Richards-Gate III: This Time It's Personal

Now that Harrogate has taken his stand as to separatung the Person (Richards) from the Art (Kramer), it has become necessary to conduct inquiries into how we are all reacting to the Person. In his initial post on this topic, Harrogate threw in with Shakespeare's Sister and, it seems, most everyone else, lambasting Richards as, in short: an asshole. Between then and now, however, Harrogate's views have broadened, he wishes to somewhat retract the harsh snap judgment. And now, to share why.

As commenters have made clear in earlier threads, it is true that Richards revealed an ugly cankerous thing in his soul, that he crossed a line, and that it would have been just as bad had it been done privately. It is also true that his rant reached significantly beyond political incorrectness and into the dark underbelly of racism. So now that's established. But the question we must all ask ourselves remains: whether we are prepared to allow such an incident to define this man for all time, and define him to such an extent that it actually seeps into the character he created years before he did this thing.

Can anyone honestly look Harrogate in the computer screen and say, without a shred of irony, that they have never said a racist thing or thought a racist thought? A sexist thing, a sexist thought? Shall one of Harrogate's readers now posit themselves as wholly innocent of ever harboring a homophobic thought? An anti-Semitic sentiment? And the list goes on, sadly. And Harrogate sticks his neck out and asserts that his Readers share with him a history of mistakes, some small, some grave, some perhaps even worse than what Richards did in that club.

Indeed, perhaps some of you have even said something terrible in public, and someone heard you and then never saw you again, so that forevermore you remained defined by that terrible moment. Nice thought, isn't it?

Humans in general seem to Harrogate a terribly unforgiving lot, especially when it comes to people they don't know very well. But consider this: maybe it's less important to play the gotcha-game of identifying an ugly thing in a person, than it is to see whether or not that person struggles to deal with, to somehow get beyond the ugly thing. And this applies to ourselves. You hear a lot, for example (especially from liberals like Harrogate), about taking care of the poor, about the madness of "war for oil," about this, about that, and about the other. But really, when you look around, you see everyone driving cars, using credit cards, and generally dominated up to their necks by their own little private lives. Everyone Harrogate knows, including Harrogate himself, is firmly in the grip of corporate gluttony, even though most of us fancy ourselves as seeing through "The Machine."

The point of all this being, ostensibly, Jesus's from long ago. To paraphrase: who are any of us to judge Richards based on this one incident even as we all of us are guilty of things just as bad if not worse? the hypocrisy of it all bothers Harrogate a lot. It really does.

But pshaw, enough of such things. Perhaps Richards the man can learn from what he has done, now that he has seen himself capable of such an ugly thing, perhaps from there he can heal. Must he, really, be pariahed as a racist from now until doomsday because of this incident? Each must search their own heart.

Richards has apologized. Who will stand and give him benefit of the doubt? It will be interesting to see what comes of this.