Well, well . . .

Check out this nugget from Jimmy Kimmel's portfolio of work as  one of America's beloved entertainers:

Twitter user Austen Fletcher shared an old clip of Jimmy Kimmel (from The Man Show) playing a game with women on the street where they had to guess what’s in his pants using their hands.

It’s worth noting that the women in the clip voluntarily played this game for a comedy bit, and is not equatable with Weinstein’s actions (despite what some social media have insinuated).

He suggested one woman “use two hands” and jokingly said “maybe it’d be easier if you put your mouth on it.”

Kimmel asked another woman how old she was, which she said 18.
“Are you sure?” Kimmel replied. “Because Uncle Jimmy doesn’t need to do time.”

When one of his contestants was aggressively feeling around his pants, he told her “You’re gonna make a fine wife.”
In the end, he revealed what he had in his pants: a zucchini with a rubber band on it.

Kimmel has gotten a lot of attention lately for weighing in on the health care debate and pushing for gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre. 

Now, as this report on it from Mediaite says, the participants volunteered and, in general,  it was lighthearted and devoid of the creepy lechery of what has been garnering notoriety for Weinstein. In fact, I had to ask myself before beginning this post, are you sure you're not skirting the edges of excessive prudery?

But how much daylight is there between what Kimmel is up to here and truly creepy behavior? If he hadn't been a celebrity of at least some degree, and had the volunteers not been assured that it was all in good fun and would go so far in stoking the sexual energy with which the gag was charged and no further, would it not have been truly creepy?

This clip establishes where Kimmel stands on the intersection of sexual energy and dignity.

It comes from a period in his career when he was on a cable show with a rather specialized audience called The Man Show. Now, years later, he is host of a network late-night talk show.

So ask yourself this: Is anything like this in the pre-late-night-talk-show-host archives of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson or Jay Leno?

And further ask, did any of the above go on to engage in moral preening about issues of their day from a position that advocated government intrusion into the rights of individuals the way Kimmel has with health care and gun control?

The way this ties together is that Kimmel, in the above clip, shows himself to be a moral relativist, taking the tee-hee factor with which sex is inextricably bound to a level at which hard and fast codes about sexual conduct are sneered at. And then, many years later, he assumes the role of moral arbiter, asking us to get all teary-eyed about infants needing surgical procedures as well as mass-shooting victims, and overtly demanding that government curb everyone's rights to address these particular situations.

It's sanctimony of the most nauseating sort.

Neither this old clip nor his recent diatribes about socialist health care or gun control exhibit the slightest bit of humility born of recognition of an absolute moral code.

It's all about letting the human sexual impulse run free while the brute force of the state is brought to bear on any other form of individual autonomy.

For a moment, I asked myself if there was any point to the discovery of this old clip, but then this became apparent to me.

We get Jimmy Kimmel as a rich and influential figure in our culture when we set ourselves up as own gods.