Too many dudes (Polanski, Letterman, Ensign, Sanford, Spitzer, and Edwards — to name a few) have great balls of fire. Thanks to Clean Gene Lyons, here's to one of the original dudes with great balls of fire: ol' Jerry Lee Lewis hisself — with his 13-year-old "wife." From the Yearning For Zion Ranch to The Kingdom (Saudi Arabia), sexual abuse of children has occurred and continues to occur in the 21st century. More than 50 years ago, Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita about a 37-year-old man's sexual obsession with a 12-year-old girl. There is no evidence that his Jerry Lee Lewis read Lolita before he married his distant relative, Myra Gale Brown, age 13. There is no evidence that Polanski and the other fireballers read Lolita either. If this is (fair & balanced) pediophobia, so be it.
[x Philadelphia Fishwrap]
Worldwide Pants
By Signe Wilkinson
[Signe Wilkinson was born in the depths of the baby boom and graduated from her suburban Philadelphia high school about the same year the SAT scores began their slide. After acquiring a BA in English from a western university of middling academic reputation, Wilkinson was unprepared for real work..., so she became a reporter, stringing for the West Chester (PA) Daily Local New. She also worked for the Quakers, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and with a housing project in Cyprus, a job that ended with a bang when a coup d'etat was followed by a military invasion from Turkey. Since then, Wilkinson has felt that a little multi-culturalism goes a long way.
Back in the newsroom, Wilkinson began drawing the people she was supposed to be reporting on. She realized cartooning combined her interests in art and politics without taxing her interest in spelling. After a year of remedial art school, including a stint at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she began freelancing at several Philadelphia and New York publications, finally landing a full-time job at the San Jose Mercury News in 1982. After 3 1/2 years on a steep learning curve, Wilkinson repaid her long-suffering Mercury News editor by taking a job at the Philadelphia Daily News, where she has been drawing contentedly ever since. Wilkinson won the Pulitzer Prize for her editorial cartoons in 1992 and in 2007, Wilkinson received the Thomas Nast Prize for editorial cartooning.]
Copyright © 2009 Signe Wilkinson
[x Salon]
There's A Special Place In Hell For Roman Polanski
By Gene Lyons
Tag Cloud of the following article
What would Americans talk about without celebrity sex scandals? It's getting to where even a diligent voyeur has trouble keeping the protagonists straight without schematic diagrams like the character lists in 19th-century Russian novels.
If adultery were a crime, a cynical homicide detective once told me, the prisons would be bigger than the graveyards. Even so, reveling in other people's sins has become the national pastime. We've become a country of Peeping Toms, a sadistic activity.
Recently, four separate sex scandals vied for the news consumer's attention: a film director, two prominent politicians and a TV comic. As usual, the unlucky lovers saw their privacy obliterated and their intimate lives rendered into moralistic fables. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous.
Everybody's least favorite character is French/Polish film director Roman Polanski. Except for a few Hollywood fools and European intellectuals who express the perverse belief that art excuses all crimes, hardly anybody would be upset to see Polanski go to prison. (In polls, ordinary Poles and Frenchmen reject the art alibi by large majorities.) As one who thinks his film "Chinatown" a masterpiece, I don't much care what happens to him.
Polanski's a one-dimensional villain to almost everybody except his 1977 victim, now a 45-year-old mother of three who's forgiven him. She thinks even the seven weeks he served undergoing psychiatric evaluation were excessive. Samantha Geimer has long argued that charges should be dropped.
Should her wishes be honored? Not necessarily. However, it also shouldn't be forbidden to wonder why she thinks that way. Wasn't her life irretrievably ruined by the famous director's crime? Evidently, Geimer doesn't think so.
It's also important to call things by their right names. Yes, it's illegal for an adult man to have sex with a 13-year-old girl; the slang term is "jailbait." (Remember Louisiana rock 'n' roller Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old wife being expelled from England?) But that doesn't make Polanski a "pedophile," i.e. a deeply disturbed person obsessed with pre-pubescent children. If I had my way, there'd be no need for a "Megan's Law" tracking paroled pedophiles, because there wouldn't be any parole. Ever.
Anyway, here's what the now-deceased judge who accepted Polanski's guilty plea said at the hearing: "The probation report discloses that although just short of her 14th birthday at the time of the offense, the (victim) was a well-developed young girl who looked older than her years; and regrettably not unschooled in sexual matters. She has a 17-year-old boyfriend, with whom she had sexual intercourse at least twice prior to the offense involved. The probation report further reveals that the (victim) was not unfamiliar with the drug Quaalude, she having experimented with it as early as her 10th or 11th year."
The child also apparently had the Stage Mother from Hell, a film industry tradition. In short, there may have been excellent reasons why both sides wanted to avoid a highly publicized Hollywood trial, and no reason to treat the grand jury testimony of a 14-year-old girl pressed by her mother and the prosecutor as holy writ. She may have interpreted Polanski's pleading guilty to a reduced charge as a kindness.
That said, Polanski's 1979 interview with novelist Martin Amis ought to earn him a special place in hell, if not a California penitentiary. "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see?" he said. "But ... judges want to (bleep) young girls. Juries want to (bleep) young girls. Everyone wants to (bleep) young girls!"
