I see that the pitchfork people are coming for Woody Allen. His movie “Wonder Wheel’’ opens next week, and there is talk of a boycott to protest Woody’s numerous crimes against humanity.
Allen may be the greatest comic writer of the 20th century, for those of us who remember his lapidary contributions to The New Yorker in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m not sure the magazine has ever published work as funny as “The Whore of Mensa,’’ or the chess-by-fax parody “The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers,’’ And yes, I know who S.J. Perelman is.
What was Woody’s unforgivable transgression? He had an adulterous affair with his stepdaughter, to whom he has been married for more than 20 years. In the course of a vitriolic divorce battle, he was accused multiple times — and exonerated multiple times — of molesting another stepdaughter.
I’ll read the reviews of “Wonder Wheel’’ and take it from there.
Welcome to life in the Social Justice Cafeteria! Eat this! Don’t eat that! While Hurricane Weinstein was blowing through town, my wife and I were watching a TV series produced by the Weinstein Company, “Trapped,’’ a goofy Icelandic police procedural — and saw the logo flash across our screen every night. Should we have turned the television off?
Should I never watch my favorite movie, the Weinstein-produced “Shakespeare in Love,’’ again? Hey, cinephiles — will you stop watching “Casablanca,’’ arguably the greatest movie of all time? I read here in the Tablet that its producer, Jack Warner, was “a serial exploiter of women . . . who may well have invented the casting couch.’’
I am shocked, shocked.
Speaking of eat this/don’t eat that, Globe food critic Devra First recently ventured into a Chick fil-A restaurant, reminding readers that Boston’s late mayor Thomas Menino pointedly uninvited the chain to set up shop here, because of its chairman’s outspoken support of “traditional’’ marriage. “Where do we draw the lines about what we consume?’’ First asked, and it’s an interesting question.
The lines are sinuous indeed. Guess who opposes same-sex marriage? The majority of my co-communicants in the worldwide Anglican church. And yet I pop up at the altar rail a few dozen times a year because, well, I choose to. The state of Israel doesn’t perform same-sex marriages, and yet I’ve travelled there twice, and would again in a heartbeat.
Boycott the NFL? Why should I? If, like me, you are still watching pro football, you are in pretty deep. You are apparently comfortable with paunchy white men raking in enormous amounts of money on the soon-to-be-shattered brains of promising young athletes. You somehow rationalized Baltimore Ravens star Ray Rice smashing the bejesus out of a defenseless woman on videotape.
Even though I deplore Donald Trump, it somehow doesn’t bother me that every member of the Patriots’ Holy Trinity — owner Bob Kraft, coach Bill Belichick, and the Gwyneth Paltrow of quarterbacks, Tom Brady — has been shilling for him since Day One.
Football isn’t a morality play, and it doesn’t claim to be. It’s a violent spectator sport that mimics the ancient drama of battle to huge, appreciative audiences, including me.
The problem with over-analyzing the menu at the Social Justice Cafeteria is that you risk starvation. Bad people do great things, and mediocre people do very little at all. Our world was built with the crooked timber of humanity: the just, the bent, and the halt; the brilliant, disturbed writers who marry young girls; and the God-like quarterbacks who won’t eat tomatoes, for some crazy reason.
Welcome to it.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitt@imalexbeamyrnot.
