Wow: and look, they really drink Chardonnay, too

Nobody is sticking up for Roman Polanski anymore. At least, I haven't read anything written on his behalf for the past week or so, and once Conor Friedersdorf has decided to opine on a subject, I think that we can all assume that conventional wisdom has definitively made its stand on the matter.

Since a cultural scandal has once again passed me by, then, allowing me no chance to demonstrate my populist bona fides by expressing my outrage at the outrage (I was properly outraged, though, let me assure you), I've decided to engage in my little academic strategy of meta-commentary: that is, commenting on the controversy itself.

Michael Kinsley has famously described a gaffe as when a politician accidently tells the truth. Seems to me that we've got to have a similar sort of term for when a group, or some subset thereof, in a moment of communal indiscretion, reveals that what a generous soul would have taken to be an unfair characterization or stereotype is pretty close to the actual case. An example here would be when a few tea-baggers out on the Washington Mall hold up cartoons of Barack Obama as a monkey, or crazy-ass anti-abortionists assassinate a doctor, or when employees of ACORN provide tax guidance to apparent prostitutes and their apparent pimps.

In the case of Polanski, the defenders played into a common prejudice regarding the bicoastal "cultural elite" (at least, it's common out here in flyover country): that they are over-educated moral idiots who have convinced themselves that artistic talent allows one to dispense with any obligation to treat other human beings with decency or respect. Which is, in fact, often true. Our clue here is, no one who lives in Hollywood seems all that surprised that many of the people there are assholes and hypocrites who apparently believe pedophilia is an outrage when practiced by some loser unknown Catholic priest but Not Such A Big Deal if you've done some good work on edgy historical mysteries and horror films (and been forced to live in the 14th arrondissement for the past 25 years, for God's sake, and were not even allowed to come pick up your Oscar trophy!)

The more interesting issue now is a political one. Because of the tendency of so many in Hollywood to adopt fashionable liberal political stances (probably because they associate this with being "artistic"), the question is whether their obtusteness could infect the whole left side of the spectrum among general public opinion. And this is why the most angry and eloquent screeds against Polanski and his cultured defenders are coming from people like Katha Pollit, Gene Robinson, and Kate Harding in the liberal webzine Salon. They're well aware of the long-term damage this could do. I doubt that Limbaugh and Beck are really paying much attention right now, knowing that they can feast on this little nugget (Woody Allen sticking up for a child rapist, Haw!) for the next ten years or so. They can trot it out every time they want to rail against fancy-pants east coast liberals and their cultural nihilism.

The rough equivalent would be the sort of damage control that comes up from the conservative commentariat every time Sarah Palin says something stupid or when some cracker Republican congressman gets caught making a racist joke. Except, of course, that never happens: the folks in places like The National Review and The Weekly Standard mostly just plough on through. Nothing embarrasses them, not even the birthers. This is because conservative intellectuals (and maybe, also, Hollywood film directors) realize something that liberal journalists like Robinson and Harding haven't figured out yet: there are no longer consensus, middle-of-the-road, default positions in this country about issues of common decency and public decorum. We're all just defending the tribe now.