lot of people think Polanski shouldn’t make movies and if he does, you certainly shouldn’t go see them.

UD is definitely a judge the art, not the artist type; but she cringes when Lisa gets to “highly unpleasant.”

Ringside fun for everyone, just a few miles from UD‘s house!

******

They’re dropping like flies! Get to a ring while they’re hot. I mean cold.

So do me a favor and read this first. Everything Frank Rich says there about Ma Ingalls’ rancid hypocrisy in her NYT anti-materialism screed goes quadruple now that Harvard’s been exposed as Mr. Epstein’s main squeeze. Harvard has spent decades sucking up so much money – dirty and semi-dirty and semi-clean and clean – that its endowment alone is $40 billion (Harvard’s wealth goes significantly beyond its endowment, kiddies). It sucks it up and it doesn’t spit it out (see this notorious cartoon); it hoards it. One assumes the goal (why? why is this the goal?) is a $100 billion endowment. Harvard, everyone jokes, is a “hedge fund with a university attached to it”; this non-profit paid each of its fund managers $35 million dollars a year until a few people squawked and it ended up on the front page of the NYT...

Why should Harvard – the world’s most powerful reputation-launderer – give a penny of that shit back? Why should they do anything with what they’re sitting on, you son of a bitch? It’s their money and fuck you.

[His cadre of intellectuals] could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance atelier.

Frank Rich, who years and years ago condemned Epstein pal Larry Summers for his hedge fund activities while Harvard’s president, compiles a long list.

**********

On which, of course, the moral conscience of a nation and the late lamented president of the rapeabilliest and most Baptist campus in the country, appears.

… Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”

It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo.

… (details here) retires from his drug distribution days to the life of a highly respectable billionaire, ordinary dumbshit drug distributors in the state he helped destroy – West Virginia – go to jail. Let’s put the big drug capo next to the little drug capolinis, okay?

In a species of hypocrisy too grotesque even to laugh at, Hammergren, for years the CEO behind McKesson’s opioid carpet bombing of the US, currently heads up a task force on women’s health at the Center for Strategic and International Stupefacients (of which he is also a trustee; enjoy his written-by-someone-stoned-out-of-her-mind biography here). He ran one of America’s dirtiest businesses, and his personal greed is a national disgrace, but CSIS just loves them some Hammergren money and they don’t give a shit about those dead people cuz they wanna help people, see? You follow?

“No other corporation distributed more opioids in those years than Hammergren’s McKesson … Over his first 16 years as CEO, notes Bloomberg, Hammergren pocketed $781 million. His final months in the McKesson chief executive suite brought that total near $800 million. Upon his retirement, he walked away with a pension package worth $138.6 million.” When the rewards for addicting much of the nation get this high, you do not go to jail, mes petites; you make high-level decisions about women’s health.

So here’s John with probably more personal real estate than even Jeffrey Epstein, telling those American women who happened to survive his carpet bombing how to stay in tiptop shape … and here’s a couple of West Virginians – Samuel R. Ballengee and Devonna Miller-West – who saw the amazing business potential of opioids just as clearly as Hammergren but lacked his resources and connections. What happened to them?

They’ve landed where Hammergren never will – on a federal indictment for drug distribution. They’re both the sort of jerks who will end up going to jail rather than advising UD on how to keep her cholesterol low through the liberal application of OxyContin. Ballengee, once a pharmacist, and indeed a McKesson distributor until CBS aired a report about his pharmacy and McKesson went and got cold feet, got so pissed at CBS for ruining his business that he sued them for fifteen million dollars! That must seem like a lot to Ballengee, though Hammergren makes that much every time he takes a dump.

Anyway, a judge totally dismissed the lawsuit totally immediately (“These broadcasts were not only tolerable—they were applaudable... The people of West Virginia, indeed those all over the country, deserve to know about the evolution of the opioid epidemic and the identities of the bad actors.”), and now Ballengee’s unemployed, owes lawyers money, is the object of a bunch of civil suits from I guess survivors of overdosed customers, and has been named in a federal indictment. Loser.

