Beyond the Pale

Each time I see a little girl

Of five, or six, or seven

I can't resist the joyous urge

To smile and say

Thank Heaven for little girls

For little girls

Get bigger everyday

Thank Heaven for little girls

They grow up

In the most delightful way

-Maurice Chevalier

Back at my computer doing trial prep as the sun rises out there.

Feeling a little better than yesterday, when I told P I was as exhausted as I'd ever been in peacetime. Trial is a young man's game, and I'm sure as hell not that. As happened during the war, thinking back to those fraught days, I find myself looking beyond next week and the cessation of hostilities, one way or another. Home with P. Perhaps we'll do something fun that has nothing to do with work or school.

Back in 1990 and 1991, I spent hours pawing through the American Express vacation catalogues while I sat alert. Remember those? I had my African safari all picked out, desperate for something to which to look forward if I survived my time in the desert.

I don't foresee anything so ambitious here. My Charlotte County trial may go away, and if so I could be in the air only six days from now. Perhaps the extent of "something fun" might entail riding up to the lake, unplugging everything, and watching it snow for a couple days. Lots of quality nap time. Maybe read a book that has nothing to do with law or politics.

My sense of "fun" is sure as hell different than it was when I was 26.

Like everyone else in the country this week, I'm watching with revulsion and fascination the drip drip drip of horrible information trickling out of the Epstein files, apparently just a little taste before the torrent. He's in there, all right, even alone for hours with the poor young lady who ended up taking her own life as it all became public years later. A deeply sick man.

But we knew that, didn't we? He's the most well-documented serial rapist and pedophile perhaps ever. The only reason there are no new stories is likely that he lacks the ability to physically close on the deal. A nation's young women breathe a sigh of relief, as does Melania.

What's deeply troubling about all this isn't so much his incredibly cruel and destructive behavior toward these vulnerable girls as his base's reaction to it all.

Steve Bannon tells his peeps they need to stand by the criminal SOB because he's "infused by divine providence".

Megan Kelly reminds us that a real pedophile is shopping for an 8 year old, and these teenagers somehow don't count.

Mike Johnson, a radical fundamentalist in some sort of kooky "covenant marriage" with his trad wife, kept the House out of session for over fifty days for the sole purpose of shielding a child rapist from exposure.

Meanwhile, evidence was finally revealed this week that our former representative in the next district to the west, Matt Gaetz, raped a drugged17-year-old on a pool table as his friends watched and faced zero consequences in the same House of Representatives. The girl lived part-time in a homeless shelter, and needed the money to pay for braces.

The consequences of his actions? He's planning to run for governor of Florida once the Wee Guv term-limits out of the job. Because of course.

These are just very, very bad people. There's no getting around it. And if you're still driving around with an "R" on a voter registration card right now (do they still make those?), you're complicit.

And the moral corrosion of countenancing this sort of exploitation and abuse of power, even inviting Dear Leader to grab your p*ssy across the front of your t-shirt, extends to all of us who have to share this moment in our national narrative with you.

I remember in 2015, right around the time a very bad man was descending an escalator in Manhattan to commence the national nightmare we're all living, Louis CK hosted Saturday Night Live and delivered a monologue that made the audience that night and most of the country gasp. His topic? Pedophilia, and how it must be incredibly great for the molester given the consequences of getting caught. The joke almost ended his career.

Now I suspect it would barely draw a shrug, because for one among us, our modern Princeps, there simple are no consequences. For anything.

Back to work. Witness outlines don't just write themselves.