It’s been 92 years since the radio show, “Ma Perkins,” first aired in the United States. There probably aren’t many of us who remember it, which may be a blessing. Its modest daily domestic drama was sponsored by Procter & Gamble’s Oxydol laundry detergent, inspiring the term, “soap opera,” which attached itself to Ma Perkins and others of its ilk.
Soap operas have persisted over the years — they’re very big in Mexico — migrating to television and longer slots. They’ve also metastasized from backyard kerfuffles over unpainted fences and troubled love lives to incredible plots featuring, among other impossibilities, the resurrection of supposedly deceased bad guys. My late wife’s favorite was “Days of our Lives,” which she called, with strong justification, her daily escape from reality. It was the cue for my escape, too, into my shop in the cellar.
Whatever their virtues or vices, soap operas have always caught the imagination of the middle classes. We’re suckers for them. And just now, in the middle of one of the most bizarre episodes in recent American history, we’ve been swept up in another. This one hasn’t been scripted, but it’s every bit as predictable as if it had been. The characters are well-known and familiar. Even with that, news anchors report every detail with breathless excitement, and we pause opening the snack crackers and pouring a glass of wine in order to catch it all.
It should be embarrassing to us as a “nation of laws” that nothing the current administration has done in its first six months — not the gutting of programs dedicated to the support of our uninsured or underinsured citizens; or the roving squads of unidentified goons in battle costumes snatching people from the streets, farms, and processing plants; or the gulag of “detention camps” right out of Solzhenitsyn; or the threats of ruinous tariffs as whimsical as a weathervane; or the assaults on education at all levels; or any other administrative outrages perpetrated under clearly false pretenses — is as fascinating to us as the so-called “Epstein files.” As a mass of citizenry, we are less interested in bringing justice to the many victims of Epstein’s alleged child-trafficking system than finding out what prominent figures may be implicated in the list of its clients.
The president is ever more obviously opposed to the release of the files. He’s been dropping hushpuppies right and left (urging Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in its recipe or, for example, slamming the loss of First Nations names from athletic teams) to quiet down the growing demand for the files’ release. The latest ploy, perhaps, is a reference to his clearly oedematous ankles as a benign symptom of advancing age. All to no avail. Heather Cox Richardson quotes one social meme: “Chronic venous deficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein files still haven’t been released.”
We’re likely past the stage at which we’re still discussing whether they exist, though the president, after claiming they don’t, now has attributed their authorship to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Vice President Vance, before he assumed his office, called loudly for their release. Lately he’s been averring that they likely are fictional. Reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s line: “When the tide rises, and sharks are around, his voice has a timid and tremulous sound.” One person who could shed light on the subject, Ghislaine Maxwell, is in jail, and considering the murky demise of her paramour and business partner, must be in reasonable expectation of a similar end.
So here we are, in what’s becoming our usual mess, with the new stories and situations coming at us, as Ms. Richardson points out, faster than reporters can keep up with them. The increasingly trivial subjects of the administration’s gaslighting suggest increasing desperation to change the subject from the Epstein files; and now that the Clinton-haters have joined the baying pack, it’s increasingly unlikely that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s probable release of redacted grand jury proceedings will result in anything but more fervor for the complete files.
What concerns me more than the dreary lawsuits, the temporary stays, and the multiple ways that this can drag out over many more months is the notion that behind what appears to be a madman with a microphone may be a far more superior mind, someone with nothing to lose from the release of the files and a master of the prestidigitation for which the president is notorious. What’s he (or she) distracting us from? Uh-oh. Now they’ve got me doing it!
