Rumble rumble

Guess I haven't been posting much here. And now that my book draft is finally done (YAY!), I don't really have an excuse. Anyway, of late I've been thinking of fame in the Internet age. It's a topic I know yaoobruni has written on before, and as our entire lives are online I can't help but think of that old saying, "No man is a hero to his valet". Because they've seen too much.

These days we've all seen too much though. Was having a conversation with a friend last week about how with our whole lives online, it might be trickier for many people to run for office in 40 years. She believes we'll just accept that people have imperfect pasts; I'm less convinced. But even famous people now, so many of them (including people who I admire/respect) will have something unpleasant brought to light that at another time would have been personal life, maybe considered trifling and we'd not know, but now it's out in the world. And I like truth and transparency and information flowing, so it's not as if I want these things to be hidden, when people we admire have said or done things that are ignorant, hurtful, etc. But it does make it hard to have heroes. (Anyone see that MLK play?) Nobody's perfect, obviously. Still, lately I've seen a lot of "How can you support X person? They said/did terribly thing Y!" on various blog comment threads (yes, I've been blog-addicted again) where the post was simply praising a praiseworthy action.

Anyway, perhaps that's why I wrote this week's column about heroes (with credit to sanj). Last week's column my paper screwed up the formatting, but I still think the content came out well, so if you like politics or poetry I think you might want to read my Legislation Sonnets