SHAME

Bill Conlin, who died a month ago, was the best writer at the Philadelphia Daily News for at least thirty years. Then, in 2011, allegations surfaced that he was being accused by a niece and three of her childhood friends of pedophilia. Hours before the news hit, this dean of Philly sportswriters resigned his position and disappeared into a retirement community in Florida. He never spoke to anyone about the allegations. I was told by his colleagues at the Daily News that Conlin was never a terribly sociable guy and had no friends at the paper, but even so, his vanishing act was extreme. He wouldn't answer the phone. He wouldn't answer an email. Exactly nothing appeared about him in any Philadelphia newspaper from December 2011 until the report of his death on January 9, 2014.

I mention him because his story is today so unusual, though public figures caught in corruption scandals or moral turpitude used to do this all the time. They would disappear in shame, and you would hear nothing about them for decades. Today, however, the ambit of public shame has shrunken so much that Conlin's story is a bit of a shocker.

A 49-year-old US president cheats on his wife with his star-struck 22-year-old employee, then perjures himself about it in an unrelated legal matter. There was a time, well within living memory, that a scandal of this nature would have led to his resignation and his departure from public life. Instead, there were howls of outrage from his supporters that anyone would suggest such a thing. Today, he remains very visible in public life, and it is considered rude to even mention his past behavior.

Lesser creeps consorted with hookers (Spitzer), cheated on a cancer-stricken 30-year wife (Edwards), drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl (Polanski), and repeatedly sent photos of his penis to strange women on the internet (Weiner). All these guys took career hits from their transgressions, yet none of them seems especially contrite. They all seem to be merely waiting until the rest of us come to our senses and stop being so damn judgmental and let them back onto the A list. And they all have their defenders though, unlike Clinton, maybe not so many.

Expelling a person from public life for transgressions against accepted norms had several purposes. First was deterrence. By stripping bad actors of their celebrity privileges, society made it clear that disgraceful or dishonest or evil behavior would carry a price, and this made it more likely that those who were lifted up to positions of power and influence would refrain from giving in to their baser instincts. There was an implicit understanding that those few individuals would hold themselves to a higher standard. I can offer no mathematical proof of the deterrence principle, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. I don't remember seeing bad behavior from the high and mighty nearly as much as we do today. Then it was always a shock. Today it is almost expected.

A second purpose was to teach humility, and this aspect is something I desperately miss. When I see a weird serial pervert like Anthony Weiner trying to resurrect his political career, I am struck primarily by the arrogance of it. Does he really believe we can't get along without him? Does he think the New Yorkers he represented in Congress will be so distressed by his departure that they will be unable to find somebody else? This was the other lesson of the shame-and-disgrace model---that no one is so important they cannot be replaced, or are beyond the reach of our contempt---but that lesson is no longer being taught. Instead, these creeps hang around, disappearing briefly for a stint in a clinic but then re-emerging (cured!) to reclaim their sliver of limelight. I just want them to go away. But they won't.

But Conlin? At one point, he and I had a lengthy argument on-line about Gene Mauch's proper place in baseball history, and Conlin actually blocked my emails. At the time I didn't know that could be done, and I don't know why he did it other than the fact he was a crotchety old bastard. I didn't like him much, in other words, but I have to give him some minimal credit for understanding there is a line between good and bad and that he had fallen on the wrong side of it. Knowledge that there is such a line is far from universal, though it used to be.

John Profumo was Secretary of War for Harold Macmillan's government in 1963 when he became entangled with a young hottie named Christine Keeler in a complicated scandal involving Russian spies that might have compromised (but probably didn't), British national security interests. He then lied to the House of Commons about it, and that was viewed as a considerably worse thing than the scandal itself. Two weeks later, he resigned his position and went to work as a volunteer cleaning toilets at the Toynbee House, a charitable institution in London's East End.

And that is where he spent the last forty years of his life.

Copyright2014MichaelKubacki