This is part iii. If you haven’t read parts i and ii, they’re HERE (i) and HERE (ii). iv. below is a section number, not a post number. Today, we’re going all the way to vii. the senses shattering finale …
Oregon Public Broadcasting news, 8:03 AM 1-25-09:
Portland Mayor Sam Adams has not yet decided whether to resign after he covered up a sexual relationship with a teenager….
iv. We get jiggy with it
Ultimately, sex scandals aren’t about fucking. They’re about talking about fucking: self-anointed moral guardians passionately declaiming passion. Prurient outrage expressed at orgasmic volumes by those who, seemingly, are against orgasms.
(We even call some scandals ‘crimes of passion.’)
The facts quickly take a back seat to various interpretations of the facts, and then judgments of the facts, and the facts, because they are about sex, are generally sketchy at best, and more characterized than described. Once the “sex!” meme is introduced into the hall of funhouse mirrors and bounces around for awhile, the story floats on its own feedback.
There are stories about stories. There are stories tracking how great our story was, and quoting other stories about our story that we put in THIS story:
[COVER STORY, POLITICS]
Why Adams Confessed
The story behind why the Mayor admitted to lying.
Table of Contents: | The Story Timeline | The Reaction | Police Puzzle
BY NIGEL JAQUISS
[January 21st, 2009][Editor's Note: This cover story is an update to an article originally published on WWeek.com on Monday, Jan. 19. Click here to read the original online version, with more than 200 reader responses. ]
By now, most readers know Mayor Sam Adams called WW on Monday afternoon and, contrary to his earlier denials, confessed to having had a sexual relationship with Beau Breedlove in 2005. Thirty minutes later, Adams issued a press release to other media, repeating that confession.
Adams made his comments as WW was finishing a detailed update to a story from September 2007 about Adams and Breedlove, a legislative intern whom Adams met in 2005, when Breedlove was 17.
In that story, both insisted their relationship in 2005 was platonic. On the phone Monday, Adams said his original denials were untrue. Rather, he said he and Breedlove did have sex, although he said it was after Breedlove turned 18 on June 25, 2005….
And, because the story is about talking about the story, the buzzwords unmask passions, but rarely facts. When talking about the story that I did not want to cover, a radio announcer on OPB made a telling slip: she began talking about the l’Affaire Goldschmidt as having sex with an underage girl, and CAUGHT herself, concluding “sexually ABUSING an underage girl.”
You think you know what was said, but, really, you don’t. Because we don’t ever talk about it.
And it is in that silence that the witch hunts thrive.
If we are going to root around in garbage, then let’s be explicit here, OK? People’s lives and careers are on the line.
OK: what is underage?
It is someone under the age of consent.
What is the age of consent?
It is a legal line drawn in the sand. It could be 21, or 18, or 16 (as it was in Oregon during the time of the Goldschmidt event and not, 25 years later, 18) or13. The age of consent is a reflection of the times, and moves back and forth.
Under English Common Law for centuries, sex with a child was defined as under 10.
It is a fiction, but a necessary fiction. The “girl” of 17 years, 364 days is defined as a “child” in the sex scandal talk, but at 18 years, she can star in porn films, and nobody can do anything about it legally. It’s not even particularly a news story, unless you can get the local judge to declare her an unfit mother, or the PTA draws up a resolution demanding that the school board refuse to allow her to finish high school.
The problem is that biologically, the age of sexual maturity does not coincide with the legal permission to do anything about it. Thus, the term “jail bait.” At its extreme, this has been interpreted to mean that a young man of 18 years having consensual sex with a young woman of 17 years and 364 days (365 in a leap year) is “statutory rape.”
Thus, a “child” in the talking heads formulation automatically cannot give “consent” (they magically become wise and knowing, and, therefore able to grant that consent at 18), and, therefore, sexual activity with someone “underage” becomes sexual activity with a “child” and therefore sexual “abuse.”
And we have not talked about fucking ONCE in the prior exposition.
You see? We characterize “teenager” which is an ambiguous term for “age of consent” and “child” because there is that arbitrary legal line. It must be drawn, but we must remember that it is a legal fiction.
Because nobody bothered informing our bodies and their instincts.
