One afternoon at break, Jimmy W. was asking Pennington how long he had been a painter I think the response was 15 years. "I'm sure you have personally done some pretty fine work in those 15 years. No doubt! And though you consider yourself a painter, no one else here might call you one and, in fact, maybe no one in the world might acknowledge your efforts and call you "a painter". However, you go out in that parking lot and suck ONE dick at lunch, and everybody will call you "a cocksucker" That's a fact." That entertained the crew. Even Pennington laughed.
This came to mind when I read that Monica Lewinsky gave a recent Ted Talk about her fame and how it affected her life. Let's face it- being a cocksucker is what she is famous for. The world will never-mind anything else she does short of curing cancer as long as she lives. She was 22 years old, an intern crushing on the then President of the United States, and she had the presidential penis in her mouth. She blew the president. It was in all the papers. Well, how do you top that?
When the story broke, it was on the front page of the Commercial Appeal, the paper of record in Memphis when you can't get the free weekly, Memphis Flyer. I was in a gas station in South Memphis getting smokes and that paper and the black gal behind the counter looked at the front page and said: "I don't believe dat". I asked her if she didn't believe presidents had desires just like regular men. "No", she replied, "white men don't like sex dat much!"
I looked her over. Maybe 50. Five feet tall. 160-70 pounds. "Soooo...how many white guys have you been with, young lady?"
"None!" she declared proudly.
"Always good to talk to an expert" I replied, as I gathered up my change and left. Hers would not be the dumbest response to the Lewinsky Affair but I had to include it because it was delightfully stupid and racist, an angle that was so Memphis, really. This was before my world view of idiocy was so expanded by the internet. Monica's too. She called herself "patient zero" of online abuse. I wasn't anywhere near the internet at the time but, I can imagine it was rough for her there as it was in the bars and gas stations of the day. It was an embarrassing time for America, mostly because we were talking about it as giggly construction workers and poorly prepared store clerks. Europe laughed at us.Their presidents have always had mistresses. They wondered why we cared. I'm not a big fan of adultery but I wondered why we cared too. I mean, I knew why but, did it have to be a slut like Newt Gingrich leading the way against Clinton and Lewinsky? The shame of America over that episode was really that America had no shame in Newt's pontificating despite his own history of divorce, mistresses and non-wife blow jobs. At least he had practical experience.
I always felt sorry for Monica. She was young. It must have seemed like the thing to do at the time. It was a nice thing to do for a man she cared rather deeply about. I'm sure she never dreamed the world would know...
Lewinsky had been suicidal herself after her extremely public ordeal. She stepped out of the darkness of her personal humiliation when in September of 2010, an 18 year old college student named Tyler Clementi took his own life after being humiliated via the internet by his college roommate who used the webcam on his computer to 'broadcast' Tyler having sex with a man. Humiliated, his young life ruined, Tyler jumped off the George Washington Bridge and drowned.
Where she may have been "Patient Zero", he was yet another in a long line of people publicly shamed via the internet. It wasn't getting any better. It wasn't going to stop. We all know it never will. But, Monica is trying and she deserves a lot of credit for that.
There are real people behind the scandals. The public usually never sees that. It's easier to see the woman in the blue dress or the shy young man on the computer screen, We don't have to know them as someone's daughter, and someone's little boy. They're just cocksuckers to be laughed at, right? Yeah, just them....
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