Sexual harassment: the true story of how it happened to me, and how that affects where I come out on Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, and others

The author of this book had it wrong. Women, militantly and justifiably 
raising righteous hell with male harassers, are from Mars. Men are from
…well, read the story and see

Back in my “Madmen” days, somewhere in the 1970s when I was a thirty-something advertising copywriter, I was sexually harassed by my female boss.

It happened at an office party. I can’t remember the occasion. It wasn’t a big party — just members of our creative group  and a handful of people we worked with standing around bowls of potato chips and popcorn, sipping inexpensive wine from plastic cups.

Suddenly my boss, on whom I depended for my job, raises, favorable evaluations, and some minor supervisory authority, walked up to me and stuck her tongue in my ear.

Just before she did it she said, “You’re going to enjoy this.” She kept her tongue in my ear for quite some time, wiggling it around and purring while she breathed.

Now you have to understand that my boss — let’s call her Josephine — was about 25 years older than I was. She would have been described back then the way the writer Nicholas Von Hoffman once described Margo St. James,  founder of a San Francisco sex workers’ rights organization called Coyote. Von Hoffman described St. James as “a good old broad.”

That was Josephine, too. Without knowing absolutely every detail of her life, I was confident that she had done everything — and ingested, inhaled and snorted everything — at least twice. In some cases a whole hell of a lot more than twice.

One of my colleagues at that ad agency, a television commercial producer — let’s call him Richard — told me that once, that when he and Josephine had been shooting a commercial on location in Los Angeles, Josephine revealed that her favorite cocaine dealer was in town. The dealer was an heir to a corporate fortune. His family name appears in the company’s logotype to this day. He had nothing much to do except live in big houses on his inherited wealth, so to pass the time he got involved in various hobbies. One of them was dealing cocaine, the drug a la mode back then. I swear to you, this is all true.

Josephine and Richard drove to Mr. Big Corporate Name’s West Coast digs, where she bought a glass phial of Bolivian Happy Dust for $500. Then they went to a very fancy restaurant, where they decided to get high before going to their table. But how?

They formulated a plan. It went like this. Josephine would take the phial to the ladies’ room, lock herself in a stall, and snort up a line or two while Richard stood guard outside, to warn her by coughing loudly if another women started heading inside. Then they would reverse the process, with Josephine standing outside the men’s room door while Richard took a few snorts.

Josephine went into the ladies’ room. Richard stood guard. Suddenly he heard a loud shriek from inside, followed by Josephine’s voice screaming, “Oh no, oh no, oh no!”

Alarmed, Richard charged into the Ladies Room, where he discovered that Josephine had accidentally dropped the phial on the tile floor of a stall. It had shattered. Cocaine dust was all over the floor. What to do?

“Well hell,” said Josephine, finally putting her emotions back in some secret hiding place, “there’s no point in letting all this stuff go to waste.” She lay down on the stall floor and began sniffing cocaine off the tiles. Richard followed suit. 

Suddenly, Richard told me, while he and Josephine were lying on the floor, their legs protruding from under the stall, the door to the ladies room opened. Richard, from his low vantage point, saw a pair of feet wearing high heeled velvet pumps clack-clack-clack toward the center of the room. All at once, the pumps froze in place. There was a pause of perhaps four seconds. Then the pumps turned around 180 degrees and rapidly clack-clack-clacked out of there, while Josephine and Richard resumed snorting.

Anyway, that was Josephine, my boss. Uninvited, she stuck her tongue in my ear and wiggled it around while purring and breathing heavily. A clear case of sexual harassment.

Except that I rather liked it. Nothing ever came of the incident. She was ten years too late. I had dreamed of that kind of stuff when I was a teen-ager and a twenty-something. But now I was married, with a touchy wife (now an ex-wife), a kid, a house, a mortgage, and too much at risk if I dared to play around. So I passed.

But, to repeat, I liked the harassment all the same.

What does this tell us? For one thing, it is an illustration of why the title of a best seller some years ago, “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” is wrong, dead wrong, most especially today.

