Comments on On An Overgrown Path: When role models get it wrong

I think I'll nominate Michael's comment above as m...

2007-12-20T18:31:00.000Z

I think I'll nominate Michael's comment above as my last word on this one.

Drive safely over Christmas everyone. Or even better, don't drive at all.

No, I'm not certain that it is. If Lewis Hamilton...

2007-12-20T18:00:00.000Z

No, I'm not certain that it is. If Lewis Hamilton had committed vehicular homicide, I certainly might agree with you! But in his particular case, no actual pain has been inflicted on anybody.

By a stretch of the imagination, Hamilton may have endangered the lives of hypothetical others—despite having built his entire career on the ability to control an automobile at three-digit speeds without killing anybody—but Robert King has inflicted real harm on a number of not-so-hypothetical boys.

There is a vast and, I should have hoped, clear difference in the severity of the two crimes. Speeding is serious. Sexual abuse is far, far, far more serious.

As for Benjamin Britten, it's funny—I've just finished reading Britten's Children, which makes a convincing case that he did not molest children. He was, however, an avid car enthusiast, and enjoyed taking children on high-speed rides through the country. So, by your logic, maybe he was as bad as a child molester?

It is true that highway accidents do cause many mo...

2007-12-20T17:57:00.000Z

It is true that highway accidents do cause many more deaths than child molestation. While statistics show that highway accidents have a high mortality / morbidity rate, deaths from molestation are exceedingly rare. Slow down--save a life!

The "different treatment" probably has to do with ...

2007-12-20T16:59:00.000Z

The "different treatment" probably has to do with the fact that Lewis Hamilton (I'm, er, not a fan) drove too fast in an 80mph zone, and Robert King (I greatly admire his recordings) molested teenage boys.

Precisely my point. Coupled with the fact that 3500 people, many young, will die on Britain's roads this year. Of those deaths around 1000 will be due to excessive speed.

Isn't that enough pain to justify a comparison?

I too am unsettled by the King's Consort's sudden ...

2007-12-20T16:43:00.000Z

I too am unsettled by the King's Consort's sudden amnesia. And I find "car culture," so pervasive here in the States, alarming and dangerous.

But I'm not sure there's any comparison between pederasty and speeding, as criminal offenses go. The "different treatment" probably has to do with the fact that Lewis Hamilton (I'm, er, not a fan) drove too fast in an 80mph zone, and Robert King (I greatly admire his recordings) molested teenage boys.

Thx Mike, although I'm not sure you've quite got m...

2007-12-20T07:42:00.000Z

Thx Mike, although I'm not sure you've quite got my nuances.

The point of the post is NOT to defend sexual abuse. As I clearly say 'I am not contesting the pain and damage caused by sexual abuse.

It is to highlight society's radically different attitude towards criminal abuse that took place more that ten years ago and criminal driving that happened last weekend.

It is also to highlight that nobody in the classical music community comes out of the Robert King case very well, least of all those who today run the King's Consort.

We also need to be careful about bringing Britten into this. His biographers agree his interest in young people was Platonic. A jury in a very fair legal system found Robert King guilty of abuse. There is a big difference.

But nuances aside we agree on the two key points. That our attitude towards the car culture is unacceptable, and that there are disquieting elements in the Robert King story. And that was the point of the post.

Pliable: You are such a weird character, writing a...

2007-12-20T07:05:00.000Z

Pliable: You are such a weird character, writing a post defending somebody who has sex with under-18s while also advocating for a less abusive, car-free culture.

What's even weirder is that I agree with you on both points, in fact even a bit more radically. We need to get out of car culture completely for a while if the human species is going to survive, and the fact that more people don't recognize this simple truth continues to astonish me. And on the topic of adults/adolescents having sex, in most cases I'd call it abuse, clear and simple, but in a few other cases not. Britten was not an abuser, and from the sound of it neither was Mr. King. But we don't live in an officially subtle world.

An email has come in which says:I just looked at t...

2007-12-19T19:46:00.000Z

An email has come in which says:

I just looked at the King's Consort website and was also shocked to see that he's been deleted from it. That isn't truthful.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Robert King case the King's Consort website is an extrordinary example of revisionism.

Here is the Hyperion wensite -

In the world of film music King was a music consultant for Ridley Scott's epic The Kingdom of Heaven and his harpsichord playing can be heard in the hit film Shrek 2; other recent Hollywood projects include work for The Chronicles of Narnia, Pirates of the Caribbean, Flushed Away and, assisting award-winning composer Hans Zimmer, The Da Vinci Code.

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/artist_page.asp?name=rking

Here is the King's Consort website -

In the world of Hollywood TKC's choir feature in the sound tracks of Ridley Scott's epic The Kingdom of Heaven, and in The Chronicles of Narnia, Pirates of the Caribbean, Flushed Away and The Da Vinci Code.

http://www.tkcworld.com/about-short.html