Alexander Cockburn Is Wrong

Our "sexual tolerance has shriveled" since 1977, complains Cockburn, but in point of fact contemporary attitudes owe more to the recognition that rape is an act of violence than to some fanciful "ongoing demonization of the Sixties and all that ebullient decade spawned." What a preposterous platitude. A mirror image, if you will, of the fevered imaginings of the New York Times' David Brooks regarding the sanctity of Establishment ways. Neither have a clue but Cockburn is by far the more pernicious, locking the idea of libertinism around the progressive ankle.

When Mr. Polanski drugged a thirteen year old girl, forced her to drink champagne, and then raped her orally, vaginally, and anally, that was an inhuman assault, torture, inflicted by an adult, a vicious predator, upon a child. Was love involved? One can affirm, from an a priori argument, that absolutely it was not. Was lust involved? One could argue the point but I very much doubt it. Rather, the rape — there was nothing particularly special here — was about power and violence. Mr. Polanski wanted to throw his weight around. Perhaps he even believed that in Hollywood, as word spread, as inevitably it must have done, that it might enhance his reputation. A reputation based, of course, upon his films about sexual degeneracy and violence. Indeed, it's not unreasonable to suspect that Mr. Polanski is a serial rapist who had managed previously (perhaps subsequently?) to not get caught...

Mr. Polanski has acknowledged in a guilty plea before a judge in a Los Angeles courtroom that his act was a crime. Then he became a fugitive. On what grounds can he expect a pardon? It all boils down to a single category of argument: that he is above the law. But nobody is above the law. Pointy headed intellectuals should quit their bellyaching, if for no other reason than out of respect for political reality.