Academia: Only Connect

Friday's Child Is Tired of the Cycle

Do you feel trapped in a cycle of the same news, the same revelations, the same feelings and reactions?

Every time Epstein’s name comes up, I think the following things and wonder why the whole metastory gets hung up on the same points again and again.

First, why is anyone still looking for proof of Trump’s complicit involvement with Epstein? We’re way past the “smoking gun” stage and onto “smoking bomb crater”. Why is anybody allowed to act like Trump only barely knew the guy?

In fact, we’re on to “burning wildfire caused by the bomb”. Which is really what drives me nuts with this whole thing.

In each cycle of informational release, reporters and social media sift through the latest tranche of evidence and find a bunch of names of people who were in contact with Epstein, visited Epstein’s island or his other residences, benefitted from Epstein’s donations, or had money being managed by Epstein. The men (almost all men) named either ignore being mentioned or strenuously protest that they barely knew the man. In a few cases, they threaten to sue if the alleged connections are sufficiently damaging or potentially criminal. Only a small number of people who have been linked to Epstein have ended up suffering any real consequences—Joi Ito is the most prominent example that I can think of, and he’s more or less landed on his feet after leaving the MIT Media Lab.

Which leads me to the second frustration I have in each turn of this story. Why is there such an exclusive focus on sex with underage girls, as if that is the only thing that might taint people associated with Epstein? I understand that it’s at the core of his two criminal convictions, and it is the first of those convictions that critics allege should have led to anyone previously associated with Epstein to break ties with him. At the very least, many commenters plainly feel that anyone who knew Epstein and knew he associated with young, possibly underage women, and that he in some sense was offering that association to men he knew, should have broken with him right away as soon as they understood that this was the case. Certainly the latest dump of emails makes very clear that many Epstein associates were extremely aware of Epstein’s character in this respect, and that more than a few were involved in the world he had created.

That’s the thing: it should be just as bad if it turned out that Epstein was scrupulous about only recruiting women who were of the age of legal consent in the United States. It’s still trafficking if you are recruiting women older than 18 for one kind of job and then putting them into a situation where they do not feel free to leave or to refuse demands that they perform sex work. Frankly, I think it should be just as bad if it turned out that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were running brothels where all the women they recruited were fully aware that they would be doing sex work, at least when it comes to the clients. E.g., I don’t think any better of famous scientists, culture-makers, tech businessmen, politicians, and so on if they are routinely getting comped visits to sex workers at a ranch, at a Caribbean resort, or in a swanky NYC penthouse from a wealthy man who is trading off his procurement for insider knowledge, influence and reputation-enhancing access to accomplished men.

Which in turn raises the third thing that drives me nuts about this story in each of its recurrences. Why did the major revelations of the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers simply poof! and blow away from almost the moment that the ink dried? Some of the most astonishing documentation of the massive scale of “dark globalization”, the flow of money to entertainers, politicians, corporate leaders, investors, and so on from a host of sources, many of them illegal or questionable, and from those recipients into bank accounts and investment funds designed to shield that wealth from taxation, regulation, accountability or visibility? Why hasn’t the global press connected those revelations to similar investigations of hidden investments in property ownership all around the planet, but especially in the United States and United Kingdom?

You might ask: why do I expect that larger story to come up when Epstein is mentioned? Because that’s what Epstein represents! It’s not just sexual provision for powerful men that he was selling. He was selling exclusivity. He was modelling how to be corrupt: how to fly on private planes to private places, how to do whatever you like whenever you want, how to move money and hide money, how to get the insider word on where to be and what to do, and how to make sure you never, ever had to interact with lesser human beings at any kind of disadvantage. Why do we seem to have such difficulty connecting Epstein to the worlds he made visible? He showed us something about how those worlds work, but he didn’t create them. He was only one inhabitant.

Epsteinland has been everywhere in the 21st Century. It had its forerunners: Enron, WorldCom, AIG, Madoff. It has had other outposts of accidental visibility since it took on its fully-realized shape after 2009 besides Panama and Pandora, like the NXVIM sex cult. Or, I’d argue, like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the financial misconduct of Sam Bankman-Fried and associates, and many other visible nodes of criminal activity and corrupt influence-peddling. And Trump, who is a founding citizen of Epsteinland, and yet in some ways, also its court jester—the most obvious, the crudest, the least representative of that world. Small wonder that Epstein himself puzzled that the “dog has not barked” in Trump’s case, but that’s Trump’s genius, I suppose. He has found invulnerability in being obvious, in his kaiju-like obliviousness to hiding his lies, his misdeeds, his sexual predation.

When MAGA activists protest that critics of Trump would feel differently if Bill Clinton were under fire for his associations with Epstein, most of us reply: not at all. Go get him too. Get them all.

Which is why I file this under academia.

Because it’s not just about the famous academic names who show up in Epstein’s orbit, whether as planets who revolved tightly around his dark sun or bodies far out in his Oort cloud who made only one distant pass around his world. Academic networks cross into Epsteinland powered by the same motive force that drove a fair amount of “entrepreneurial” activity at large, wealthy research universities. It’s the hustle of people—again, most of them men—trying to make their names via selling attractive legitimating infrastructures for ideologies appealing to our new oligarchic ruling class, and the way those hustlers brought home a cloud of associates into departments and programs and projects and initiatives and were rewarded by their administrations for doing so. In many cases, what that did was bring people into the world of the academy who have recently betrayed the academy on behalf of Trumpism. In many cases, what that did was build a financial model, a revenue stream, that created enormous vulnerabilities for the university as an institution. In Epsteinland, there’s no equity, no autonomy and no values that transcend acquisition and power: there are only patrons and clients. And victims. That was an especially polluting spirit to bring into the university, and it came in not just through donors and entrepreneurial bigshot professors but through Davos, though Aspen, through McKinsey.

Another thing that MAGA-aligned Americans will sometimes say about stories of corruption: they all do it. That is meant as benediction and excuse, as permission to do it some more, as much as you like. Which, I suppose, is why people fixate on the pedophilia as the line where that permission is withdrawn, the one transgression that MAGA still agrees is anathema. (Though Megyn Kelly floated a trial balloon this week about making a distinction between sexual attraction to children and jailbait, more or less.)

MAGA is wrong, and often cynically and consciously so. They don’t all do it, and they don’t all do it with the same destructive consequences and the same depraved non-concern for a wider world. But Epsteinland is indeed a big country, with many natives.

So for all of those who did it, yes, get them. Shun them, banish them, disinvite them. Tell Dershowitz to go make his own fucking pierogis. Recognize that we shouldn’t have needed the latest emails to tell us what Larry Summers actually was because he showed himself to the world a long time ago.

Trace all those names in those investigations from Panama to the House Oversight Committee. Look at those email headers. Recognize that where there is smoke, there is fire, and that these fires have very nearly burned into the world beyond the dark forest. Don’t leave the ashes smoldering until another ill wind blows our way—and let’s rebuilt what the people from Epsteinland have destroyed, but let’s do it together, with shared purpose and conscious dialogue, in academia, in civil society, in the distributions and uses of wealth. Let’s celebrate the people who have put their money to good use, who have kept it clean and transparent, who have been honest and generous, and build a bigger, better gap between those worlds and those people and the sadly familiar hell that is Epsteinland.

Image credit: By State of Florida - https://offender.fdle.state.fl.us/offender/CallImage?imgID=1665905, retrieved July 12 2019.archive.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80362746