As
my follower Jason Dorwart is aware, sexual pride is important in the
progressive disabled community. I’ve written about it in somewhat explicit
fashion in earlier years, nor am I the only formerly indoctrinated and
embittered outcast to be censored in search and have page views suppressed
because of it. Far more confident paraplegic females have had instructional
videos removed from You Tube by Google over the issue, and in extending an
olive branch to ableism, the dowager was sympathetic. Reading the narratives of
shared experience takes us only so far, and whereas sexual activity may leave
certain women ambivalent, others may be happy in pushing boundaries. Harassment
and hostile environment is the flip side of this coin, and having been through
these trials, my viewers may think I’d find the scoop by Irin
Carmon and Amy Brittain commendable. Eight testimonials illustrate a
pattern of conduct similar to those which besieged Cosby into an opaque court
case, and Rose, like other lesser PBS titans, stayed at the top of his game far
past Medicare eligibility. He was bound to be forced into retirement at some
point, given that his facial features in a live interview setting occasionally
cast a ghoulish aspect to his profile.
What
is seemingly intractable, however, is the incongruity of his cultural and
political excellence juxtaposed against behavior we more readily expect to emanate
out of the Playboy mansion. From my point of view, it is less about power,
in Rebecca Traister’s micro-post, and more about a legacy of excellence tarnished
less by the heinous aspects and more by the hideousness foisted on all of us by
entropy. Look at everything he has done to explore issues with his audience,
his lengthy segments taking psychiatric medical model treats seriously, even with
enthusiasm by his guests. Rose is a robust believer in cooperative treatment in
a way the spastic dowager is not, dissecting the clinical aspects of his heart
disease with more than one eminent cardiologist, in an envious lust to hang on
to the quality of his life. He channeled the outrage felt by the public over
the Iraq war to joust with Donald Rumsfeld over the destruction of a regime and
a society which later devolved under Obama into a puppet state. Judy Woodruff
commended him on his scoop with Assad when the Syrian theatre was hot. There
are too many probative conversations to list which amount to a daunting legacy. If it seems I am coming perilously close to advocating a grin and bear it approach, which is what my humiliation has amounted to since 1999-- no, not quite. I'm merely suggesting, much as with Roman Polanski, that being the best at something shouldn't be entirely forgotten, and though there is a rush to being a journalist on deadline which extended my lifeline to September 2017, I'm increasingly unhappy with The Washington Post anointing itself as the moral arbiter of feminine esteem. Would I have broken this story, unleashing the #MeToo fury in the public square? What I can say is this: I would have waited to give Rose the benefit of the doubt. We should rehabilitate and honor that ego, whether or not he considers his cardiac issues debilitating, or merely chronic.
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