Women, at least women today, militantly and justifiably raising righteous hell with male harassers, are from Mars. And men? We’re from Penis, a place in our bodies that intrudes on and influences what must be a formidable percentage of our decisions. Like it or not, men of a certain generation have grown up in a testosterone-influenced culture. And yes, you may call it the Penis culture.

We are wired to want sex, Worse, our upbringing, however wrongfully, encouraged our wants. Which explains many things about the Madmen epoch, although it excuses nothing. It most certainly does not excuse rape, consistently creepy behavior, pederasty, or constant annoyance of any woman. However, it does account for a sublimation of sex that from time to time expresses itself as a bit of sexually-tinged playfulness, and that should in some instances, when it does not rise to the level of consistent annoyance of an individual, be given a pass. Cases concerning each point?

Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of rape and whose brother reportedly had a career on the side buying off women whom Harvey is said to have sexually abused, does not get a pass. Plus, the reports of lawyers and a brother paying numbers of women to shut up reinforces the probability that Weinstein is a sexual predator.

Donald Trump has admitted to much the same. From his position of power, he boasted during a so-called “locker room talk” on a bus that he was able to grab women by their private parts and get away with it. What he did does not quite rise to the level of rape. But it does rise to the level of at least a misdemeanor sex crime. Had any other male tried the same, whether in performers’ dressing rooms, or on the subway, he’d be deservedly sitting behind bars now.

But Al Franken, who was photographed playfully pretending to grab another performer’s breasts on an airplane, a mischievous look on his face, clearly aware that a camera is pointing at him? That seems hardly at all like predation. It seems much more like a mistake in judgement, the kind of tasteless bad joke that may have been influenced by testosterone culture, but is not even close to the level of a boss who stands nude in his home, in front of an assistant, who depends on the flasher for her salary.

Yes, the woman in the Franken photograph also accuses him of unwanted kissing. But film of her during the same tour shows her engaged in a bit of sexually tinged license of her own. Clearly, this playful license was part of the culture of this particular USO tour. Check out this video from the show, about two minutes past the beginning. In her case, as well as Franken’s, the license is merely playful rather than intrusive or creepy. 

Anthony Weiner, the former U.S. Congressmen, sent to prison for texting pictures of his penis to young girls, clearly has no further business being in public life. The sexting, particularly to minors, is beyond the bounds of playfulness or flirting.

But if Weiner deserved prison, how can Roy Moore, who is accused of committing actual physical acts of pederasty (as opposed to Weiner’s acts of photography) with a 14-year-old girl get away with what he has done? Certainly he does not belong in the United States Senate if the charges against him are true. And the snowballing of similar charges by formerly underaged women keeps adding credibility to those charges. As does the defense by one of his friends which seems to indicate that the friend believes that the charges are true, but that the Bible says it's all okay.

To be sure, there is a danger in all of this, and that is the danger of witch hunt hysteria, which not only existed in Colonial America, but which swept across Europe from the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries, resulting in hundreds of deaths by torture and fire. All anybody who wanted to get rid of, or get even with somebody else had to do was level an accusation of witchcraft.

The same kind of guilt by accusation is possible in contemporary times. That is why we will need evidence-based legal investigations, and possibly criminal trials, to determine who is a sexual predator, and who is a hapless victim either of an overreaction or a lie. (It may be telling that Franken has called for a Congressional investigation of himself, whereas Roy Moore simply growls denials.) 

But investigations are long and slow. In the case of Senatorial elections there may not be enough time. People will have to vote their commonsense judgment. 

My own common sense is telling me that Franken is guilty of little except some tasteless horsing around. But that Roy Moore may be a pederast more deserving of a prison cell than a U.S. Senate seat.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

Guest Blogger: "What I give 'thanks' for this year." Yeah, sure.

