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Now maybe I've been too preoccupied with my own inner beauty to notice, but I’ve never heard the same complaint from a single black South African. Not once. And just for the record, I've never heard an Afrikaner whinging about how bored stupid they are with stories about the women and children who died in concentration camps during the Boer War, or a Jew bitching about all those lame Holocaust museums all over the place.
And I don’t blame them either. Personally, I think people have every right to wax histrionic about their traumas, cultural or personal, for as long as they need. I’m as likely to tell an Armenian who lost a great-grandfather they never met in the genocide a hundred years ago to shut up and get over it as I am to say the same thing to a hijack victim who lost his VW Polo the previous week. It’s their process, and I’m in no position to tell them how to feel, or when to stop. Sure, it can be a bit annoying waiting patiently for them to get over all their tedious suffering, but I’m a nice guy, and it seems like the only polite thing to do.
Just like I think it’s only polite to shut the Hell up when the victim has had enough talking – no matter how newsworthy it may be.
Take, for example, the case of film director Roman Polanski, who nailed a 13-year-old model he was photographing for Vogue magazine in Jack Nicholson’s Jacuzzi in the late ‘70s – apparently while under the influence of champagne and mandrax. At the height of a media feeding frenzy, Polanski fled to Europe before be could be sentenced. In 2003, he couldn’t pick up his best director Oscar for The Pianist, because if he ever sets foot in the US again he’ll be arrested before he can make it to the nearest boob bar.
In a world that specialises in self-righteous indignation and condemnation, especially of people who appear to be having a far better time than we are, it’s easy to label Polanski an irredeemable scumbag who should spend the rest of his miserable life playing happy families with a cellmate called Twostroke. But maybe we should focus instead on empathising with the victim, the now 45-year-old Samantha Geimer, who has called for the charge of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” against Polanski to be dropped by the prosecution and forgotten by the public. She says the case and the media attention is causing harm to her and her family.
But the Los Angeles district attorney seems intent on doing the same thing to Geimer as Polanski did all those years ago, only now without her consent – or the comforting lubrication of drugs and bubbly.
Geimer may have got over it and moved on, but the world hasn’t. It’s a matter of pride for the prosecution. Polanski is still legally a rapist, and dropping the charges against him would set a dangerous precedent. Nobody wants to be held responsible for saying it’s OK to plough 13 year-old girls.
And it’s also a matter of titillation for the public. Of course it is. Statutory rape is our favourite kind of rape. The victim appears to be willing, and besides, most of the time the act would be perfectly legal if the participants just moved two countries to the left. And in this case, it’s particularly sexy. A celebrity film director, a Vogue model and Jack Nicolson’s Jacuzzi is too attractive a combination for us to ignore. Describing the crime with all the requisite disapproval of Polanski’s depraved actions is how the mass media serves pornography disguised as news to its drooling audience. Apparently, Geimer will just have to grin and bear it.
