It's a tale of biblical proportions as porn star Stormy Daniels battles a sitting president, not unlike the shepherd boy David dueling the pagan giant Goliath. And this drama gets played out on national television where she told of her consensual affair with Trump and how he bought her silence with a non-disclosure agreement that he neglected to sign.
Stars of a second kind
Trump's transgressions are far from peculiar. NBCNEWS prepared a list of men accused of sexual misconduct since Weinstein's abuses were exposed. And the roster is not just taken from the entertainment industry.
Besides allegations against Ben Vereen, Jeffrey Tambor, Dustin Hoffman, Ben Affleck and Kevin Spacey, you get respected journalists. These include Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for the New Yorker magazine and Mark Halperin, the former senior political analyst for MSNBC.
In addition
Other noted broadcasters on the NBCNews list take in Tavis Smiley, Garrison Keiller, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. Then there are the men in high culture like James Levine, conductor for the Boston Symphony and Peter Martins, who leads the NYC Ballet. And like Trump, pols are also on the roster, such as Al Franken and former president George H.W. Bush.
Women, too?
But wait. Men aren't the only sexual predators.
Lawfirm.com compiled a lineup of more than two dozen female teachers who have had improper relations with their students. World News Daily (WND) reported an even longer list of women who committed sex acts with underage students. What's going on? Has the world gone mad? Are we in Hell?
'The Millennium' is now
The situation conjures up Hieronymus Bosch's picture of Hell, “The Millennium.” Made in 1550, it was the nightmare that haunted the Middle Ages.
Bosch, a Renaissance painter, was out of step with his time, but clearly not with ours. The things that upset him were greed, injustice, and violence. Sound familiar? One part of his painting describes a man with giant ears, which was the artist's way of saying that while the man can hear truth, he can't listen to it. Who does that remind you of?
A way out
Then there's debauchery, another reminder of you know who, not to mention a slew of fellow predators. If this is Hell, something fiction writer Anne Rice wrote about in her 1985 novel “Exit to Eden” might get us out this mess. One of her protagonists posits that sexual abuses derive from our childhood when we tussled with dominance and submission. In that sense, predators are simply re-enacting those early challenges. If you can avoid getting distracted by the explicit sex scenes, Rice's writing is gorgeous. Her powers of description of all seeable things, from skies to street scenes, holds you fast, not unlike Bosch, but she does it with words.
A final solution
As for cutting back on transgressions, Rice's story tells of a place where people safely act out their fantasies “no matter how primitive or repulsive” and stave off acting out. What she proposes is a kind of legalized prostitution, but on a grand and altogether picturesque scale.