Washington seems to be suffering from a plague of turkeys

 Call it fatigue. Call it burnout. Call it laziness. Call it what you will. In any case, since I haven't posted a word for more than a week, I thought I'd leave it to my pal Garth Hallberg to spread a little Thanksgiving cheer.  Here is what he has to say. If you like it, you might investigate his new book, The Piketty Problem. Take it away, Garth:

At this time of year when we’re encouraged to give thanks for our blessings before the commencement of the season of greed, here, in no particular order and with apologies to NY Times columnist Gail Collins, are some of the things I’m giving "thanks" for, hoping they will put a little smile on your face…

…Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, whose principled opposition to the gut-the-middle-class, Republican tax bill is based on his desire for small businesses like his family-owned plastics company to receive the same corporate tax breaks as multinational corporations.

…Barack Obama and George W. Bush, our last two presidents who managed to keep their hands to themselves.

…all those citizens who have thus far resisted the well-meaning siren call of born-again hedge fund manager Tom Steyer to impeach President Trump, having been blessed with the sober realization that the replacement lurking in the West Wing would be even more of a useful idiot than his predecessor.

…those evangelical Alabama clergymen who, in the tradition of pinhead angel-counters, have diligently found divine guidance in scripture to back up their belief that pedophilia is a lesser sin than being a Democrat.

…Alex M. Azar II, former president of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and President Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, for his unique ability to bring an insider’s perspective to the ongoing battle to reduce the outrageous cost of prescription medicines.

…Steve Chiavarone, portfolio manager of the Federated Global Allocation Fund, who relieved fears about another Wall Street meltdown when he confidently predicted on CNBC that the bull market in stocks will last for another ten years because “Millennials are entering the workforce, but their wages are going to be under pressure their whole career…They won’t make enough money to pay down their debt, fund their life and fund retirement where there is no pension. So they’re going to need equities.”

 …Mike Mulvaney, former Republican congressman from South Carolina and current White House budget director, who for the good of the nation set aside his previous reservations about the usefulness of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and took on a second job as acting head of the organization which, when a member of the House of Representatives, he had co-sponsored legislation to eliminate.

…Ben McAdoo, a.k.a. Mr. Magoo, head coach of the NFL’s New York Giants, who ditched his prescription shades, slicked back his hair, and for the first time, interacted effusively with his players on the sideline, spurring them on to their second win of the season over the Kansas City Chiefs, the home team of “red-state experimenter” Governor Sam Brownback, whose disastrous tax-cutting policies have been inconveniently forgotten by the enthusiastic trickle-down Republicans in Congress.

…the unnamed executives at Twitter who are doubling the length of tweets to 280 characters in order to reduce President Trump’s annoying habit of having his mouth run over into serial tweets.

…the unnamed officials of the Environmental Protection Agency, who put our minds at ease by removing from the EPA website at least 15 mentions of “climate change” and numerous links to materials designed to help local officials prepare for a world of rising temperatures and more severe storms.

…Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and the real Rocket Man, for trivializing the moral of The Piketty Problem by pointing out that the scariest potential of robots is not lost jobs, but “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” 

…Louise Linton, blazing-blonde actress, and wife and portable spotlight for dour Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who auditioned for a remake of the Disney classic 101 Dalmations while donning black leather gloves, thus showing her and her husband’s disdain for small bills.

…those of you who have already purchased a copy of The Piketty Problem or The Robots Are Coming, The Robots Are Coming, and/or who have signed up to receive my blog at arts4actionsake.com. Why don't you do so now, if you haven’t?!

A happy and joyous Thanksgiving to all…Garth 

What use is the Bible Belt if it can’t even keep a Republican’s pants on?

Judge Roy Moore, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. If you see

him coming, lock up your daughters.

Years ago, somebody told me a joke. 

Q: What’s the definition of a virgin in Alabama?

A: “A fourteen year old girl who can run faster than her uncles.”

I used to think the joke was disparaging of Alabamans. It sounded like something out of a novel by Erskine Caldwell. But c’mon, Tobacco Road was almost 80 years old when I first heard the virgin joke. And Tobacco Road happened in a different state. Nice try, but the joke was based on out-of-date information.

These days, I’m not so sure.