Trust me: when law takes on instinct head on, law loses every time.
If you do a thorough genealogical check on your family, you will be shocked to find out how many of your grandmothers were 13, 14, and 15 when they got married to your grandfathers … almost always in their 20s and even 30s. It was commonplace. For millennia.
That was their age’s legal attempt to deal with the mechanics of biology that so much of the law addresses: family law, divorce court, custody battles, inheritance, probate, etcetera. All derive from that fucking that we never talk about.
But consider this: as uncomfortable as you’ve felt in reading this stuff about “Age of Consent” shouldn’t we have the intellectual honesty and moral courage, if we’re going to destroy lives with these sex-talk and moral-masturbation scandals, to actually examine the uncomfortable topics we’re frying lives over?
I mean, that was Anthony Comstock’s modus operandi: he could charge someone with “obscenity” and, because it was “obscene” and so horrible no one could actually SEE it, because it would, presumably, turn their brains into tapioca and induce the effects of tertiary syphilis, there was NO WAY to defend oneself against the obscenity of a book that no jury was allowed to read.
Yeah. Right here in the good ol’ USA.
Somehow we start with invasion of privacy and end up with Kafka’s The Trial.
American society was the only society that actually BOUGHT Victorianism, and yet, somehow, in our “enlightened” age, we still want nothing more than the vicarious thrill of the “sex” scandal. All carefully sanitized, of course, but there, nonetheless, in all its bodice-ripping glory.
And the horrible secret that we all have, but which the law and the moralists almost never speak of nor acknowledge.
v. The love that dare not speak its name
As Theodore Sturgeon said:
“Why must we love where the lightning strikes and not where we choose?” ["The World Well Lost"]
Horny makes you stupid. The body chooses, and, at best, you can try to tame your impulses, or not act on them. But you are not in control of them.
Why don’t people GET that it’s the same for straight or gay? We don’t CHOOSE what makes us stupid, and we all do stupid things when we’re horny. The classical prescription has been, West and East: Lead us not into temptation. But we live in a temptatious age, and stupid things happen.
However, there is a great difference between embarrassing stupid and illegal stupid, and there’s no illegal stupid here.
Which is why so many decry anyone else’s sexual stupidity. Passion makes fools of us all, and when we can laugh at someone else’s folly, it is never gentle laughter: it is always the cruel laughter of derision and humiliation.
And we are quick on the draw.
Just like here. The story broke. It went national. Listeners got their little moral titillation “charge.”
That’s the sideshow part of news: it’s interesting because it’s tittilating, and not because it’s legitimately news.
It would be funny if lives weren’t destroyed by it. But they are.
But you won’t even notice that there is something deeply repellent in the use of the term “queer.” It’s to homosexuality what the N-word is to being black. And, in some measure, its use is virtually identical. A Q-word can call another Q-word the Q-word, just as an N-word can call another N-word the N-word, but NO ONE else can, and both words ARE derogatory in the extreme.
Willamette Week would never think of having a page denoted by the N-word, but QUEER is OK?
And, there is a whole subtext involved that being gay is AUTOMATICALLY deviant in many minds. That a gay man had sex with a gay TEENAGER … well, it’s loftily proclaimed that this isn’t about sex, but LYING.*
Although, as former Sen. Dale Bumpers said during Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, if they say it isn’t about sex, it’s about sex.
[* And, of course, it is utterly beyond the pale that powerful forces are performing a political 'hit' on Adams, because they don't care to have a -- as WW so loves to say -- QUEER running their fair city. Everyone in Portland is progressive and tolerant, of course, and such a thing could NEVER happen.]
You see, the problem is that no details are provided, and yet huge segments of the population (if the media is to be believed) are outraged. Well, at least politicians and editorial page brayers are. But WHAT is it that they’re outraged about?
Lying?
Oh, there’s a lot of highfalutin’ talk about public trust and other such hooey, but no political position in the land requires that you let reporters into your bedroom. If there were, we would have no one willing to enter public service.
And, the idea that a politician told a lie is a dog bites man story at best. (Especially when it’s about sex.)
