Liam Neeson, poster boy for an outrageous decade

If we were to be judged by what we did in the 1980s, we would all be in deep trouble if only because most people alive today cannot remember what they did in that distant era with its laudanum for breakfast, its bustles and horsewhips.

Life was different then, i.e., worse. People behaved in ways that would be unacceptable now, but then I feel that way about 2018. How did Trump get away with that year? By starting another one even worse.

Why be outraged over the cruelty of the past when variants on those cruelties never actually stopped? They blossomed.

Thanks to the online world, pedophilia is no longer a cottage industry but a global behemoth. Russia just legalized wife-beating. In the U.S., you can be jailed for a miscarriage.

It’s outrageous to choke-rape a woman in 2004 as she cries, as the Virginia governor’s understudy allegedly did. It’s worse to say of her “F- - k that b- - -h” in 2019 as he allegedly did this week.

But for general racism like blackface, the truly outrageous thing is to keep doing it, and Southerners do. With their Confederate statues alone, they keep racism going like an underground coal fire (recall the one in Centralia, Penn., where people suddenly noticed in the 1980s that their whole town was hot to the touch.)

Racism, Trump’s calling card, is still burning. That’s the outrage. And we have new horrors.

Americans were shocked by the birth of Daesh after they invaded Iraq. But the Khmer Rouge was born when the U.S. invaded North Vietnam and bombed Cambodia. The U.S. caused a near-genocide twice, but Americans never mention Cambodia. Hey, the ’80s were a foreign country. They did things differently there.

Americans are horrified that their government took small children from their parents at the Mexican border and may never be able to track and reunite them. Yes, that’s outrageous. But what makes it worse is that the Nazis did precisely this to blond and blue-eyed Eastern European children, ripping 250,000 of them from their parents and handing them over to German families to thicken up the Aryan race.

“It was difficult for us to believe that this could have happened. Who would have taken babies or toddlers away from mothers?” wrote Gitta Sereny, working in 1945 to reunite stolen Polish children with their families.

In 2018, Trump’s border agents did precisely what the Nazis did. Trump calls it Zero Tolerance. The SS called it Lebensborn. The Department of Health and Human Services now says taking those children from their “foster parents” would emotionally re-traumatize them. Which is precisely what happened in 1946, as Sereny was to discover to her horror, children tortured by repeatedly losing love.

Sereny called it a “double infamy.” But where did DHS learn this? Why do Trump Americans tolerate a Nazidevised double infamy done to little children? It’s a genuine outrage.

Equally, score one for Irish actor Liam Neeson, 66, who said #MeToo was “a bit of a witchhunt.” He’s a bit sorry for having gone looking for a black man to beat up after a friend of his was brutally raped by a black man. But guess what? It was the 1980s.

Actors aren’t interesting. And they aren’t their roles. Most of them aren’t even smart, perhaps because of wisely choosing highly paid work over education in their most dewy and fetching years.

Unless an actor has done something meriting arrest or a lawsuit, stop caring what actors say.

The columnist Marina Hyde has delivered a wonderful rendition of Neeson’s imaginary agent writhing like a minnow on the hook to spin Neeson’s artful “confession” of having had bad thoughts 40 years ago.

Here’s Hyde’s classic line, suitable for publicists everywhere. “Actually, Liam has started a really important conversation.”

He hasn’t. But saying it is a daft, yet effective, way of blunting the pointless outrage of our outrageous days.