Humanizing the Harvey Weinstein saga, thus to find redemption – and #MyKindOfBenedy – everywhere.

There but for the grace of fortune go you.

The headline isn’t even a challenge: I did it Saturday. I left most of the work on Harvey’s desk, but I showed you how the man can still be lovable and human, despite his current shame and his past shamefulness.

That matters, I think, because that kind of instant universal ostracism can happen to anyone. There could not be a better time to distinguish storgic love – the enduring love of families – from the other kinds.

And that much is me playing #MyKindOfBenedy games: Deploying the tools of satire to make farce, instead. Especially family farces. Especially family farces that defy common expectations of family.

I like those kinds of stories for two reasons: Second, I want to help build an Island of Less-Broken Toys – not alone because this is the only way back to better, stronger families. But first, I just like the idea of stripping away the romantic and erotic love from families, so we can see how storgic love actually works.

Regarding the massively-reviled Harvey Weinstein, I wrote this on Facebook:

I can give you three movies:

1. Grandpa’s redemption.

2. A farce about a lummox who lucks his way into catastrophe – very much the actual news, I think by now.

3. A Sophoclean war of rivalrous brother-kings.

I wrote a piece of the first one, but the full story would be charming – revisiting “Regarding Henry.”

The second one suggests a sort of John Candy vehicle – and obviously the outrages have to be a lot less outrageous.

The third one is most interesting as story – Menelaus and Agamemnon turn on each other – but that’s not something I would want to write.

But the second and third stories could be combined into a Toby Belch/Andrew Aguecheek kind of farce: A war of ineptitudes. From Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello, that comic match-up works.

There are two points for me – here and everywhere:

First, everything can be made into a #MyKindOfBenedy story if you quarry for the humanity of the people involved.

And second, there but for the grace of fortune go you.

Few of us are as rapine as Harvey Weinstein is reputed to have been, but fewer still are innocent of every abuse of status or privilege or circumstance. Finding redemption everywhere is a good way to find it within yourself, should the need arise.

This entry was posted in Splendor!. Bookmark the permalink.