No defense for the indefensible

Mike Straka has an online screed at foxnews.com that is typically too personal in its peeves for me to find it anything but a rant (this is the pot calling his kettle black). Today, however, he's posted some excellent social commentary. The salient passages:

But this is just another example of how people these days are only concerned about looking good, instead of being good.

It looked good for Ashlee Simpson to be a pop singer on MTV, but when it came to a live performance on "Saturday Night Live," she had to fake it by using a backup voice track. After the track was played in a snafu, first she blamed the band and then she blamed acid reflux.

Author James Frey of "A Million Little Pieces" infamy didn't plagiarize, he just made stuff up.

Frey must have taken a page out of the Jayson Blair Style Guide. He of New York Times infamy made up descriptions of places he'd never seen in order to file some of the paper's front page domestic news stories -- from his apartment.

What is really sad about this situation is that Viswanathan will get to keep the money she's made from her book. She'll get to keep the money from Dreamworks whether they make the movie or not, and most likely they will, since the project has a built-in publicity machine now.

And why not?

After all, Ashlee Simpson keeps "singing," "A Million Little Pieces" keeps selling, Barry Bonds keeps hitting home runs despite being clouded in a steroids controversy, Paris Hilton became a household name after a sex tape was plastered all over the Internet, Pete Rose never admitted he gambled on baseball until he had a book to sell, President Clinton "did not have sexual relations with that woman," "Lost" star Michelle Rodriguez chooses five days in jail over 200 hours of community service for her DUI conviction, Jayson Blair got a book deal after he was fired, and, and, and.

Viswanathan will learn a lesson from this, but the lesson she'll learn is any publicity is good publicity, and the more controversy surrounding her, the more money she'll make.

Straka fails to mention the word that first comes to my mind when considering these public challenges to character: shame. There appears to be no enforcing of a sense of shame any longer. Shame, taken to extremes, is a terribly stultifying psychological crippler. But in small and normal doses, shame is a corrective - and can lead to such great character traits as humility and generosity.

The Bible speaks of the chastening that comes to believers as being in our best interests - in the vein of Romans 8:28 - things working for the greater good of the believer called according to God's purposes. I believe in this for I've seen it work in my own life. Chastening and shame can go a long way toward converting unrepentant pride into something fruitful - humility, for instance.

Who do you like being around - the humble or the proud? My best friends are humble people generally. They have their pride-filled moments, as do we all, but they are in the minority of their moments.

Said another way, the man who defends himself stridently needs no defense from me.

Consequently, he gets none.