New Orleans       The long life of this whole Epstein thing is pretty amazing.  The rich, famous, and well-born keep heaving with a sigh of relief that the bullet missed them, and then the inept and incompetent Justice Department drops another cluster bomb, and all of them are ducking for cover again and some of them are hit between the lines of their own emails.  Young girls and women were irreparably hurt by Epstein and his network, but increasingly the titillation in the news about who and how some big whoop has fallen, obscures the real reasons we should feel outrage.  Mainly, we are treated to real time evidence of the “banality of evil” as each reveal largely exposes the boring impunity and cluelessness of the global rich and elites.

Granted some are craven and will be held in their countries to account for their crimes.  Britain and Norway have arrested people and launched criminal investigations.  The United States, not so much. The US allows miscreants like these to simply duck and cover.  The government keeps counting on 1.5 million emails and 3 million overall documents to distract the public from the Justice Department’s inability to deliver any justice to the victims.  Their strategy for protecting their boss, President Trump, is to scorch the earth with others.

It’s hard to feel any sympathy for any of these folks.  They tripped merrily along in the clueless belief that they could hobnob with a convicted sex abuser believing that their personal correspondence was somehow confidential and would never come to light, because, you know, it was personal and confidential.  It never occurred to these self-certified charter members of the elite with their fame, bank accounts, privilege, prestige, and fat rolodexes that dealing with a convicted criminal might not put them in the soup with him at some time in the future.  Marc Morial, when he was mayor of New Orleans, once remarked to me that he was looking forward to using email when he left office, because there was no way that he was going to use it while in office, when there was always the chance of future investigations.  This was something none of these folks – or their lawyers — seem to have even considered.

This is where misogyny also comes in.  They knew he was guilty of sexual exploitation, but they saw it as trivial, “boys will be boys” stuff.  It’s just sex, even if on the border of rape as some victims have claimed, so “how bad could it really be?”  How badly could the women really be hurt, they rationalized?  Sure, some wanted in on the action, but for the most part they treated Epstein and his criminal peccadillos as no big thing compared to their own utilitarian view of transactions.   They wanted something, so it was easy for them to look the other way, if they looked at all.  Their moral compass always pointed back to their self-interest, and the devil take the hindmost.

I know we’re supposed to believe that Epstein was some master criminal mind and was cleverly manipulating and deceiving all of these folks, but it’s a hard sell, and I’m not buying it from the little I’ve forced myself to read about this mess.  They all seem witting accomplices, queuing up at his door, even if not on his island.  The fact that he had some money and some connections seemed more than sufficient for many of them to line up, and then stay in line no matter what.

Some of the other rationalizations this crew have offered for their misbehavior are also simply unbelievable. The seekers from the academy and scientific fields for example have tried to plead poverty and the constant need to raise money for their labs and institutions.  Wah-wah, they wail. That’s just balderdash!  If you’re going to raise money for your organization or institution, one of the first rules has to be knowing that there are some people and places from whom you should refuse money, because it would hurt your organization more than the money would ever possibly help.  These folks should have known, like the rest of the favor seekers and sycophants, like the country-and-western song says, “if you don’t stand for something, you don’t stand for nothing at all.”

The moral of the Epstein story is almost unescapable for the rest of us:  too much of the global and domestic elites are simply rotten to the core.  A pox on all of their houses!