#48 - It's Good That Al Franken Resigned, Actually

CW: this post discusses sexual assault, allegations of grooming, and child sex abuse.

The United States Senate is a crock concept cooked up by a bunch of slave owners 300 years ago because they knew that the northern population would increase faster than the southern and were attempting to create a completely undemocratic institution to enshrine their terrible moral values into law. And because enough of them were from Virginia and the ones from the North were also power-hungry war dogs, they agreed.

I was trying to emphasize how bonkers the treatment of New York City by its own state and country is recently, and I pointed out during a conversation that NYC’s houseless population is now over 600,000 people. Which is equal to the entire state of Vermont. Where are their two representatives in the Senate?? Schumer and Gillibrand have never done a single thing to promote legislation that would benefit the largest population of houseless people in America despite coming from the state in which those people reside because it’s cool to pretend as if New York City is not the largest city in America and as if what happens here is not a cultural nexus and reflection of the country at large! The narrative that NYC is “elite” is truly so wild, we’re mostly working-class folks being heavily exploited by landlords!

Anyway, fuck Al Franken. I am so sick of his name being invoked when we ask why there are still criminal Republicans in congress. I hate that for some fucking reason he gets to be redeemed over and over and over again and held up as a beacon of The Wronged Man when, in fact, he resigned before the investigation into his behavior could start because the investigation was not going to be focused on the photo of him pretending to assault a sleeping woman, it was going to be investigating the several complaints from CONGRESSIONAL STAFF MEMBERS. The Republican creeps shouldn’t be there either! The answer is getting them out not letting the bad leftist dudes back in!!

I don’t know, feels like it’s actually not at all a bad thing that a predator doesn’t get to be a Senator anymore. Feels like that’s maybe like a baseline standard that we should be proud to hold ourselves to. He represented the people of Minnesota. Do you know how many women live in Minnesota? 2.8 million of them!! That is, in fact, more than the number of men who live there! If you want to be a Senator, a job solely aimed at representing your population, and you lack the basic respect for more than half of them, you don’t get to be a Senator anymore, I’m so sorry.

Look, I read his books. He’s the best character interview in the SNL oral history, a book I have read over 12 times because for some reason it turns my brain into white noise on a plane. The culture is rotted, so rotted men come out of it. (Why have I read the history of SNL so many times when half of the book is them vaguely defending themselves from the idea of a “boys club” sandwiched in between stories of Bill Murray “playfully” physically removing Gilda Radner from parties when he decided she’d had enough and the fact that John Belushi used to refuse to read sketches written by women and when he did underperformed the comedy or only spoke in whispers? Because it’s a cultural institution and I wanted for so long to do something in comedy and I guess my core belief that having the most information will benefit me is something I extend to all facets of life. But Lorne Michaels is one of the worst figures in pop culture and has been the arbiter of so many awful things, and we all turn a blind eye because the results of looking at what he has wrought is too painful, would ruin too many things. But now I just have all of this fucking background information kicking around in my brain of exactly how awful the treatment of women has always been by the entire institution. And honestly like, NBC at large! And it’s not just NBC, Les Moonves of CBS was also outed as a predator! It’s abusers all the way down!)

I love 30 Rock so much, I can’t even begin to describe how much the show was a formative part of my humor, my personality, and what seeing Liz Lemon did for me as an overachieving nerd comedy girl when I was in high school. But then I read last week that there’s evidence that Tina Fey witnessed the sexual assault of a minor who was groomed by Horatio Sanz, and like, I get that holding witnesses accountable is a weird slope and obviously Sanz should receive the brunt of the shame and legal recourse but like I’m so sick of these men getting away with this shit because everyone around them is so afraid to call them out because of the damage it could do to their careers.

Everyone knew James Franco was a fucking asshole the second he assaulted Busy Phillips in 1999 so I don’t buy Seth Rogen’s “woe is me who knew my friend would go on to sexually assault multiple women through his bullshit acting college program and solicit sexual materials from minors over Instagram” like y’all knew and you wanted to make money and movies with him, so the entire crew turned a blind eye and I just think it’s really shitty that Judd Apatow clearly did not value women’s safety on his sets enough to forgo casting the asshole over and over again and now the new Billy Eichner movie is part of Apatow media and I would love to support Billy but does that come with a moral compromise?? Do I as a consumer who knows these things have a moral obligation to boycott culture en mass because I know that Hollywood is actually so much worse than we ever want to assume, and has been the whole time? (Also there’s evidence that James Franco was a shadow Executive Producer on the Pam & Tommy show—a show that depicted the extremely violating behavior against Pamela Anderson without her explicit consent, retraumatizing her 20 years after the initial events—and that was after all the “good guys” made their “my friend isn’t such a good guy, huh” statements. They know. They knew! They just don’t care. Because they hate women!)

