Embed Notice

As a tangent and I guess an opposing example, I never liked Harry Potter. I've never read the books or seen the movies and I never thought much of Jowling Kowling even before she exposed her true colors. And it would be very tempting of me to bring that up when people talk about how much her work meant to them and how her reveal has affected them. It would be gratifying to say, "See, told ya so, I knew it all along."

But I didn't. I didn't read the books because I was too old to get into them as a child but not old enough to get into them as an adult. I rejected them because they were popular and I was tired of hearing about them. Had things been just a little different, I could easily have been very into Harry Potter and find myself in the position that others do. I'm not special, I'm not smarter, I'm just lucky and perhaps a bit too contrary for my own good, really.

I'm not going to exhaustively enumerate my failures, but Bill Cosby's standup was formative to my sense of humor. I used to joke that, if I were forced to pick a male movie star to have sex with, I'd go with Kevin Spacey (and I didn't even know he was gay at the time). I love Firefly even though I wasn't an early adopter. I enjoyed Louis CK's comedy. I've read and enjoyed all manner of books by problematic authors, some of them after those authors' problems were widely known. Believe me when I say that I'm no wizard when it comes to avoiding art by terrible artists.

That's part of this too. You can't beat yourself up about enjoying something if you didn't know. And yes, that includes if you could probably have known if you looked into it. Cosby has been an open secret for way, way too long, for example. I could plead all sorts of extenuating circumstances, but at the end of the day, the best thing to do is take the knowledge and act on it, then try to be more aware in the future.

Even with the internet making everything everywhere all at once, a lot, I mean a LOT of people don't hear about things. The terminally-online are no exception. And the system is designed to let these assholes get away with it by memory-holing their crimes. Never forget that either.

I guess all I'm saying is that you can strive to do better without either being a joyless cynic or beating yourself up about your failures to the point that you stop learning from them.