Case in point: Roy Moore. Surely you’ve already read at least some of the dirt on  Roy Moore. He’s the ex-judge who was removed from office for defying a higher court's orders to remove a fifty-two hundred pound block of granite, inscribed with the Ten Commandments, from the rotunda of his own courthouse where he had ordered it installed. His refusal was in defiance not only of the higher court, but also of the establishment of religion clause of the United States Constitution. That Roy Moore.

This Bible-thumping Republican from Alabama is running for the Senate and whaddaya know! Turns out that during his days as a thirty-two-year-old prosecutor, he offered to babysit the fourteen-year-old daughter of a woman who was going into court for a divorce. The judge took the fourteen-year-old’s phone number. Not her pretty and about-to-be-divorced mother’s phone number. The cute fourteen-year-old’s number.

Yes he did call. And he took the fourteen-year-old child to his house in the woods. Not once, but twice. And the second time, reports the Washington Post, “she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.”

Now other women have come forward, telling stories about how Moore, when he was thirty-something, dated them or tried to when they were fourteen in one case, sixteen in another, and seventeen in the third case.  Does anybody besides me see a pattern here having to do with minor children?

What’s interesting is that Moore’s defense is all over the map on this matter. Moore himself is denying it. But while Moore, last I checked, was in effect saying all the girls are liars — Moore’s buddy, Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler isn’t denying it. He seems to be saying — read his words and draw your own conclusion — that what Moroe did is okay, because the Bible says so.

“He’s clean as a hound’s tooth,” said Ziegler. “Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist.”

So you see, there it is! Being a powerful older man who spirits a child off to his little love nest in the woods and starts taking her clothes off and feeling her up is a good thing because hey, next thing you know, she’ll give birth to a saint (assuming all those evil abortionists don't get their hands on her first.) And not only that.

“Also take Joseph and Mary,” Ziegler babbled on. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Umm, wait a second there, State Auditor Ziegler. According to the Bible, Jesus was the product of a virgin birth. So if you’re not committing blasphemy by lying about the contents of the Bible tin order to further your own partisan political interests, what does that mean? It would have to mean that either that the Bible is lying, or that Joseph was cuckholding God. Or that contrary to the fundamentalist churches of the south, Jesus was in no way the son of God. And if that literal interpretation of the Bible goes away, what's next to bite the dust of literal belief? Dinosaurs romping with Adam and Eve?

In any case, if, somehow, any members of ISIS are reading this, I do recommend that you put your arms around Moore and Ziegler and give them both great big hugs. Each of them in his own way seems in tune with all of you guys spiriting away teen-age girls and either raping or marrying them. Or maybe both. I thought this was one of the things we’ve been fighting to make stop, but no, according to Moore and Ziegler, it seems to be the American Way, too. Not to mention the Christian Way.

Oh, and this from ths Washington post, in which Ziegler adds to his defense of Moore:

Moore began dating his wife Kayla around this time, according to Ziegler. “He dated her. He married her, and they’ve been married about 35 years. They’re blessed with a wonderful marriage and his wife Kayla is 14 years younger than Moore.”

Umm, Auditor Ziegler? I think that’s part of the point all of us are making.

At any rate, I herewith suggest changing the old joke about Alabama virgins. From now on, I’ll be telling it this way:

Q: “What’s the definition of a virgin?”

A: A fourteen year old girl who can run faster than a Republian.

UPDATE: (November 14th): In addition to a fifth woman having stepped forward to accuse Moore of sexual misconduct since I posted this commentary, the New Yorker magazine today is reporting that while in his 30s, Moore's pursuit, often unwanted, of teen-age girls at a local shopping mall led the mall to ban him from the premises.

Student recruitment advertising that does more than recruit students

Could anything be duller than an ad that encourages you to consider a particular educational institution? You almost know what it's going to tell you: That its graduates do well. That there are tons of academic resources. That you'll love your professors. That the extracurricular activities are great. That the campus is beautiful. That everybody has fun. That....z-z-z-zzzzzz.

But then there's UC Hastings, the University of California law school in San Francisco. They've got something to say, not only about themselves, but about the world in which their graduates will function. That there are things going on in this nation that are an outrage. And that lawyers can do something about those things.