What do we do when the culture is rotted?

There is a large mural of Bill Murray’s face on my block. I know that he has committed multiple acts of domestic violence against his partners. It’s a painting of him in his little hat from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, because Wes Anderson really created a cultural renaissance for his career. The coffee shop it’s painted on is so cute, they have little benches and tables I always want to sit at, the folks who work there probably had little to no influence over what was painted outside. But I’ve never gone in. It just makes me feel weird. I hate that he gets to be the quirky uncle of Hollywood and the women he abused have been routinely silenced and written out of history. But our reaction to it societally is a very straightforward “eh, if we like the guy enough, it’s okay.” and I just don’t want to be complicit in that in any way.

We saw this again recently and super opaquely with the Johnny Depp defamation trial. A trial he purposefully set in Virginia (a place that has no ties to either of the people involved) because Virginia has notoriously bad Anti-SLAPP laws and the trial itself was simply a continuation of his domestic violence against Amber Heard, and he was allowed to air the trial live. She proved she was a victim many many times before, the lawsuit wasn’t about that, it was about creating the public spectacle and making her relive the abuse and trauma because abusers don’t just stop abusing their victims and often use the court systems to do it. Hence why anti-SLAPP laws exist in the first place! I believe Amber Heard, of course I do, there is no reason besides misinformation campaigns that were literally driven by Russian Bots not to believe her. The defamation suit was over an op-ed she wrote in which she did not name him. The legal precedence set by the case is fucking horrifying, and it’s on purpose, and the public was taken for a ride and it’s just so fucking shameful that it happened. Also, so much of her abuse was a direct result of Johnny Depp’s biphobia and I just don’t think enough people are viscerally aware of how bad the DV stats are for bisexual people in relationships, but bi women are the most likely to be abused and/or stalked by their intimate partners and I just think that’s a very important part of the story to note. (Especially as JD’s best friend and other noted horrific abuser Marylin Manson is going to try and discredit Evan Rachel Wood’s testimony, who is also a bi woman.)

Remember when it came out that the Time’s Up movement that was supposed to act as Hollywood’s monetary answer to routing out abusers and providing legal funds to victims turned out to be funding and advising Andrew Cuomo during his trial? Remember how it was an open secret in Albany for years and yet for some fucking reason we’re probably going to solidify his second in command Kathy Hochul as governor despite evidence that she absolutely knew this was happening but still wanted on the ticket and was willing to sacrifice any of her morals in order to do that? (She also stole money from Native casino’s in order to fund the Buffalo Bills new stadium to the tune of $500 million dollars because her husband works for the Bills, but is going to cut free school lunch programs in that same new budget. Please please vote for Jumaane Williams! Early voting starts tomorrow New York!) Andew Cuomo was a fucking bully, he bullied his staff, he bullied Bill De Blasio, he lied about the deaths in nursing homes at the beginning of Covid so that he could publish his book about what an incredible Governor he was, and he regularly intimidated and abused women both on his staff and outside the office. And then he tried to say it was because he was Italian??? And he might try to run for political office again, like, Andy, we actually managed to hold you somewhat accountable, sit down forever!!!! I just will never get over that even the women who formed a coalition against abuse were still willing and ready to be footsoldiers of the patriarchy because internalized misogyny really will be the death of us all!

