Juxtaposition and Bad Analysis

I unfortunately seem to have to stop by the grocery store about every other day. There's some things we forgot to get last time we were there, and some of them you can't put off.  So, quite a bit, I find myself in the grocery line at Albertson's or Riddley's sometime between 5 and 6 p.m.

I invariably end up noticing the magazine covers as I wait.  I don't really want to, I just do. And, because of that, I've been seeing the creepy robe wearing visage of an ossified Hugh Hefner staring out smiling from Life Magazine in a special issue, the only kind Life does anymore, dedicated to his memory.  As we recently passed his death.  His life, we're told, is to be celebrated as he broke down those musty old standards and let in the bright light of the "sexual revolution".

What he actually did, of course, is tell all men that the girl next door was theirs for the taking and that she probably had enormous boobs.  In real life, Hefner was married when he started out his smut based enterprise but that soon ended and, if the stories are to believed, females in the Playboy enterprise, or at least some of them, could expect to be screwed in Hefner's office.  Certainly the "girlfriends" who lived in his mansion knew that was part of the deal as they signed up for concubinage in order to advance their "careers" or to just have a roof over their heads.

Every morning, of course, we start off with the Today Show and I usually crank up my computer, both of which give me the current news. And much of that news has recently been on the topic of men who have been revealed to have engaged in "inappropriate behavior".  Matt Lauer has been a frequent topic of that recently with lurid tales of workplace skirt chasing and his conquering of various female subjects, all so far, if what we are hearing is correct, seem to have been purely voluntary, but to have submitted to sex, we're told, as he was their boss.

In other words, Lauer, who has earlier related that he grew up in a home in which his parents had no religious values at all, his father having abandoned his Jewish faith and his mother never having one, apparently, lived liked Hefner.  And that was the way that up until recently was supposedly the liberated cool dude way to live, assuming the tales about him have some grounding in reality (his first wife, he's been married twice, wholly denies the accusations being made against Lauer, and unless he underwent a radical personality shift that should tell us something).

And, sometime during the week, I listen to the weekend news shows which are also dealing with the same story of Lauer and all his many fellows.  Indeed, fellows who have transgressed in varying degrees.  Lauer, if the stories are true, was truly a Hefneresque cad, but that may be all he was, with Hefner's lesson to men about women, they'll submit, proven correct.  Others are like Al Franken, lately Senator from Minnesota, who engaged in lessor behavior but have now paid the price, even if in his case his rise to power was based on fame generated through gross humor of the sophomoric type for which grabbing butts and boobs is par for the course, and everyone should have known that.  And there's all manner of bad behavior in between.

And in each weekend show there's a cry about how are we going to create a new standard.

Eh?

Isn't something obvious here?

We had that standard.  Guys like Hefner tore it down, guys like Lauer lived the new libertine one that was supposedly cool in its place, and now the inevitable messed up wrecked lives and consequences of that have come roaring back.

As yes, the First Law of Behavior and the Fourth.  

Laws of that type simply can't be broken.

And reinventing the wheel isn't necessary.  It's just remembering where you put it.