Anything Goes?

Times have changed
And we've often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got a shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today
Any shock they should try to stem
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

Cole Porter, 1934

*

Yes, times have changed—and it is best to take to heart the First Rule of the 21st century:

Always remember that all mics are probably hot, all cameras are rolling, and, as a corollary to the latter, everybody carries a camera.

It was unfortunate this past week that the Rule was forgotten by media figures who should have known better. 

Football announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman were picked up on a hot mic mocking an air force flyover at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.

Aikman: “That's a lot of jet fuel just to do a little flyover.”

Buck: “That's your hard-earned money and your tax dollars at work!”(1)

The pair, of course, have had to do some groveling take-backs.(2)

The real victim this week of his neglect of the Rule, however, is Jeffrey Toobin, who has reported on legal matters at CNN and The New Yorker. During a pre-election role play event on Zoom, Toobin was caught on camera (let us say euphemistically) pleasuring himself.(3) Toobin has been suspended from his duties at The New Yorker and has been granted a leave of absence from the network.

*

But both the above cases are really minor. When it comes to trying to understand how things have changed in the 2000s, we must turn as usual to ET (the Egregious Trump). 

The Department of Justice is attempting to intervene in a defamation lawsuit filed in a New York court against Trump by E. Jean Carroll, a writer. The Department is contending that it should defend Trump on the grounds that his denial of the accusation of rape—which allegedly took place well before he became president—was “an official act because he ‘addressed matters relating to his fitness for office as part of an official White House response to press inquiries.’ ”(4)

Now to me this is a Plymouth-Rock-landing-on-my-head matter. I have racked my brain trying to remember exactly what I learned about the presidency and the Justice Department in my college Government class(5)—in which I received an “A.” I’m sure that I never nodded off and missed a lecture on how Justice is supposed to run interference for a predatory president, to the extent of covering his ass for actions decades before his term in office.

*

Excuse me, it’s time for me to crawl out from under my rock and to try to determine if indeed anything goes.

***

(1)  https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/us/troy-aikman-joe-buck-flyover-trnd/index.html

(2)  I, of course, completely agree with those sentiments. But the true inanity happens when flyovers are performed above an indoor arena!

(3)  https://www.vice.com/en/article/epdgm4/new-yorker-suspends-jeffrey-toobin-for-zoom-dick-incident

The sub-head of the article reads, “The call was an election simulation featuring New Yorker all-stars.” To show where my head was at, I read it as “erection simulation.”

(4)  https://news.yahoo.com/justice-dept-says-trumps-denial-121816984.html

(5)  That was in the good old days before Government departments pretentiously renamed themselves Political Science, thinking they could have some of the stardust of physics or chemistry rub off on them.