Everyone is just so saddened and dismayed, as if they just found out that there is a Santa Claus after all, and he's a serial sexual harasser.
Some people were impressed by Sarah Silverman's statement on Louis C.K.: "Can you love someone who did bad things?" But is that the honest question of an adult, or the title of a children's book?
And yesterday, Matt Lauer's co-host Savannah Guthrie said, "We are grappling with a dilemma that so many people have faced these past few weeks. How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?"
Ummm.
How old are these people? And in the entertainment and media business, how have they managed to surround themselves with puritanical paragons, lo these many years?
I mean, golly! Even this little old Ohio boy has seen many people in my life through nearly countless simultaneous affairs, three-way trysts, strip poker at the office and grab-ass through a boat hatch. Those activities have resulted in divorces, reconciliations, children appearing out of woodwork, new marriages, car chases and the occasional fist-fight. "Goddamn," my friend told me after his wife punched him in the face, "I hope she never learns to plant her back foot." And so on and so forth.
Now, perhaps I believe too sincerely in the old saw, "heaven for climate, hell for company." But at an adult stage of any kind of rich life, surely no one is facing for the first time the "dilemma" of beloved people doing bad things.
When I was in fourth grade, my best friend at the time threatened to stop hanging around with me, "Because you swear too much." I called his bluff. It was I who left his lunch table in seventh grade, because the prudish little pecker was just too dull.
To be my friend: You only have to love life, you have to love me and you have to want to be good—a far cry from being perfect, as we all know by now. Right, kids?
Now, you can't be my friend and be brutal or abusive. Who decides what constitutes brutal or abusive? If you're my friend, I have to. But if I decide that about you, I sincerely hope I don't turn to the rest of our friends and pretend that complicated people are "a dilemma" that I have been facing for the first time "over these past few weeks."
I hope I'll just look down into my glass, and remember what my old man once once told me: "Older people are quiet because older people have more to be quiet about."
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