Here are three examples of someone presenting great reasons to go to law school, created with the help of their local advertising agency, Mortar. The ads make me want to ask, "Where do I apply?"

Cancer victims, pharmaceutical companies, and the old malevolent fortune teller trick

“I am dying. What can I do?”

“I see in my crystal ball that someone with the Evil Eye has put a curse on all your possessions. On your money. On your jewelry. On every valuable thing you own. That is why you are dying.”

“But what can I do?”

“Bring all your money and jewelry to me. I will put them all in a velvet bag with magic herbs. There is no trickery here. I will return the bag to you. Just keep it sealed for three months and a few days. Then you can open the bag. And you will have a chance to live longer. Abra cadabra!”

By the time the victim opens the bag, the fortune teller has vanished to another city. And so has your money. Abra cadabra!

Above, a scam used to rob a few vulnerable people every year. Below, a scam used to deprive vulnerable cancer victims of billions.

What Bristol-Myers Squibb hasn’t let out of the bag, except in a tiny footnote that you might have missed, is that lung cancer patients who took Opdivo on average lived an extra 3.2 months. 

They weren’t  cured. They still might have been gasping for air, stumbling to walk, or in pain from their metastasized disease. And then there are all the people who will die, or fall even more gravely ill, from the side effects of the medicine.

But they got 3.2 months. On average.

Uh, another small catch. The cost of the drug is $13,200 a month. A month! That comes to over $39,000 per patient, on average. If your medical insurance doesn’t cover all or most of that, you may well have to take all your money and your jewelry and  sell it to cover the cost — the equivalent of putting it in a magic bag. 

Or if your insurance company covers the cost, don’t be surprised when the rates you pay go through the roof. And then you may need to put your possessions into a magic bag and sell them to pay the insurance premiums.

Abra cadabra!

Thanks to Donald Trump's antics, a Republican candidate for Congress who says she met with extra-terrestrials can't even be a laughingstock

Republican Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running

for Congress in Florida. She says she went aboard

an extraterrestrial space ship and learned some 

really,really interesting stuff.

You know this country has gone off the deep end when late night network comedians can't even be bothered (at least so far) to joke about a political candidate who says visitors from outer space taught her about skulls, the earth's energy center, and an ancient Egyptian pyramid located in South Miami-Dade — all while she was aboard their space ship.

Well hey, it's understandable. After all, we've got Trump in the White House. You know, the mad president who says Barack Obama is tapping his wires? The brain-dead president who doesn't seem to know that his presidency extends to the Virgin Islands (not to mention Puerto Rico?) The president with the mentality, maturity, and modesty of an unbalanced six-year-old?

So no wonder his party has no problem putting forward Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, a candidate who, according to the Miami Herald and other newspapers, boarded a Martian space ship and learned from the aliens that:

▪ There are 30,000 skulls — “different from humans” — in a cave in the Mediterranean island of Malta. 

▪ The world’s “energy center” is in Africa 

▪ The Coral Castle, a limestone tourist attraction South Miami-Dade, is actually an ancient Egyptian pyramid. 

▪ “God is a universal energy.” 

She also said that the aliens had mentioned Isis, though she didn’t clarify if they meant the terrorist organization or the ancient Egyptian goddess.

Hey, compared to Trump, Rodriguez Aguilera is as sound as a....well anyway, she's not nearly as dangerous or crazy.

Rodriguez Aguilera is running to replace outgoing Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. If she pulls it off, I'm going to ask President Trump to extend his Mexican wall around the entire border of the United States— South, West, North and East. 

That'll be the only way to keep all of us safely penned up in this asylum.

A MODEST PROPOSAL for Supporting Ye 2nd Amendment Gun Rights Whilst Simultaneously Doing Something about Ye Scourge of Abortion

No, not this modest proposal, but you're getting warm

And so, with the recent events in Las Vegas, the gun death toll continues mounting in what may be the most violent, bloodthirsty, and self-destructive nation in history. I’m talking about the United States of America, of course. 