Miller-West is similarly pitiable. She shares Hammergren’s tireless drug-entrepreneurship energy – she owned (still owns?) not only a pharmacy, but also Alternative Healing and Coalfield Cannabis (admiring local news article here) – but she too finds herself on the federal indictment.

You MUST know by now that UD/SOS loves people who write like Charles P. Pierce. Pierce, in a brief Esquire piece, lets rip his pleasure at having discovered that the Very Reverend Kenneth Starr Esq., Baylor University’s highest-ranking academic officer (until that campus rape thing) is one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers. One of the guys who helped Epstein – a notorious sex offender – get a singularly light sentence.

As a headline from another source puts it:

Moralist Ken Starr Explains His Help For Billionaire Pervert Jeffrey Epstein

Ecoute: Those of us who love the full and frank exposure of full and rank hypocrisy love this story. It was written for us…. Continues to be written, cuz the tale of the high-profile men (including one of this blog’s favorites, FGM defenderAlan Dershowitz) accused of sharing Epstein’s underage sex slaves is finally – after years of flaccidity – up and at ’em again on the front page.

Not to mention the tweets.

My savior, ’tis of thee,

Sweet school of Liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land of hypocrisy!

Land for a perv like me!

Where I’ll pretend I’m Jesus-y.

Let freedom ring!

So now with all this talk of vanishingly few people going to football games (we’ve been talking about it on this blog for a long time), UD is here to tell you the truth about why it’s happening.

Recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum – Existence precedes essence. With football, it’s equally existential, though with a twist.

Existence precedes putrescence.

Did you know NASCAR attendance/viewership is also tanking, at an even faster rate than university football? NFL attendance/viewership is down too.

The core problem is one of – incremental, to be sure, but real enough – civilizational progress. We are failing to replicate yahoos.

With each passing year, our young men look at stands rich with drunks either screaming at fields rich with assholes, or enduring fifteen minutes of ads screamed at them from stadiums rich with Adzillatrons, and they ask themselves: Is it just me, or is this disgusting? Am I alone in feeling kind of dirtied up by what I’m being put through here? By the sort of people I’m supposed to be cheering for? By the whole cheesy exploitative atmosphere? Does anyone else notice the hypocrisy of all this clean-cut Americanism as the world’s thinnest overlay for greedy coaches, concussed players, and the total domination of tv revenue?

In short:

I have a life (that’s the “existence” part) and I don’t have to spend one moment of it with this rottenness (putrescence).

The problem is particularly acute on college campuses, where a real-time war is being waged between the pressure from the institution to civilize, and the pressure from the game to barbarize. At least NASCAR isn’t being staged on the fields of Harvard! The great disadvantage under which college football labors is its proximity to sources of human development.

As universities respond by retrofitting stadiums with less and less seating, it’s going to occur to them that things like football and NASCAR are assuming the subcultural status of professional wrestling and motorcycle gangs. Schools will begin the titanic task of dismantling the vast smoky hollow that was their football stadium.

Watch the demolition, and you will be reminded of people all over Europe pulling down statues of Lenin.

And she says it well. Excerpts:

[Avital] Ronell’s [background here] supporters have swarmed to defend her. But rather than expose a hypocrisy or invalidate the #MeToo movement, this has only underscored the point that #MeToo feminists have been making along — about the nature of power and the way it fosters abuse.

… [Avital’s defenders admit] they have had no access to the dossier of claims against Ronell. But they called [her accuser’s] allegations “malicious,” while emphasizing Ronell’s seniority and prestige — precisely what the allegations accuse her of exploiting. The signatories said they have “collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar, but also as someone who has served as Chair of both the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at New York University.” Later in the letter the group noted, “As you know, [Ronell] is the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and she was recently given the award of Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French government.”

