Public Humiliation Of The Powerless And Often Blameless Is Terrible And Should Be Distinguished From Feeling Ashamed For Real Wrongs

Back during Ken Starr's massively publicly funded role as a Republican political operative pretending to be engaged in law enforcement, his  hunt to find something, anything he could find to end Bill Clinton's presidency, when the idiot "House managers" including such human garbage as Lindsay Graham, Henry Hyde, James Sensenbrenner, James Rogan,  Bill McCollum, Asa Hutchinson, George Gekas, Steve Chabot, Chris Cannon, Charles Canady, Steve Buyer, Ed Bryant, and Bob Barr, a ship of fools who screwed the country while being paid for it and who were so stupid that that number of them couldn't get Bill Clinton convicted and who I am naming because they should have suffered a fraction of the shaming that they put her through, were stupid enough to put the videotaped deposition of Monica Lewinsky into evidence in the Senate and, so, on American TV.

It was the first time I saw and heard Monica Lewinsky in the entire scandal and I was impressed that not only was she much smarter than the inquisitor who was trying to trap her into saying something useful to the Republican assholes who mounted the entire series of fake Clinton scandals, with the help of some in the FBI and the billionaires and multimillionaires who funded the effort, Monica Lewinsky came across as a likable young adventuress who, while I would wish she'd been more careful in her personal choices, unlike those named and referenced above, had no truly evil motive in what she did.  Well, other than the adulterous nature of it.

She seemed to me, even at my age back then, to have been a kid who had done something really dumb, having been seduced with the excitement of celebrity and trappings of power around an American president and who was manipulated by those who were, unknown to her, acting as Republican-fascist operatives, but who was not really any dumber than I might have been at that age.   I liked her.

The only two people in the whole thing I came away liking more than I had before were Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Clinton, the wronged party.  The entire thing should have been a private affair among three people, Hillary Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, instead the Republican lie machine, cabloid TV and hate talk radio and the massive Ken Starr racket to waste public money and cheapen the country that it was.

How many of the real shits in that story,  Ken Starr, Lindsay Graham, Henry Hyde, James Sensenbrenner, James Rogan,  Bill McCollum, Asa Hutchinson, George Gekas, Steve Chabot, Chris Cannon, Charles Canady, Steve Buyer, Ed Bryant, and Bob Barr, who wasted tens of millions of public dollars trying to undo the results of elections in which, unlike with those of Bush II and Trump, the actual winner of the election won, have been held up to shame and public ridicule.  I ask that even as I point out as a gay man, myself,  the hypocrisy of the most powerful and hypocritical faggot in America right now,  Lindsay Graham, has probably done everything that he held up Monica Lewinsky as doing and I'll bet most if not all of them have been on the other end of that or a similar transaction in their private lives, some of them probably in their congressional offices.  Remember that scumbag fake man of faith, Henry Hyde had already been exposed as an adulterer who probably gave the woman stupid enough to get involved with him little more than a set of pink luggage.  Though none of them were subpoenaed into talking about their sex lives for the edification of Republican fascists and cabloid liars and pieces of shit like Jay Leno (watch the video below if you want to know why I mention that piece of slime).  You give me the money and resources they spent, I'll bet I'd find out about them more than the tiny little scandal which was the entirety of what they found on either of the Clintons and that was with Bill doing his best to hand them stuff.

That's why I liked hearing John Oliver's interview with Monica Lewinsky in his show about the current culture of shaming in both its good and its outrageously bad manifestations.  One thing that he didn't really point out enough is that most, in fact all of the outrageously bad uses of public shaming against powerless people happen through the very media that put Monica Lewinsky through what she went through and they do it through the very legal rulings that I've railed against here, those that allow the media to lie about people and destroy them in nationwide and world-wide broadcasts and through the internet.  Oliver's example of the "aunt from hell" incident is one of so many that could named, I always remember the destruction of Shirley Sherrod, Richard Jewell after the Olympic bombing in Atlanta,  of ACORN, and so many other incidents that all spring from the permission given by the Supreme Court for the media to lie and to spread lies.

Here is John Oliver's piece on it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm entirely in favor of the emotion of shame, when it is appropriate to the things felt shamed over and when it has some use in ending bad behavior.   I'm Irish, I know shame is one of the greatest of human emotions and one of the most beneficial.  I think one of the problems is that we're using the wrong words, to an extent.   The kind of thing that John Oliver is pointing out is more like a lynch mob to destroy and torture people than it is an honest examination of conscience and repentance.  One is public with the intention to use someone, like Monica Lewinsky, and to destroy her in that use, to torture her, to humiliate her.  That's not the same thing as someone feeling ashamed for their own actions which they conclude they should regret.  And even then, "shame" isn't always the word for that.   For the merely dumb things I did when I was in my early 20s, I feel embarrassment and humiliation,  for the mean, cruel things I did, like the kind of things that were done to Monica Lewinsky,  for those, I feel shame.