This nation’s soil is now drenched not only with the blood of our dead adult citizens but (lest ye forget) also our dead children. Especially notable among these are the deaths of  twenty small school children (plus six adults) in Sandy Hook, and most recently, at least as I write this, the fifty dead of all ages in Las Vegas, plus the Dylan Roof church murders…and on, and on, and on, and on it goes.

Yet the Republican Congress and Senate continue refusing to do anything significant to stop the gun violence. Having a ruminative chat about bump stocks is not doing something significant. 

But why should our law makers do anything that would put an end to the slaughter? Many of them collect millions — millions of dollars per Senator or per Congressional representative — to make sure that any nut, any lunatic, any violence-minded psychopathic sonofabitch who wants to shoot people to death, may have all the guns, all the armor-piercing ammo, all the high capacity ammunition magazines, all the silenced firepower he can lay his hands on.

By both their actions and their inaction, Republican lawmakers have proved that they are nothing more than a sludge pit of gun sluts, a submissive troop of political whores who would get down on their knees and fellate a rifle barrel if the NRA put another few million dollars in their pockets and told them to suck it. 

Read the list of the biggest money-grubbing harlots and the sums they pocket — and make no mistake about it, depraved whores who value money over basic morality and the lives of their fellow Americans, is exactly what they are. See Merriam-Webster’s third definition of a whore, here.

Yet it is this festering pit of whores — or are they giving prostitution a bad name? — will go all pious on you when the matter of abortion comes up. Do so much as scrape a hollow ball of cells, a blastula, from the uterus of a desperate pregant woman, who may have arrived at her pregnancy by being a rape victim, or simply by becoming a victim of a thoughtlessly passionate moment, and they’ll accuse you of “murdering babies.” 

Most abortions no more kill a living, self-aware baby than the act of wiping the ejaculate off a jerkoff Republican Congressman with a piece of snotty Kleenex. But I digress. The sad, or perhaps infuriating fact is, once a baby is born, it ceases to be of value to Republicans, who seek to prevent nearly anything that will keep helpless children who are already born alive and thriving — by refusing to fund anything ranging from a good education, to a doctor’s visit, to adequate nutrition.

To these Republican hypocrites, fetal life, if you can call it that, is sacred. But once born, the poor little babies, who at long last are inarguably sentient and self-aware individuals, can drop dead. I quote a recent article in the New York Times:

“These are little boys and little girls waiting to be born,” said Representative Mike Kelly, Republican of Pennsylvania, in a speech in the House defending the abortion ban. “If we do not stand for them, who will stand for them? If we are not the first responders, who will be the first responders?” 

Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, was incredulous. 

"There is this absolute silence on the deaths that have been created through guns and irresponsible gun ownership and yet here we are somehow talking about the sanctity of life when it relates to abortions,” she said. 

Representative Louise Slaughter, a Democrat of New York, put in bluntly. “I don’t know anything else to call it but pure hypocrisy,” she said. “We love it until it’s born and then it’s somebody else’s problem.”

And so, on to my Modest Proposal, designed to bring Peace and Tranquility to the Land by means of Both Sides Working Together.

I herewith propose that Congress and the Senate enact, and that our kindly President Trump ratify, an “Unborn Fetus Protection and Second Amendment Preservation Act,” which shall state:

Any and all abortions, for any and all reasons, anywhere within the borders of the United States, its possessions or its overseas military bases anywhere in the world are herewith and forevermore prohibited. However…. 

Once an American child is born, one or both of its parents, or either parent’s duly appointed agent or representative, shall have the absolute Second Amendment right to shoot the newborn baby dead, on the justification that such shooting is a means of protecting said parent or parents, and the child itself, from the life-endangering threat of hunger and poverty, and that permitting such baby to live shall induce one or more of its parents to fear for their lives.  

Parents who choose not to shoot their babies themselves may, at their own discretion, donate said babies to a duly licensed firing range, to be used for patriotic target practice.

There! That’s the kind of compromise we can have if both sides of the aisle work together. It will make everybody on both sides of the aisle happy, not to mention the lobbying pimps who shovel money into their purses.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog

No wonder so many Americans won’t stand for the national anthem. It’s nearly un-singable. It’s warlike and un-aspirational. And it supports slavery and racism.

