Polanski arrest sets off hypocrisy tsunami

The deeper the world’s elites sink into criminality, the more outrageous the hypocrisy, and as usual the US leads the parade

BY JOHN STEPPLING [print_link]

The response in the US to Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland … as he was on his way to receive an award………is typical of a resentful, angry, and most significantly, a puritanical society.

I do wonder where the outcry is about Henry Kissinger still walking around? Or Ollie North (who is gainfully employed at FOX) or any number of priests, who havent done time but were merely shuttled off to a new parish. Why no moral indignation?

Actually, I think the reason Polanski is being piled on this way is that he has never apologized. In the Oprah era of public confessional that is the modern US, *not showing remorse* is the ultimate sin.

The question of Polanski as an artist is an interesting one, too. In the culture of the US, being an artist makes you a target of hate, unless (!) you manage to neuter yourself like a Tom Hanks or are, in fact, just a celebrity (like Hanks). But a serious artist, the Pinters or the like, are never going to find a home in the US. [Chaplin was hounded by the same puritanical battalions, as was Ingrid Bergman and many others). Real uncompromising artists are important people, they provide the much needed disruption in this sleepwalking culture, they provide a tacit conscience for the various cantons of encapsulated narcissism that passes for a civilized society. In the US they have always been distrusted and denounced.

Ads like these are all too common on US media.

This case is almost laughable actually, the girl was sexually mature and active, the mom an almost pimp, and the sex consensual. Oh, oh, oh, it can never be consensual with a minor. Well, this is more puritanism, and more hatred of pleasure. A society that so criminalizes, pleasure (drugs, sex, etc) and is simultaneously addicted to all forms of illicit activities….. is a very unhealthy place. Check the internet for swingers sites, and ads for tranny prostitutes, and ask yourselves how many of the people involved (and I have no issue with such activities at all) are also condemning Polanski. The girl, the *victim* wants the case forgotten (she got her settlement) and so what is the DA of LA county doing in a cash-strapped time, having this man arrested and wanting an expensive extradition ? One wonders, might it have to do with publicity? Gee, ya’ think?

Spare me the moral indignation over a thirty-year-old statutory rape case and give me investigations into torture. Give me Kissinger and war criminals like Wes Clark, give me those behind Iran Contra and give me the guys still tutoring death squads for the most repressive but business friendly regimes in the world. Give me the Catholic church, a foul and rotting institution of hypocricy and duplicity, give me the whole damn church, and give me all the bad cops who routinely abuse their power (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQSv88bdsbQ). Give me Blackwater and give me Dick Cheney.

JOHN STEPPLING‘s last film credit was Animal Factory (directed by Steve Buscemi 2000). Expat Steppling lived until recently in Lodz with Norwegian director Gunnhild Skrodal, while teaching at the Polish National Film School.