Ignoble Rot

If you like wine and consider yourself a connoisseur, then you learn all the lingo (the wine "breaths", it has "body", etc.). And if you're really knowledgeable, then you know what a "noble rot" is: "a gray mold that is deliberately cultivated on grapes to enhance the making of certain sweet wines." Without the rot, the thinking goes, the wine wouldn't taste so good. The rot makes the wine.

Perhaps we've underestimated the appeal of rot. Certainly we've underestimated the power of it. 

Rot ... the process of decay. Decomposition. Something valuable turning into trash. 

You see it in our justice system, particularly in the case of Harvey Weinstein. Three years ago a young woman that he assaulted went to the NYPD to get him charged. The police worked with her, got Weinstein to admit what he'd done in a secret recording, then referred the case to the District Attorney. And this is where the rot comes in: instead of prosecuting Weinstein and protecting the victim, the opposite happened. The victim was victimized again, terrorized by the DA's office, asked to answer totally irrelevant questions about her past, distracting her and the case away from the assailant and the crime. The police had to protect her, not only from Weinstein, but from  the DA's office! The case was twisted around and eventually dropped by the very people who should have prosecuted it. This was power protecting power, money controlling the justice system to perpetrate injustice. This was rot, plain and simple.

And that's not the only case close to home. The Kushner Company, the family business of the current president's son-in-law, apparently lied to city agencies about having rent-stabilized tenants in their buildings in order to kick them out and sell the buildings at a huge price. The city agencies responsible for uncovering this didn't -- for years! Again, rot -- the system meant to protect us victimizes us.

That's what rot is: the transmutation of something into something. Protection into threat. Justice into injustice. Something solid becoming something weak.

This is what's happening in our country right now, under the Trump presidency. A strong country being weakened by a bad man and his accomplices. Can it be stopped? Even if it is, how much damage will have been done?

Weinstein eventually faced justice of a kind, fired and shamed into professional exile but, as of now, he remains free. Trump's political, and that of his family, is in free fall, but they remain in the power. That's part of the rot: the delay of consequences. The powerful protected, always protected. 

Rot is never noble when it comes to the public good. It's always bad. But until we the people create a system where it cannot and will never be tolerated, it'll be the rot that makes us. It is us. And it's ignoble.