All right, Mr. Trump. In attacking the NFL and NBA players who one way or another refused to stand and put their hands on their hearts when The Star Spangled Banner was played, you’ve opened and then dumped the contents of a giant can of worms onto your own plate. Now it’s time for you to eat them.

Just to begin, athletes, like everyone else, are guaranteed freedom of expression by the U.S. Constitution, which is one of the things for which the American flag is a symbol. Thus, when you choose to deny them this freedom, Mr. Trump, it is you who is disrespecting the flag.

You have ignored the simple truth that the protest of these athletes is legitimate — that as people of color, they are regularly the victim of police brutality, documented so many times in recent years that you have to be willfully blind to claim it does not exist.

Since you’ve brought up the national anthem, let’s also deal with the question of why it deserves no respect and ought to be dumped in favor of some other song. The answer boils down to this: our great nation has one of the lousiest national anthems in the world. Consider:

The Star Spangled Banner is virtually un-singable. The clip of Roseanne Barr slaughtering it at the top of this post may have been Barr’s idea of a sendup, but it wasn’t very far from the truth. 

You can carry a tune and still, like million of Americans, you may not be able to credibly sing this unmusical, unlyrical song. It staggers over wide-ranging octaves like a careening drunk bouncing off walls. 

What’s more, the anthem’s lyrics are so ineptly out of meter with the music that singers need to insert syllables where none exist in the English language, disrespecting not only the dignity of our nation, but  our language as well. Example: (“And the star spangled ban-ner in tri-yi-yi-umph sha-all way-ave….”)

Speaking of drunks, the music was actually composed for a bunch of drunks with sex on their minds. It was a song written and boozily sung originally in England, not America, in the Eighteenth Century, by members of a drinking club, the Anacreontic Society.

But worse yet, the little-known and even less-sung final stanza of the Star Spangled Banner all but curses enslaved black men.

Here are the pertinent lines of the stanza:

Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The "foul footsteps" to which Francis Scott Key refers are those of slaves in Maryland who fought on the side of the English when promised their freedom. So clearly Key, himself a slaveholder, didn’t not consider black people suitable citizens for either the land of the free or the home brave. 

No indeed. Instead he believed blacks were “a distinct and inferior race of people which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that affects a community.”   Little wonder he cursed them with the “gloom of the grave.” For that reason alone the song deserves to be stricken from opening ceremonies. It is not a patriotic song. It is anti-patriotic.

So what should we sing instead? Well before World War I, in Newark, New Jersey, a woman named Katherine Lee Bates and an Episcopal choirmaster named Samuel A. Ward wrote a beautiful, melodic, easy-to-sing and patriotic hymn. It was about our nation and its natural beauty, and brotherhood — and not about a battle and a curse on some of our people. Moreover, unlike the Star Spangled Banner, it mentions — repeatedly — the name of our nation. 

It concedes the nation has flaws. It calls upon God to men them. It mentions liberty, law, gleaming cities of alabaster, and brotherhood. Yes, "America The Beautiful." Here’s a touching rendition of it by Ray Charles

And for a backup? In 1893 a poor immigrant boy with no skills and as yet little education was permitted to enter the United States. In time he discovered he had a talent for writing songs. Over the years he created great fortunes and employment for others with this talent, writing over 20 Broadway hit shows. 

Among his many songs were “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,”  and the holiday songs “In Your Easter Bonnet,” and “White Christmas.” His name?  Irving Berlin.

Perhaps Berlin’s his greatest and — dare I say it? — most sacred song was a hymn he wrote to the country that let him in, instead of attempting to wall him out.

Think what a glorious song a new national anthem could be, if America focused on its mission and message to humanity, and not always, constantly, incessantly, annoyingly on you, Mr. Trump, playing while you're all alone at night with your petty little tweeter.

Here is Irving Berlin, late in life and a bit frail with age, singing his song — followed by a chorus that demonstrates the way God Bless America could sound in stadiums and theaters across America if it became the new national anthem.