Tuesday, June 02, 2020

THE MOVIE ABOUT JEFFREY EPSTEIN

When I moved back to Montana on the strength of a job as a computer person for a little ag advertising newspaper, there were two salesmen of the ads that paid for the paper.  One was the owner and the other was the husband of the office manager of the tiny office crew.  When I showed up for work a little early, which is my habit, this other salesman was not pleased.  “Why don’t you go over to the cafe and have a nice cup of coffee,” he suggested.

He was always on the phone, flirting and teasing with someone who had to be female.  But this is the way salesmen around here operate.  I watched when a pharm salesman brought a box of pastries to my obstetric doc’s office staff. When I tried to track down the business that was coming to county clerk’s offices to scarf up properties whose taxes were delinquent, the clerks told me about handsome young male charmers who brought goodies.  It works.  The salesmen seem to enjoy it.  Maybe sometimes it leads somewhere.

So after I had been fired, which Montana allows for no reason if you’ve been working less than six months, the newspaper reported that the early joking teaser had been arrested in an FBI trap.  He had intended to pay hundreds of dollars to have sex with a 12-year-old.  Everyone in town said, “We knew he was like that.”  

So I want to dispel right away any idea that Jeffrey Epstein was exceptional or glamorous or anything else but rich, not that there isn’t a body of people out there who want him to be seen otherwise, partly to sell stories and partly to look good as law enforcers and so on. There is a strong cultural penchant for stories like Epstein’s, particularly if they are about sex with powerful but physically repellant people.  Trump comes to mind. 

Also I ran across a reference to studies about sociopaths whose brains allow them to do this coldly, deliberately, and often very successfully.  When I googled, there were many studies listed.  It has something to do with the amygdala and parts of the cortex, they say, though some people like to suggest that it’s the result of a bad childhood.  Optimists, liberals and mommies like to think people only need therapy and advice. 

Last night I watched the recent movie about the conviction of Jeffrey Epstein, which was really about the hundreds of girls he had sex with or trafficked to important men.  It was riding on the trope about beautiful young blonde virgins who are violated by satyrs with the help of evil Jezebels.  As such, it was well done.  Very pretty settings and the girls spoke well.

But two things jump out at me.  First, it was about a very strange version of sex that was actually about a word Trump uses: “domination.”  Usually performing on a massage table, Jeffrey did as much self-stimulating as crushing his victim under him.  There was none of the mutual desire and pleasuring that justifies our conflation of sex with love.  This was not about sophisticated adult women at all, no games, no talk, no technique.  It was about naked vulnerability to a snake, a python.  (Though it was remarked that his sword was more egg-shaped, as has been said about Trump, though they said “like a mushroom”.  I looked it up: small tip and fat root.)

The second thing was that though it is known that everywhere is trafficking the young of many kinds — some dark, some male — and it’s obvious that these young women were one kind, that one kind was chosen to arouse mainstream American men to some kind of heroism, almost blinded by their indignation, and called them away from their other lust: money and power.  Sex is the powerful distraction that lets the political and financial systems go unchallenged around the world, internationally.  I feel confident that underneath the sex schemes was simple international espionage.  Plenty of others say the same.  Extortion, blackmail, sudden death.

We are encumbered with laws and regulations that are inadequate to the deep evil in the world around us, not because God is dead and the pews are empty, but because we are between cultures, doing mix-and-match right-and-wrong.  Article 25 allows for the removal of a president who is temporarily disabled or sliding into dementia, but not a president who is dominated by the leader of a foreign country and participates in an international crime web that began long ago in Sicily, was put on steroids during prohibition, and then swallowed by international schemes encouraged by addiction to oil.  Trump is quite mad, criminally insane as well as demented, and owned by his own past failures and debts.  He’s a person of bad character and evil intent and he does not identify as American, possibly not as human but as superhuman.

This is not the first time such a situation has arisen — most plays and many books are about this, but it is the first time we’ve sat watching the witness through the ordinary people on scene to demonstrate because the law has been overtopped.  We watch the dam being broken and the people being killed.  We don’t like it one damned bit, but we can’t quite figure out what we should do about it.

Epstein was an excellent salesman of an illusion.  Today we can investigate everything through computers, even Jeffrey’s brother with the elegant name of Puggie, not to be confused with a local Blackfeet nickname of Puggie.
It was Puggie’s education and background with art that Jeffrey borrowed when he was forced to provide a deposition testimony.  Puggie is said to have good connections to Adam Schiff, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Maxine Waters.  OMG.  He has UN connections.  But these are not people likely to be distracted by teen angels for hire.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-epstein-bio-jeffrey-brother-will-what-we-know-2019-8?op=1

The movie talked about the Epstein family beginnings on Coney Island.  This tale is full of cliches. There are earlier cases much like Epsteins.  Trump’s family was slightly more dignified in a criminal sort of way.  But the straw man/little girl idea has persisted as a cover and proposed means in a life that had the domination of money and power as its real end.  The people who respond to this combo have lives that encourage them to think this is as real as a Heaven where blonde angels possibly have braces and high hopes.  This movie is about the angels, now a little older, heftier, wiser, so still surviving.  There will be lots of time to figure out more about Jeffrey.

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