I keep coming back to this feeling of like “okay but what does that mean for me?” because I genuinely don’t know. I hate that the yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr.com discourse has become so mainstream and we picked apart celebrities for not-real issues so now we don’t know how to value judge what we as consumers are responsible for when it comes to our media diet. I’m not casting these movies, I’m not pitching these shows, what responsibility do I have to make sure the media I’m consuming didn’t exploit someone somewhere along the way? This isn’t me trying to get out of that responsibility, it’s a genuine question. The Michael Jackson musical just took home four Tony awards last week. We KNOW he abused children. (And some of the lasting influence on culture is actually tied to one of those children, who became a choreographer in the early 2000s and transformed the dancing in music videos, and that dance style was heavily influenced by Jackson’s because the reason that he as a child had ended up in proximity was due to competitions to find the best mini-Michael dancers.) So like, the MJ legacy is fucking complicated because I can know that he himself was an absolute victim of abuse, but that doesn’t mean ignoring that he then perpetuated that sexual abuse against minors. And he’s dead so he’s not getting money from his royalties but like…should we still be playing his music in public? Won’t there be another generation of kids learning the Thriller dance if we don’t exorcise it from society? I was obsessed with his dancing when I was a kid, and then was very confused by the criminal trial, and I went to dance classes for years where he was the main soundtrack, and in all of that no one ever seemed to stop and ask if it was perpetuating something awful to keep him in the zeitgeist and continue to introduce his music to the next generation.

I gave up Woody Allen movies in a fucking heartbeat when I found out what had happened to Dylan. It makes me want to cry every single time I think about the fact that Ronan Farrow is absolutely so dedicated to routing out predators in Hollywood, and everyone believes his reporting, but then when it comes to his sister, there are still skeptics because Mia Farrow wasn’t always a perfect mother??? Make it make sense. (It doesn’t, we just, say it with me, hate women.)

When I watch Arrested Development, it’s fucking tainted because of how I know Jessica Walters was treated by Jeffrey Tambor. How does David Letterman still have a career after what we know happened in the Late Show offices? Why does Charlie Rose feel entitled to make a comeback? Why why WHY is Louis CK getting booked for comedy shows when he is a workplace hazard who admitted to his targeted harassment and subsequent targeting of his victim’s careers?

Al Franken was a very funny writer, and that does not excuse his predation. It’s that simple. I don’t think we should separate the art from the artist because we only seem to do that in situations in which the artist is a fucking horrid human being. The Democrats were right to hold abusers accountable, even if the other side refuses to. The moral turpitude on display when people ask why our side doesn’t get to keep the abusers in power is unfathomable. I hate it and I just saw a tweet about it again this morning and wrote all of this because I’m just so tired of feeling this way. Stan culture is bad because it causes people to make declarative statements online about the morality of people who they have never met and then feel compelled to double down if and when that person is shown to not be a paragon of morality. Also there is so much evidence that abusers are often very nice people who you “wouldn’t expect” it from and that’s why believing victims is so important.

(The DC Sniper in 2002 set out to cause mass hysteria and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it was all an elaborate scheme to murder his ex-wife Mildred and make her death seem non-targeted. He abused Mildred for years, physically, sexually, and financially. He kidnapped their children, cut her off from friends and family, turned the church against her, he started sleeping with the court-ordered therapist in order to get more favorable results in the custody trial. He was charismatic and charming, and no one believed Mildred. Mildred went on to get her children back, and committed her life to helping other women who were victims of domestic violence. Her ex-husband then became a domestic terrorist. There should be fucking statues of Mildred around this country. She grew up in a violent household, she escaped violence multiple times, and she was so determined to break the cycle that she did it over and over and over again even when no one believed her, except her friend from church who used to come over with food for her and the kids every week, because at one point the financial abuse was so bad she was being starved in her own home. And I didn’t know any of that until listening to one of the most harrowing series of Podcast episodes I’ve ever listened to and I believe that this story is really representative of how little we know or care about the women who suffer abuse.)

Believe women. Believe victims. Hold abusers accountable, and hold the people who knew and turned away from it accountable. We have to get to the root of the rot or it will just continue to fester and I would really love it if I could just watch some shit on TV, and vote for people without having to do a series of background checks on everyone involved because it turns out that rehabilitating abusers is like a major cultural thing that happens again and again.

Al Franken does not deserve to be a Senator again. He can do many many other jobs, no one is throwing him in jail, he just simply does not get to be in one of the most powerful positions in America anymore. I don’t care what the excuse was, I don’t care that the woman in the photo was a Republican, he doesn’t get to be a Senator and I beg beg beg the lefty internet to stop holding him up as a paragon of “cancel culture gone too far”. Cancel culture has nothing to do with the systemic extraction of abusers from society, actually. They’re not being canceled. They’re being held (barely) accountable.