The Less You Know

Just watched a very poorly-written public service announcement during a rerun of Friends.  It was for a cancer-fighting organization and starred someone who's presumably a starlet of some type whom I didn't recognize.

She ended the spot by saying, "Every hour someone dies from melanoma.  It doesn't have to be someone you love."

...which means, of course, that if you play your cards right and donate to the organization she's endorsing, it can be someone someone else loves.  It can be a stranger.  Or maybe, if you're really generous, it can be someone you dislike.  They have that power over melanoma.

Poor logic or poor writing?  Most likely some of both.

Spoilers for Man of Steel, if you care....

I have no intention of watching Lame New British Superman, but I would like to see him told off by Tony Stark.

Let Us Now Denigrate Famous Men (because it makes us feel all warm and superior inside)

John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, interviews Eric Metaxas about his new book 7 Men and the Secret of Their Greatness.  Haven't read the book and probably won't anytime soon, but I have to say I love Eric's response to this rather snide question:

Why do we hear almost nothing about the flaws of these men?

Because most of them were so genuinely wonderful that it would be a disservice and a distortion of the truth, especially in a short chapter. If someone asked me about you and even though I think tremendously well of you I felt the need to think of one negative thing to say, just to be "fair," that would in fact be deeply unfair and wrong. For example, shall I tell everyone who asks me about you that you stole from those dear elderly people you were visiting? Besides, you needed that jewelry, didn't you? Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, it's nobody's business.

Okay, but seriously, let me wonder right back atcha: Why is our generation obsessed with the flaws of famous men? At some point in the last 40 or 50 years we've swung from never revealing the flaws of famous men to focusing exclusively on those flaws. I talk about this at length in the introductory chapter of the book. It's become genuinely pathological. We've gone from hiding the glaring flaws of seriously troubled men like JFK—who everyone feared might be "too Catholic," but who in reality regularly brought prostitutes into the White House, which is not all that Catholic, now that we think about it, eh?—to tearing down genuinely great men, like George Washington, who did so much for this nation that we are all profoundly in his debt, but who now must always be gravely scolded for having owned slaves at a time when not one single Virginia landowner did not own slaves. Of course there was a time when we may have overpraised even the great George Washington, but for the love of Mike, let's not all leap from being Parson Weems to being Bill Maher or Chelsea Handler. Can't we strike a balance?

We've got to regain our common sense and be able to tell the difference between heroes and villains—and yes, those categories still exist—without endlessly feeling the hand-wringing obligation to say that some hero wasn't perfect. Of course every one of the men in 7 Men is a sinner and flawed, but since none of them is Jesus, shouldn't that go without saying? We owe it to ourselves—and to young people especially—to be able to make the distinction between Joseph Stalin and Christopher Columbus. And we have got to snap out of the adolescent habit of saying that unless we report on the one bad thing someone did, we're not telling the "whole" story. Our constantly tearing down leaders and over-focusing on their flaws has had a tremendously baleful effect on the culture at large. It's made us all cynical and world-weary. There really are times when it's okay to be innocent and hopeful, but like some eye-rolling Goth 15-year-old, we've decided that that's just like so naïve. To which I must needs reply: whatever.

Scofflaw

Today was my dad's 87th birthday.  I made double chocolate pound cake and was led to wonder if there is a more often broken instruction in the world than the one on the back of the cake mix box: Do not eat raw cake batter.  We ate raw eggs and butter and loved it.