We went through this in the Clinton impeachment, remember? The tactic of trying to de-couple lying about sex and the sex didn’t work then and oughtn’t work now.
from the Willamette Week virtual masthead
It’s about the sex. The GAY sex.*
[* Er, ... this morning's WW:
CITY HALL / NEWS / POLITICSBeau Breedlove Tells Oregonian He and Mayor Sam Adams Kissed Twice When Breedlove Was 17
Beau Breedlove told The Sunday Oregonian that he and Mayor Sam Adams kissed twice on the lips before Breedlove turned...
vi. Mr. Peepers doesn’t quite get the goods, but no matter
And to be upset about the sex, you gotta VISUALIZE the sex. Listen to those voices raised in anger. What are they imagining that is upsetting them so?
Well, from Willamette Weekly‘s Pulitzer Prize Winning Guardian of Public Decency, Nigel Jaquiss, here’s something to help [emphasis added] …
[...]
The puzzling relationship of Portland’s new mayor with a young man less than half his age is not a story about sexual preference.
Instead, it is a story about candor and the need for the public to be able to trust its leaders.
BEAU BREEDLOVE IS AN ENIGMA. He is a darkly handsome 2005 graduate of Salem’s Sprague High School, and a talented pianist. Now 21, he has bounced from place to place and job to job.
Starting last April, eight months after Breedlove briefly made headlines, the story came back to life. Breedlove’s curious actions, the decision of some of his acquaintances to speak to WW and, more recently, the circumstances surrounding a surprising new hire by Adams, have provided new information.
On April 23, 2008, Breedlove penned a cryptic blog post on his MySpace page, which was emailed anonymously to WW:
“you know that feeling you get when you come to realize that youve probably done something wrong, and although you really wanted and/or needed to do it, you know it probably wasnt the best decision at the time, or at least not the most honorable,” Breedlove wrote.
The post could be read as a harmless evocation of a young man’s angst, or as a confession. Either way, WW decided to do additional reporting.
Since then, WW has spoken to three Breedlove acquaintances. All spoke on condition of anonymity. All three say Breedlove told them he had a physical relationship with Adams in 2005, although the men were unsure of whether it began before or after Breedlove turned 18….
No. It’s not a story about sexual preference. It’s a story about sex. It’s a story about anonymous sources and peeping into someone’s sex life on the flimsiest of pretexts. It’s a story that was originally pursued to destroy the life of an elected official. When it didn’t turn up any smoking gun (Freudian pun not intended), they went with the story ANYWAY.
The PURPOSE of the story became more important to Willamette Week than the actual facts of the story, and that should givest pause.
We all know about the public’s right to know. But what about the public’s right NOT to know?
Unless it was done on the taxpayers’ expense account and during working hours (not including breaks) using taxpayer facilities and vital nuclear secrets were given to our mysterious foreign enemies, I REALLY DON’T WANT TO KNOW.
You got that? You won’t show us pictures of the war, but you’ll glop down this mess of sleaze right down in the middle of dinner.
This narrative is nearly pathological. Facts aren’t the issue: the breathless, constructed narration of deception and anonymous witnesses laced with unspoken innuendo and intimations of some far greater darkness would do Ken Starr proud. Think about what’s going on here:
A would-be (gay) political opponent tries to smear a political candidate (Sam Adams) with a story that he’d had gay sex with a minor.
Hot button. Red meat to hungry bloodhounds.
The candidate delivers a stinging denunciation.
It’s dropped.
But look at what we get instead:
ON JUNE 5, 2008, Breedlove was working as a waiter at a benefit for the Q Center, a Southeast Portland gathering place for gay youth.
[Bob] Ball, a Q Center benefactor, attended the event at Cacao, a downtown Portland chocolate shop.
Since publication of the original Breedlove story in September 2007, Ball had largely withdrawn from public life.
During the event, Breedlove, whom Ball says he had never previously met, walked up and introduced himself.
Ball, 42, says he was “stunned” by the encounter, but even more surprised when Breedlove apologized to him.
“I wanted to say I was sorry,” Breedlove said to Ball, according to notes Ball took after the conversation. “I was very isolated and didn’t understand how big this situation was and what was happening,” Ball recalls Breedlove saying.
Ball said he believed Breedlove to be apologizing for having lied about Adams.
