What to Do with Accomplishments by Creeps?

12/8/2017

Dr. Eric R. Kandel and Charlie Rose, Brain Series (photo, not video)

One of the best things on television in the past decade was The Brain Series by Charlie Rose.

The body of work exists – on line, easily accessible, and etched in the memories of viewers like my wife, who listened and learned.

The leader of the discussions was Dr. Eric R. Kandel of Columbia University, whose knowledge and manner commanded the screen. The other guests were also brilliant, and Rose raised his game considerably, moving things along and actually listening to the experts.

Now we are left with the image of a powerful man parading around his apartment in an open bathrobe, terrorizing young female colleagues.

How do we process this?

The series remains. I suspect the science and the humanity will remain pertinent, at least until future discoveries add to the knowledge.

Can people live with a focused Charlie Rose moderating a landmark series?

Can people live with their vinyl and CDs and downloads of James Levine conducting opera?

Everybody has to live with their memories. I won’t miss Matt Lauer because I never, ever, watch morning TV. I don’t know how to gauge the widely variant charges or suspicions about John Hockenberry and Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz (and Charlie Rose), all of whom have interviewed me respectfully, let me hustle my books. What was it like for the capable women in those studios who made a visit so successful?

Harvey Weinstein is easy. He is a monster who produced some great movies but he is a monster just for what he did to that beautiful and spirited and talented Annabella Sciorra, whom I have loved since she sang in "Mister Wonderful."

(Go ahead, look at the video, watch her ex eat his heart out.) I want to be on the Weinstein jury. That’s all I’m saying.

Then there is Garrison Keillor. There were years when we built our Saturday afternoons and evenings around his radio show – times when my wife and I sat in a parking lot outside a restaurant until he finished his weekly visit to Lake Wobegon (the one about a man driving his young family back to Minnesota for the holidays, the one about the pioneer who dies in the badlands, never getting to see the Pacific.)

Keillor never presented himself as anything more than flawed. (His radio alter ego was reminded of this by his own mother, who couldn’t remember his name.) He added his human complexities to his voice, his words, his image.

Now he is accused of – he says – sliding his hand into the back of an open blouse. A mistake, he says, which happened while consoling a woman. Keillor says he is not a tactile person, and I believe it. In past decades, I interviewed him maybe half a dozen times on the phone but never quite got to have a conversation even at rehearsals at Town Hall in New York. He nodded in recognition -- and kept moving. A shy guy. Who knows about him?

Keillor played himself in a movie about his last radio show, art predicting life. The Robert Altman movie, “A Prairie Home Companion,” has an amazing cast, not the least of whom is Virginia Madsen as a redhead in a white raincoat who, he realizes, just may be an angel of death, with her eye on him. (She died in a car wreck while laughing at his radio joke, she tells him, as he edges away.)

The movie (Altman’s last) is classic Altman, in that you have to listen to overlapping conversations – a stretch for younger audiences. One of the subplots involves Meryl Streep as a country singer on the show, who was once Keillor’s girlfriend, and every so often she reminds him of exactly that.

He knows she is in pain that he caused. The ringleader figure in the movie is a creep, but a talented, sensitive, guilty creep. How human, art imitating life.

Now the question is, what do we do with the education, the art, the culture, from people (men, in this context) who seem to be varying scales of creep?

We have a major creep running for the Senate in Alabama.
We have a serial creep as President.
We have creeps of all major parties.

Meantime, I can watch Keillor in that movie over and over again. Some day when I grow up and develop a brain, I plan to watch the Brain Series, but for the moment we are left with the major creep in the bathrobe who caused such pain.

Streep and Keillor in the movie, "A Prairie Home Companion"

Hansen Alexander

12/8/2017 07:56:16 pm

A sensitive and informative discussion of a difficult subject, George, handled with your usual grace and good writing.

bruce

12/9/2017 12:17:13 am

george,

the MO of a lot of these guys, it seems, involves a bathrobe.

it's hard to imagine how prevalent this is/was.

and how they got away with it for such a long time.

you wonder if these guys were always like this before they became well known, but having so much success made it easier to act out.

i wonder if there'll eventually be a powerful woman who gets accused of behaving the same way with a man--or another woman.

watching the 'last picture show'....haven't seen it for a long time.

everybody looks so young. 46 years ago, my god....jeff bridges looks like a baby.

bruce

Tom Schwarz link

12/9/2017 10:20:59 am

George, I think this is the best piece that I have read on this confusing, CREEPY subject. I vote for you to be on the Harvey Jury!

George Vecsey

12/9/2017 10:52:26 am

Thank you all for the nice words. I stayed away from trying to parse the political-power scale. Gail Collins said it better than I could, today.
La Streep portrays a woman with power in The Devil Wears Prada.
Takes many forms.
Great to hear from friends...GV

bruce

12/9/2017 11:06:59 am

George,

i enjoy the hell out of collins' columns.

bruce

Brian Savin

12/9/2017 06:22:44 pm

My dear Grandmother, whom I still love, once wisely counseled me about the private within the important confines of marriage. She said, no one ever knows what takes place within a marriage.

Outside those confines, all bets are off.

bruce

12/9/2017 07:16:11 pm

i used to say that to my first wife more than 40 years ago when she asked me why i couldn't be like her friend X's husband. a few years later X came over to announce she was getting a divorce. ended up her husband was one sick puppy.

it wasn't what these men were doing behind closed doors in their marriages....they were often doing it with women who weren't their wives/girl friends and without their consent.

Altenir J. Silva

12/10/2017 06:10:59 am

Dear George,

It is very hard to know about people that we admire were so bad. It’s like eating a tasty food in beautiful restaurant and then find out a dirty kitchen. What to do? I don’t know, the food has already been digested.

Best - Altenir

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

What to Do with Accomplishments by Creeps?

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