Clear Cut, Yes? Clear Cut, No!

I would recommend a John Feinstein article to you. You can find it on the Post's website here. The best thing about the article to me is this line:

"People want heroes to be heroes and villains to be villains. It is rarely that simple and it isn't even close to being true with Knight."

Personally, I think it isn't true for just about everybody. I mentioned this to someone during the last season of The Sopranos. Tony Soprano can be a very frustrating protagonist to root for sometimes. One moment he's cutting short a tryst with another woman because she's unbuttoning the shirt his wife buttoned for him on the way out. The next moment, he's driving along with a Bada Bing girl's face in his lap (to put it mildly). Sometimes people do things they aren't proud of and say, "That wasn't me." Which is nonsense, if you ask me. It's always "me" or "us". We're the same person doing the good thing as we are doing the bad. It's just not that easy to reconcile something like that within ourselves.

My favorite novel is Atlas Shrugged. I think it's wonderfully written and put together. But I disagree with Francisco d'Anconia that there are no contradictions. I think that every human being is a contradiction. We do want two different things at the same time, things that are not only different but contradictory. Things that reject each other. And we still manage to get through every day, pretty much every day. I think that's rather nice.