“Why else would he apologize to me?” Ball says.
(That’s really questionable hearsay, Mr. Reporter. What kind of competent professional editor would run with a quote like that?)
Uh, that’s not my problem, Mr. Pulitzer, Mr. Morality, Mr. Peepers. That’s YOUR question. And Jaquiss DOESN’T answer it, significantly. Instead, it’s left hanging in the air, a Fox News moment … “some people say.” We don’t know why else he would apologize, assuming the story (by someone who’d love to get even with Adams) is true.
And the closet moralists, the sunshine prudes, the church social shocked! shocked! all come out with screeching anger.
And they’re lying too. Somehow it isn’t about a very ugly charge and then a very ugly intrusion into a private life by a reporter who seems to take a savage glee in destroying the lives of public servants after having convinced himself of the utter public necessity of rooting them from the body politic as a cancer.
Seriously.
- Willamette Week OUTED the man, probably hoping to destroy his public career in 1995.
- It didn’t work, so THEY TOOK CREDIT FOR IMPROVING HIM.
Now, if this sounds like the Spanish Inquisition at any point, you just stop me.
- Later, running for mayor they evidently pursued a story they knew would destroy him (as they have shown themselves to be fair-handed arbiters of the public interest) and it came to nothing.
- Then, from an ANONYMOUS email, of a cryptic posting on a MySpace page, they unleash their Pulitzer Peeping Tom, who doggedly pursues (by his own accounting) a 2005 sexual encounter.
Why?
Not because the “teenager” was underage. (Although we have to assume that the investigator HOPED that he was, else why pursue the story?). But, because they DID actually have adult, consensual sex, and when confronted with it by a hostile media, said they didn’t, THEY MUST PAY.
It’s not about the public’s right to know. It’s about Nigel Jaquiss and the WW’s right to know.
Gee, at least it wasn’t 29 years ago, which was what they did to former Governor Goldschmidt. Of course, that was, THEY KNEW, based on an anonymous political vendetta by a Senator from Lane County. Who later ran for governor bragging about it.
No, if they are to be believed, THIS time, it was just because …. because why?
I mean if it WASN’T to destroy the newly-elected mayor of Portland, then what public interest was served? Getting even for being lied to? How in any wise does any of this affect the official duties of the mayor?
Or, given Willamette Week’s track record, how do we know that this wasn’t an act of sheer malice? I mean they paid no price for outing Adams in 1995.
And, they even took credit for his political career when he didn’t just roll up and die.
And they were feted and praised for destroying Goldschmidt in 2004. Maybe they miss all the adulation.
You see, in our democracy, the ONLY force that can discipline a newspaper and a malicious reporter is the public. Public officials, courts, police and all officialdom can’t do anything do discipline the press — at least in theory.
Which is the way we want it. But it is almost indisputable that Willamette Week‘s editors and their crackerjack reporter could NOT stand up for five minutes in the public spotlight given the same scrutiny as they themselves dish out.
I wonder what kind of kinky secrets we could find in THEIR bedrooms.
But they have the megaphone, and without an actual sexual scandal, they are braying SCANDAL at the top of their collective voice. What’s the giant festering sore that is so important that the People’s time must be stolen, and the new mayoral administration crippled and hopefully the mayor disgraced and thrown from office?
Uh.
About something that turns out to not have been any of their business in the first place?
Instead, the Oregon Attorney General has announced an investigation. And newspapers as far south as Eugene recklessly inveigh their profoundest moral judgments from On High, THIS CANNOT PASS!
Sure, I realize that underlying homophobia has NOTHING to do with this.
Why, we all KNOW that if it were a straight politician, they’d even-handedly destroy HIS life as casually as you’d swat a fly, too, and then demand high fives from everyone who SAW them swat the fly.
And we STILL haven’t asked the question: WHO benefits from this?
Willamette Week was more than happy to act as Vicki Walker’s catspaw in the Goldschmidt Affair, and won a Pulitzer Prize for it, which they can flash at the rubes to prove that they’re actually journalists, and not two-bit tabloid peepers, like the National Enquirer‘s stalking staff that staked out John Edwards for months. Or did the same with Sarah Palin, except nobody picked up on THAT story.
vii. the senses shattering finale
Let me tell you something about Pulitzer Prizes.
