When Vladimir Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher for his manuscript about an European pedophile loving and lurking his way through 1950's suburban America, he found one slightly encouraging respondent who suggested a slight tweak of the plot for purposes of marketability. Why not change Lolita "into a 12-year-old lad and have him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess.)"?
Every time some mid-ranking celebrity is caught with underage pornography on his computer (Pete Townshend just "researching" a memoir, Charlie Sheen driven to sexually confused distraction by the ruthless cunning of Denise Richards, the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off too unemployable to bother with damage control at all) or a hitherto unknown congressman is made to do some explaining to the wife and constituents, I cackle to think what might have been of transgressive postwar literature were it not for the artistic resolve of one Russian genius.
Rep. Eric Massa would have us believe that heterosexual 50-year-old Navy veterans like to tickle younger men in their employ. He would also like us to think that "groping" is something that can be done playfully but chastely. Look up "groping" in the dictionary.
Then there is this from those long, quiet nights at sea:
Clarke says that Massa's roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. "Tom lived on upper bunk," Clarke say. "When you're on ship, you're almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do--you never crawl up on somebody else's bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him." Ron Moss also confirmed hearing this story from Maxfield. Maxfield did not return calls and messages left for him--I'll update if he does.
And I'll eat my sock if that poor man comes forward or goes shallow diving in front of news cameras in the near future.
Massa's strongest defense is that he recently resigned from Congress not because of an Ethics Committee investigation into his rumored sexual harassment of male staffers but because of White House pressure against his opposition to the Democrats' health care plan--pressure exerted most memorably, he claims, by a nude Rahm Emanuel in the House of Representatives' gym shower. (Massa's strongest defense is still not any more hetero-erotic than any of the ethics charges against him.)
What is extraordinary -- and also extraordinarily unacknowledged in our narrative-driven, salacious press -- is how so much of the Obama's political career has hinged on sex lives of others, particularly the timing of their public exposure. He won his Senate seat in Illinois in 2004 because the Republican candidate Jack Ryan's ex-wife -- the woman who played "Seven of Nine" on Star Trek: Voyager -- chose an election year to say that Ryan used to take her to "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," forcing him coyly out of the race and allowing the entry of the always entertaining Alan Keyes. Had John Edwards' extramarital relationship and reproduction with Rielle Hunter been reported in outlets other than The National Enquirer before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Hillary Clinton might well have found herself the recipient of Edwards' substantial votes in that harbinger contest and, quite possibly, the eventual Democratic nominee for president.
Now it is left to disgraced New York governor, himself the subject of sexual and criminal allegations and another reluctant antagonist of the president, to appoint Massa's replacement. Will it be someone more amenable to health care reform, or will a hapless and justifiably nihilistic David Paterson repay the party that disowned him by tapping another conservative blue dog Democrat who could jeopardize the biggest piece of social legislation introduced in a generation?
"Follow the money" is so passe. To see where political corruption begins and whence America's next loss of innocence is coming, follow the blacklight.
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