They Were Never Going to Punish the Epstein Clients, Bozos

Duh and/or Hello!

If you haven’t had a chance to watch the new Paul Reubens documentery Pee-Wee as Himself, do yourself a favor. You probably won’t learn a lot about Reubens that you didn’t already know, but it’s fun watching him fuck with the documentarian, performing wryly and hilariously and almost hostile to the very idea of a documentary. How much of it is a performance? You won’t know, which will teach you something about how gifted a performer he really was.

It will also leave you with questions, chief among them: Why did this guy lose his career for pulling his pud in a dirty movie theater? To be fair, I’ve wondered that since it happened, and I was a teenager at the time.

For the record, I thought Pee Wee’s Big Adventure was a pretty good movie, weird and entertaining, but I despised Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Part of this was Saturday Morning Cartoon Snobbery, i.e., anything that is not Bugs Bunny is thereby inferior, part of it was having outgrown the Captain Kangaroo/Mr. Rogers kids-show format, but a good bit of it was finding Pee Wee Herman irritating in that role. I’ll watch the guy chasing his bike across the country and shitting his pants when Large Marge transforms into a Thing That Should Not Be, but I will not listen to him have a conversation with a chair named Chairy and believe myself entertained.

But if there’s a moment when the guy earned my eternal respect, it’s when he showed up, post-scandal, at the MTV VMA’s, and when the applause died down, opened with “So, heard any good jokes?” Because Good Lord, were there jokes. Oceans of jokes. You would think masturbation had just been invented, the way everyone joked about what this guy did. I never ever understood it, and it reached the same fever pitch of Enough Already that the Pam and Tommy sextape did a few years later.

You see, there was a time when actors in Hollywood didn’t have sex scandals, because their peccadilloes were kept under wraps to the extent that such was possible. We’ll never actually know if Cary Grant was gay or not,¹ because the system kept it’s bankable star bankable. Unless you got caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy, so long as you were discreet, bought a few tickets to the policeman’s ball, took it to Mulholland, etc., you could get away with all manner of off-color assignations. That’s just Show Business.

But this was the 90’s, i.e. the nexus of a cable infotainment colossus ever hungry for dirt, the end of a conservative backlash against The Sexual Revolution, and the rising of a liberal backlash against the backlash. All of which means that a famous actor and children’s entertainer rubbing one out in a porn theater was a) news, b) scandalous, and c) the opening salvo of a new Sexual Revolution that would equalize Gays and lead to the Educated Class deciding that the President getting his knob gobbled on the Resolute Desk by an intern was Completely Fine, because Muh Economy.²

This sounds strange to recount today, because today is the result of the arguments lost and won in that time. An actor doing what Reubens went down for wouldn’t even make TMZ. It wouldn’t even make Xitter. No one cares.

And yet, it’s still such a nonsense crime. I can see the point of a law against public masturbation, nor do I mind its enforcement. That’s the price we pay for Living In A Society. But it ain’t like Reubens was wandering down Sunset Boulevard with his pants down. He wasn’t doing anything in front of children. He wasn’t doing anything in front of anyone that wasn’t also doing it. Yeah, it’s a crime, fine his ass, but did we really need it on Entertainment Tonight over and over again?

So it raises the question of why no one bothered to put the kibosh on it. At the time, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was a hit show, a bankable asset for CBS. Surely someone could have made an arrangement with the Sarasota, FL police or the Sarasota Herald-Tribune to withhold the story, let the man take his rap on the knuckle but Keep It Quiet. Reubens’ attorney did make such offers, but no one with power bothered. Why not?

Well, Reubens had just declined to shoot two more seasons of PWP, and his second film Big Top Pee-Wee, flopped. It appears he no longer had the value he might have. Plus, as the documentary makes clear, Reubens could be… difficult to work with. So… fuck it. Let the schmuck take his medicine.

This is the consequence of being Disposable in Hollywood. You’re not Cary Grant, Paul; you’re a little gay nebbish and some of us are sick of you. Hollywood is completely comfortable with throwing fat little piggies to the wolves when their profit margins start sinking. That’s just Show Business.

So while we all like to believe that the media amplifiers are all-powerful, they are merely useful. That’s the true lesson of Harvey Weinstein. In 2000, Harvey Weinstein beat the hell out of a New York journalist in public, in front of a slew of other journalists, and no one took a picture of it. No one bothered. Everyone knew it would be pointless. Reporter Sharon Waxman claimed that in 2004 the editors of the New York Times gutted a story on rumours of Weinstein’s ill behavior. The man was protected from up on high by the Prince of Darkness.

And then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Suddenly every woman he’d ever laid his fat paw on was calling him out. Suddenly that twink Ronan Farrow is airing his dirty laundry for public delectation. Suddenly the very forces that made him an emperor among men threw him into the arena and tore his flesh from his body.

-Nero’s Riot “You’ll Always Find Us Out to Lunch.”

If you understand that, you will understand why there are no longer any “Epstein clients” to reveal.

It doesn’t matter who’s on it. What matters is they are sufficiently untouchable. They are Too Big To Fail. They are Paid Up With The Right People. This now, obviously, includes Donald Trump.

Was he a client? Was Biden? It does not matter. Neither of them had the balls to make a move on it. Neither of them dared face down the Wealthy and Powerful. That’s not how any of this works.

Did you really think that the Rich and Mighty were gonna get perp-walked, hauled before a judge, and sentenced to jail? By the President of the United States, who owes his presence on the ballot to their approval? Who’s agenda can be blocked in a thousand ways if they should happen to feel like it? Did you?

If so, then however black-pilled you are about the state of this Republic, you are not black-pilled enough. The wealthy and powerful burned the economy to the ground and paid themselves bonuses. They’re not going to allow themselves to suffer consequences for screwing some underage prostitutes. That’s what power means, friends.

Epstein is dead, Maxwell is in jail, and that’s all the justice that anyone feels like doling out. Being punished and humiliated is for the disposable, the Paul Reubens, Harvey Weinsteins, and Jordan Belforts of the world. People who irritate the established players in some way, who break the rules in indiscreet ways. If you play stock-shenanigans and treat the SEC and Treasury Department like brainless goons, you will be shown how wrong you are. But if everyone decides en masse to ignore the fact that people without income can’t pay mortgages, and the financial system explodes and takes the economy with it, then they get bailed out by the taxpayers.

They’re all guilty. Both parties are guilty; all power centers are guilty. To punish anyone is to punish everyone, and that’s not happening. Under the rug it goes, next to the identity of the shooter on the grassy knoll. No one wants to pull up the rug. It’s gross under there.

Incidentally, to everyone who says this was a Mossad operation designed to honey-pot American power-brokers and officials, I say…. I have no information to contradict this statement. As you were.

1. Yeah, rumor has it he had cuddle-time with Randolf Scott, but rumor also has it he was schtupping the socks off of Sophia Loren on the set of The Pride and the Passion, among many other women, so whatever.

2. And of course, Supporting A Woman’s Right To Choose. Bill Clinton was the original Male Feminist, with all that has come to imply.