You don’t get Pulitzers for your writing. You get Pulitzers for how much of a ruckus you can kick up. There’s an element of luck involved, of course, but I’ve been around this business for more than three decades now, and I’ve known reporters who won Pulitzers and in every case it wasn’t about the quality of the work: it was about how much of a crap-storm was kicked up by the story.
That was certainly the case in 2004 with the Goldschmidt story. On that scale, Jaquiss certainly earned his stripes. But the BAD writing in that tale verges on fiction. He constructs an entire narrative of “sexual abuse” in the same manner, using lots of innuendo and false drama. All the new journalism fiction tricks, including the utter fiction that ALL of the babysitter’s problems in later life were a result of the “sexual abuse” (and, the choice of words is anything but dispassionate journalism). Having gotten the former babysitter a job, she is raped in the parking lot.
The reporter’s narrative somehow makes that Goldschmidt’s fault, and attributes all of her “post traumatic stress syndrome” back to Goldschmidt. There’s a lot of psychoanalyzing without a license, and, significantly, the “victim” doesn’t want to talk about it. Asked them NOT to run the story for the damage it would do to her family.
Well, as we said in Vietnam, we have to destroy the village in order to save it.
Gee. Exactly like the Sam Adams narrative. An act between two people that both people believe is nobody else’s business, and, even were it criminal, neither person would bear witness against the other is a moot point in law: no harm no foul.
[COVER STORY]
The 30-Year Secret
A crime, a cover-up and the way it shaped Oregon.
BY NIGEL JAQUISS | njaquiss at wweek dot com
[May 12th, 2004]
Say what? The original WW Goldschmidt story is so morally schizophrenic that this photo and caption accompanies it:
Saying Goldschmidt was mayor is like saying Mozart wrote music. He transformed a parochial backwater into a city of international renown. Pioneer Courthouse Square, Tom McCall Park and the bus mall–all are products of Goldschmidt’s tenure.
As weird and bizarro-world as taking credit for NOT destroying a man’s life after “outing” him
Crimination
n. The act of accusing; accusation; charge; complaint.
The “victim” is victimized again by the newspaper, pretending that some public “right to know” is paramount. Is more important than wrecking lives and careers.
Pretty godlike self-image, ain’t it?
But with Sam Adams it’s no longer crimination with WW, it’s more like RE-crimination.
After all, if a newspaper — knowing that it might well destroy his livelihood — “outed” a gay civil servant, most thinking persons would think that newspaper had it in for him if they tried again.
Now, let’s contrast that Pulitzer Prize with what the actual Joseph Pulitzer did in a political sex scandal that changed the outcome of a presidential election, shall we? From Joseph Pulitzer and His Prize [emphasis added]:
… Pulitzer even turned the presidential election of 1884 on its ear by exploiting a mistake made by the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine. Polls still favored the Republican stalwart at the end of October.
Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, was struggling with scandal surrounding his illegitimate child. Republican supporters penned a popular refrain to describe their opponent: “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!” Pulitzer accepted the fact that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock before his marriage, but he considered Blaine’s transgressions a greater threat to the presidency.
As a congressman during the ’70s, Blaine had received thousands of dollars from a railroad company over which he had regulatory supervision. By securing the incriminating documents from his secretary and through some amount of luck, Blaine avoided being prosecuted for his graft. However, during the 1884 election, the secretary disclosed some letters which Blaine had neglected to obtain. One message with the words, “Burn this letter,” cemented in Democrats’ minds the chant, “Blaine, Blaine, the liar from Maine.”
This election turned into one of the most sensational in U.S. history, with voters undecided between two men with very obvious flaws. One could not brush the bribing hand of industry away from his pocket; the other could not keep his own hands under control. Pulitzer saw the issue as clear-cut. Cleveland had erred in private life, while Blaine had betrayed the public trust. However, no Democratic paper was able to convince the public until Pulitzer published a front-page account of a little-noticed Republican fundraiser in New York.
