WTF? on page L2 of today's Globe and Mail

[da]

Unfortunately, this column isn't on the Globe and Mail website. It's a new column called "Damage Control, A Weekly Guide to Surviving Social Scrapes" by David Eddie.


To: letters@globeandmail.com, damage@globeandmail.com

Concerning the Damage Control column in Tuesday's Life section ("The fix for your BlackBerry blunder? Lie"). When someone is caught emailing during a funeral, the only response with "a touch of class" is to acknowledge the stupidity of what he did, grovel for forgiveness in writing (not "an apology card" but a letter), accept whatever might come of the apology including likely no response at all, and in any case to move on, chastened and hopefully wiser but with one's integrity intact.

Advising that he should lie and spin to regain his dignity- what sort of dignity is that exactly? Knowing for the rest of his life that he lied to a friend whose father had just died? Daring his grieving friend to call him a liar? Setting himself up to eventually be discovered in the lie?

Aside from the many reasons why this is terrible advice for anyone, I'm most disappointed that the Globe and Mail saw fit to publish this kind of "Damage Control." I really did think you held to a higher standard than that.

/s



[original article copied into comments]

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Ew. Ew.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

...and I didn't mention the article on the facing page, which says: teenagers lie, it's endemic and nothing is to be done about it. (As an example of why that's inevitable, they used the hypothetical kid telling their parent they were going to a friend's house to smoke pot and have sex. So of course the kid will lie rather than have the parent blow up. Inevitable. And so it's more important for the parent to deal with the forbidden behaviours and ignore the lying.)

That bad advice was more ambiguous. I thought about writing about the juxtoposition of articles, but it became too long.

They didn't print my letter this morning. They printed another letter that mentioned both and said a bit about moral vacuums.

I'm afraid our paper's turning into a tabloid.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

That bad advice is, at least, traditional. Telling people they should lie to their friends about why they were assholes at funerals instead of taking the "I'm a bastard" lumps, that's kind of novel.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yes. I'm still amazed they printed it.