In the last few days, further defenses of Ronell have appeared online from well-known figures in cultural studies and literature like Chris Kraus, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam. Duggan … dressed up harassment in the guise of sophisticated theory. The language of Ronell’s emails must have baffled the investigators, she asserted, because they could not understand the sexualized language that passes between queers (Ronell and Reitman are both gay). “The nature of the email exchange resonates with many queer academics, whose practices of queer intimacy are often baffling to outsiders,” she wrote. This reasoning echoed the philosopher Colin McGinn’s denial that he sent sexual overtures to one of his graduate students, saying he referred to masturbation in an email only to teach her the difference between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”

Yes, I know it’s getting funny. That’s why, in an earlier post about this scandal, I used the term “tragicomic.” Another Ronell defender, Slavoj Zizek — a person in all ways indistinguishable from Chauncey Gardiner — believes he has disposed of the power-corrupts essence of the case in this way:

To explain the accuser’s participation in the game with Avital through her position of power is ridiculous. If he effectively felt oppressed and harassed, there were ways of signalling this, which would have definitely not hurt his position.

This is the vacuously oracular Chauncey Gardiner with Lady Augusta Bracknell thrown in – the comedy lying in the clueless conviction that anything asserted by a person of … magnitude? … becomes true.

Livingstone again:

Furthermore, other former students have accused Ronell of abusive behavior, with one anonymous student accusing her of a variety of unethical practices on Facebook, including breaking her students’ self-esteem, humiliating them in front of others, then using the newly malleable student to do menial tasks for her, like folding her laundry. Andrea Long Chu, who was at one time Ronell’s teaching assistant, wrote on Twitter that the accusations track “100%” with Ronell’s “behavior and personality.”

So how surprised can we be by the obvious parallel with the brutal coaches also in the news lately? Same hierarchy, same closed ranks, same self-pleasuring abuse of subordinates. As I said in an earlier post, whether it comes from the most reactionary or the most revolutionary arm of the university, abuse of power would seem to be the constant, the name of the game. On the field of corrupt behavior, the coach, the Continental, and the cheering squad meet.

“If even one-quarter of what [Ronell’s accuser] describes … is true, it suggests a more intense, more extreme, more abusive instance of a pervasive imbalance of power in academe,” concludes Corey Robin.

We prefer – we even assume – this trajectory, in which human character is not utterly set at birth, but expands toward some form of realization and even – given a strikingly bad set of character traits – conversion over time.

The story of one of this blog’s minor, persistent, characters – Yeshiva University benefactor Ira Rennert – represents an all too human reminder of the difference between literature and life. For as this multi-billionaire enters his 83rd year of life, as he winds down his tale, he simply persists in his awfulness.

And this is interesting. UD finds it interesting to contemplate such a man, with his Long Island residence so notorious that, when he was on trial for looting the retirement fund of one of his businesses (he was found guilty), his lawyer begged the judge not to allow the jurors to see photographs of it because it would “inflame” them; a man, who having been made to repay the retirement funds, is now suing his lawyers for that amount.

Whenever America’s obscenely rich behave obscenely, there you will find Rennert — flying his private helicopter illegally; polluting the world’s environment; cheating on his taxes, bankrolling illegal settlements.

Like Bernard Madoff’s right-hand man, Ezra Merkin, Ira Rennert is a very high-profile pious person. His name ornaments a business institute for Orthodox Jewish entrepreneurs; he was until recently head of New York’s most prominent synagogue. Ezra Merkin’s synagogue. All three men (along with comrade in whatever Zygi Wilf, after whom a Yeshiva campus is named) were/are majorly involved with/major donors to the extremely curiously run Yeshiva University.

But that, of course, is literary: religious hypocrisy.

Sing it.

Seventy-six percent want the burqa banned,
With a hundred and ten percent close at hand.
They are followed by rows and rows
Of tut-tutting intellos
Led by Mr Tariq Ramadan.

The highest courts; petitioners; democracy!
Thundering, thundering all along the way.
The music that you’re hearing over dale and hill
Is the people’s will
Having its big fat say.