Actually, no they don't. But a culture that tolerates beauty pageants for heavily made-up little girls, promotes teen bombshells like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus and a million "Barely Legal" porn films ought to consider where Polanski got the idea. The law may demand that a fleeing felon be brought to justice, but we Americans should probably be a bit less smug about it.
As for philandering politicians, here's all anybody ever needed to know about former senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards: According to the New York Times, he once calmed his "anxious" mistress "by promising her that after his wife died he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band."
Then there's GOP Sen. John Ensign, described by the same newspaper as a "silver-haired senator with a statesman's looks and family money -- his father helped found a Las Vegas casino -- (who) has championed conservative social values." So Nevada, whose two main industries are legalized gambling and prostitution, elects a casino heir who's also a professional Christian, and we're supposed to be shocked he turns out to be a conniving fraud?
Meanwhile, David Letterman, a then-unmarried TV comic, had love affairs at the office. This is news? Wake me if he runs off with Michelle Obama.
What would Americans talk about without celebrity sex scandals? It's getting to where even a diligent voyeur has trouble keeping the protagonists straight without schematic diagrams like the character lists in 19th-century Russian novels.
If adultery were a crime, a cynical homicide detective once told me, the prisons would be bigger than the graveyards. Even so, reveling in other people's sins has become the national pastime. We've become a country of Peeping Toms, a sadistic activity.
Recently, four separate sex scandals vied for the news consumer's attention: a film director, two prominent politicians and a TV comic. As usual, the unlucky lovers saw their privacy obliterated and their intimate lives rendered into moralistic fables. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous.
Everybody's least favorite character is French/Polish film director Roman Polanski. Except for a few Hollywood fools and European intellectuals who express the perverse belief that art excuses all crimes, hardly anybody would be upset to see Polanski go to prison. (In polls, ordinary Poles and Frenchmen reject the art alibi by large majorities.) As one who thinks his film "Chinatown" a masterpiece, I don't much care what happens to him.
Polanski's a one-dimensional villain to almost everybody except his 1977 victim, now a 45-year-old mother of three who's forgiven him. She thinks even the seven weeks he served undergoing psychiatric evaluation were excessive. Samantha Geimer has long argued that charges should be dropped.
Should her wishes be honored? Not necessarily. However, it also shouldn't be forbidden to wonder why she thinks that way. Wasn't her life irretrievably ruined by the famous director's crime? Evidently, Geimer doesn't think so.
It's also important to call things by their right names. Yes, it's illegal for an adult man to have sex with a 13-year-old girl; the slang term is "jailbait." (Remember Louisiana rock 'n' roller Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old wife being expelled from England?) But that doesn't make Polanski a "pedophile," i.e. a deeply disturbed person obsessed with pre-pubescent children. If I had my way, there'd be no need for a "Megan's Law" tracking paroled pedophiles, because there wouldn't be any parole. Ever.
Anyway, here's what the now-deceased judge who accepted Polanski's guilty plea said at the hearing: "The probation report discloses that although just short of her 14th birthday at the time of the offense, the (victim) was a well-developed young girl who looked older than her years; and regrettably not unschooled in sexual matters. She has a 17-year-old boyfriend, with whom she had sexual intercourse at least twice prior to the offense involved. The probation report further reveals that the (victim) was not unfamiliar with the drug Quaalude, she having experimented with it as early as her 10th or 11th year."
The child also apparently had the Stage Mother from Hell, a film industry tradition. In short, there may have been excellent reasons why both sides wanted to avoid a highly publicized Hollywood trial, and no reason to treat the grand jury testimony of a 14-year-old girl pressed by her mother and the prosecutor as holy writ. She may have interpreted Polanski's pleading guilty to a reduced charge as a kindness.
That said, Polanski's 1979 interview with novelist Martin Amis ought to earn him a special place in hell, if not a California penitentiary. "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see?" he said. "But... judges want to (bleep) young girls. Juries want to (bleep) young girls. Everyone wants to (bleep) young girls!"
Actually, no they don't. But a culture that tolerates beauty pageants for heavily made-up little girls, promotes teen bombshells like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus and a million "Barely Legal" porn films ought to consider where Polanski got the idea. The law may demand that a fleeing felon be brought to justice, but we Americans should probably be a bit less smug about it.
As for philandering politicians, here's all anybody ever needed to know about former senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards: According to the New York Times, he once calmed his "anxious" mistress "by promising her that after his wife died he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band."
Then there's Senator John Ensign (R-NV), described by the same newspaper as a "silver-haired senator with a statesman's looks and family money -- his father helped found a Las Vegas casino -- (who) has championed conservative social values." So Nevada, whose two main industries are legalized gambling and prostitution, elects a casino heir who's also a professional Christian, and we're supposed to be shocked he turns out to be a conniving fraud?
Meanwhile, David Letterman, a then-unmarried TV comic, had love affairs at the office. This is news? Wake me if he runs off with Michelle Obama. Ω
[Gene Lyons graduated from Rutgers in 1965, and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1969. He taught at the University of Massachusetts, University of Arkansas and University of Texas before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. He has written hundreds of articles, essays and reviews for such magazines as Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, The Nation, Esquire, Slate, and Salon. Lyons was the co-author (with Joe Conason) of The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000).]
Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group Inc.
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