Weren't the 70s supposed to be the "Me Decade"? When did that end, exactly?
What is it lately with women who should be shunned, at the very least, getting the kid glove treatment on national TV? Last week it was Rielle Hunter being gently coaxed into confession by Oprah Winfrey. Today it was runaway mom Tiffany Tehan being tut-tutted on "Good Morning America." Tiffany and Tre Hutcherson ran away from their respective marriages, which in her case included a 13-month-old child, to live their dream life in Florida, touching off a nationwide search and TV news panic attack. Once upon a time, that such behavior have been material for a novel by a Dostoevsky or at least a Faulkner about how giving into a selfish impulse reverberates darkly throughout life. Today, the sinners go on the talk-show circuit and say, without guilt or even a vague sense of embarrassment, "Gosh, what were we thinking of?" and grab our attention for a day or two before the next goofballs drop by for show and tell:
Tehan said she cracked under the pressure "to be perfect."
"In a nutshell I was feeling pretty overwhelmed with life, just the pressures of work and raising a 1-year-old daughter," she said. "I wish that I had handled things completely differently."
Hutcherson said the decision to flee to southern Florida was a "spur of the moment" decision sparked by an off-the-cuff comment.
I said, 'Sometimes I think about getting on [Interstate] 75 and driving down to Florida and getting away for it all,'" Hutcherson said. "And she said flippantly, 'Don't forget to take me along.'"
Guess she can relax -- that pressure to be perfect is pretty much going to be absent now.
I don't mean to minimize the guilt of Tre in all of this (or of Edwards re Hunter), but I guess the women's narcissistic attitudes get to me, and that's probably not even all of their doing. It wasn't so much Tehan's vacuous ramblings that got to me as it was Robin Roberts' delicate questioning in that "there, there, dear, it's all right" tone that might be more apporpriate for a woman who just lost her son or husband in a coal mine explosion.
Can't wait for the made-for-TV movie. How can they not make one with a surefire title like "Tre and Tiffany" ready and waiting? What is it the Romans said, "nomen est omen"?
