The straw that broke the camel's back
I am skeptical but hopeful that the camel is in for it.
One day there was this person who was awful.
She supervised others in her job, and the place she worked was meant to provide an important service to others. She held this job for decades. The place she ran might be compared to the soup-Nazi soup vendor in Seinfeld. If you pissed her off, no soup for you, except they didn’t purvey soup, but rather, books.
Her staff were divided into two types: Normal and also-Nazi. the also-Nazi staff members enjoyed, with their little side-on grins and quiet nasal snickers, messing with the customers. They thought of new ways to torture their all-suffering patrons, tested out these techniques of torment, and refined their maltreatment every day. I’m sure the boss gave them bonuses for being bad.
The other staff, the Normals, were regular people who just liked working in this sort of establishment, and in some cases, had higher degrees backing up their proficiency in this area. One of those people was a good friend of mine, who died a while back, allowing me to tell this story. That person told me all about the abuse of staff, and as a customer of this enterprise, I was among those also abused as well. It was an ongoing thing, and it was even legendary. People around the world, as part of the broader community, knew all about all of this. They knew by name the book-Nazi.
At the apex of awfulness, one of the Normals got cancer. She asked for Tuesday afternoons off for chemotherapy, and that was granted. Then her cancer got worse, ans she asked to also have Thursday afternoons off. That was not granted, and she was forced to leave her job. Indeed, this awful boss is probably one of the individuals that ultimately caused HR departments to grow and employee protection regulations to expand.
This abuse of customers and staff continued for years, and no matter how bad things got, and no matter how much everyone knew about how bad it was, nothing changed. This was a hierarchical system and the people at or near the top of the hierarchy were protected.
So the awful boss had a boss as well, and that boss had a wife who was marginally involved in the entire enterprise of which we speak. One day a conflict developed, over some books, between the wife of the head boss and the book-Nazi. Nobody remembers the nature of the conflict, but everyone remembers that it really wasn’t that big a deal. Like soup. Soup, per se, especially a particular bowl of soup, is a small thing in the overall scheme of life. But if you say the wrong thing regarding the soup, it is “no soup for you” time. In this case, “no book for you,” and by “you” I mean the boss’s boss’s wife.
Then one day, as part of this conflict, the book-Nazi, out loud, called boss’s wife a bitch.
Later that day, the boss’s boss entered the arena, and by that I mean the actual work place, and lined up all of the staff. He openly interrogated them as a group to establish the fact that his wife had just been bitch-called by book-Nazi, and established that it was true. By the end of the week, a new person was in charge and book-Nazi was gone. The camel, it was crushed by this one bitch of a piece of straw.
Of course, this relates to the Epstein Scandal.
In the Epstein Scandal, there is an establishment. With book-Nazi, there is an institution. In both cases, the status quo is protected no matter how bad the bad things the baddies do are. It continues on and on. Nothing, not firing someone because they have cancer, not shooting someone on 5th Avenue, matters. It just goes on and on and on forever, and it is unstoppable.
Until one day one day, a camel walks in the room, gets a straw on it, and collapses. Or, more specifically a key part of the internal framework of the entity throws a rod.
In the case of book-Nazi, the villain’s villainy runs up against a key figure in the institution. The fully indurated nastiness of the Nazi could not be held in abeyance by the book Nazi herself, and bam, she indirectly slaps her own boss across the face, because she normally slaps everyone across the face. Straw, meet camel, and then she’s gone.
In the case of Epstein, the deeply rooted character flaw of abiding belief in conspiracy theories for their own sake, and the equally enduring belief in certain specific conspiracy tropes (in this case child trafficking) by MAGA, run head on into the reality that the boss, Trump, is himself part of the conspiracy that MAGA-heads are all about rooting out and destroying.
Until about today, about this morning, I held the belief that this whole business was not going to pan out into something that actually damaged Trump. Nothing ever has, no matter how bad, so why this one? I am still skeptical.
But the Epstein scandal seems to have lasted beyond some threshold of time range within which other Trump scandals have all withered and died. Also, Team Trump seem to be using techniques to deflect and distract that, in almost all cases, are making it worse. For example, MAGA-heads don’t believe Ghislaine Maxwell’s exoneration of Trump. And the right wing press is not doing what it usually does. As pointed out by Dan Pfeiffer earlier this morning, “one of the dynamics sustaining media interest in the Epstein story has been criticism from some of Trump’s most prominent online supporters. The press loves an intra-party fight, and after a decade of slavish loyalty to Trump, it’s been quite notable to see so many right-wing media personalities turn on him over Epstein.”
Donald Trump called someone a bitch.
The camel has arrived, and the straw is piling on.
Order extra popcorn.