The event was not out of the ordinary for an election year. Blaine met with financiers including William H. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould and Andrew Carnegie at the upscale Delmonico’s restaurant to secure their support. However, the World described the affair as “THE ROYAL FEAST OF BALSHAZZAR BLAINE AND THE MONEY KINGS” in a seven-column headline. The coverage, as well as a half-page cartoon depicting the candidate eating “lobby pudding” and “monopoly soup,” focused the public on Blaine’s shady financial deals. No other newspaper, whether Democratic or Republican, had published a detailed account of the fundraiser the day after it happened. But they all covered the event after the World‘s story made its splash.
So, we have two approaches: Joseph Pulitzer’s approach and Willamette Week‘s Peeping Pulitzer approach to serving the public.
Rupert Murdoch, heir to William Randoph Hearst
Now it’s your vote. The courts and the police and the government are prohibited from regulating the press — our wisest Constitutional guarantee. But when a newspaper becomes toxic and vicious; when they start behaving more like Joe McCarthy than Eugene McCarthy, who can discipline them? Who regulates the regulators?
You, dear reader. Only We, the People can hold WW accountable. But if we do not, and instead give in to the lowest urges to gossip and titter, to humiliate and destroy and rub ourselves with our own “morality” then we give the WWs and the Jaquisses of the press the license to peep into YOUR bedroom without cause. To shame and humiliate you in front of your city, your family, your friends and loved ones, whether you’ve done anything criminal or not.
Is that what you want to vote for? Isn’t privacy fast disappearing and precious in an age of camera phones and digital recorders? Of poking, googling, nexusing your lexis, cyberstalking and, yes, peeping?
If we, by increasing WW’s circulation, reputation and ad rates, endorse the voyeurism of Nigel Jaquiss and — more importantly, since this was HIS call in a culture of “gotcha” long before Jaquiss got to WW — his EDITOR, aren’t we just as guilty of low voyeurism? Because, without a shadow of a doubt, this is less about the morality of Thomism than the perverse thrill of Peeping-Tomism. Indeed, when you graft the branch to the root, it is, in fact, Peeping-Thomism: the thrill of peepery welded to the moral indignation of almost Thomist moral arguments for the RIGHTNESS of spying on people’s bedrooms.
(Isn’t Peeping-Thomism the ultimate worst-case nightmare for the gay community? Why is Portland’s gay press attacking Adams, and going along with WW?)
this morning’s WW online:
You can “vote” for this behavior or you can vote against it by your actions, but you probably can’t sit this one out. Sooner or later, our society will have to become less afraid of the penis than the gun. (If you will note, the legal penalties and social horror over the former far outstrip those for using the latter.)
But if the mere mention of “sex” (without actually providing any details, other than characterizations and legal euphemisms that make any actual behaviors seem FAR worse than they generally turn out to be) is sufficient to wreck lives, then steel yourself. Sooner or later the bell tolls for thee.
If two consenting adults hook up, it ain’t my business, and I refuse to accept Sam Adams’ apologies, because it’s NOT MY PLACE TO JUDGE HIM — on those grounds. I can judge his public life, but not his private life, because I demand the same consideration.
(Hear that, Mr. Peepers?)
It’s none of my concern, except that I am dragged into yet another witch-hunt about sex that seems to scare so many people so much. Why, to hear them, you’d think that awful stuff had nothing to do with their very existence. I stopped going to church a long time ago, and the last thing I need is for a bunch of Radio-TV majors preaching to me about morality, if only obliquely.
Here’s what you say at the water cooler: How about that Mr. Peepers guy at Willamette Week? He sure seems to spend a lot of time at other people’s bedroom windows, doesn’t he?
So: WHY is the Willamette Week pushing sex scandals without any real sex?
Who benefits? Who is WW carrying water for: which one of their anonymous sources? Perhaps their advertisers? (They ARE a free newspaper, after all, utterly beholden to ads.)
Maybe they’re just horny.
Courage.
Pingback: Mr. Peepers Goes To Portland part ii. « his vorpal sword
Is Vicki Walker planning to run for Mayor of Portland?
The sad thing is that Vicki would like to become Governor.
I had forgot that Nigel won a Pulitzer. He called me a few months ago, trying to dig up dirt on Betsy Johnson.
He likes dirt.