Both Sides, now and always

So I'll start by saying this.

Being left-wing, to me, means thinking better of left-wing people in general. Meaning I generally like them more, I generally think that there aren't always two sides to the same story and that we all want the same things in different ways. Meaning I think, on balance, left-wing people are likely to be kinder, more thoughtful, more tuned in to social issues, more caring about inequality, all of those things.

These are either life's truths or life's illusions. I think they're life's truths.

I believe the whatabouttery that persists in modern political discourse mainly serves the right. I believe they relentlessly distort the arguments, draw false comparisons, to conceal this blatant truth. It puzzles me if ever left-wing people don't think like this, to be honest. You're being too fucking fair, I think. What's even the point of being left-wing if you don't think that?

But ...

and here's where my illusions were long ago shattered ... there is an area where this is, depressingly, but pretty obviously, not true.

For decades, my reading matter has included a large chunk of popular social history and biographies of "heroic" men - icons of civil rights, of rebel music and of the left - the likes of Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer, Paul Robeson, Jesse Owens, John Lennon, Marlon Brando, film guys, Hollywood innovators and protestors, Bowie, more political figures like Mandela and Kennedy, you get the idea.

Now, there are some who have never really been held up as paragons of virtue, like Dylan, De Niro, etc. Their work is what it is - one couldn't really say they have sought to be or ever really been treated as secular saints.

But there are others like Robeson, say, Strummer, and others, who get spoken about in revered terms and I went into reading their biographies with high hopes that they might be different from the rest.

But no.

The fact is, the universal, cliched, truth about these men who changed the world is their transparent and impossible-to-conceal bad treatment of women, their sense of entitlement and hypocrisy, that they got to have their cake and eat it. There was always a little woman at home who was expected to behave herself while they got in with doing great things and having whatever they want.

Any naivety I had about that disappeared quickly, but I was always a bit disappointed. I'm not a moralist, but there was always a double-standard and a cruelty.

And, look, there's a big line between what the likes of Weinstein are being accused of and someone just being a trifling, good-for-nothing type of brother, but, in the sense that clearly these men felt like they could always have exactly what they wanted, it's part of the same mindset.

And very few of these books were hatchet jobs. The writer's affection for the subject was often transparent. If what I was reading was the best way to spin it, one often imagined that the truth might have been worse (particularly when it came to Hollywood ... that was where i had the hardest time, initially, reckoning the liberal politics of some of these dudes with their utter arrogant disregard for their wives and girlfriends).

Life's illusions. I truly, truly think the better of left-wing people - maybe it's what I need to keep my world in order - but that impression stops short when it comes to casual and not-so-casual personal misogyny.

I'm not saying anything that everyone doesn't know, but people on the left trying to make political capital out of "our sex offenders aren't as bad as yours and we deal with it better" are getting nowhere fast.