Comfort Reads

I always say that the only safe people to get behind are Tom Hanks, Barack Obama, and Mr. Rogers. Tom Hanks is always called the nicest guy in Hollywood, and the challenge to push back against that is too tempting for trolls. So if they haven’t been able to steer the narrative in another direction, he’s a safe bet.

Barack Obama is in the same situation. I’m sure his detractors have been searching for dirt for years. If they could find anything, they would have used it. He is probably as good as he seems.

And lastly, Mr. Rogers. He’s no longer around to mess up, and we’ve been through all of the movies and articles about him after his death. If there were something to uncover, it would have been found. It’s safe to put your trust in Mr. Rogers.

Everyone else is fallible. Put a story about them in your memoir, and it could bite you in the ass later. It’s the JK Rowling effect. When she was just about her books, we had no clue that the Quidditch league would rename their game to distance themselves from her. Social media gave us a whole new side of JK Rowling to not enjoy.

This is why I found this idea of a comfort person where you cannot meet or interact with the person behind the words/images interesting. She writes:

A comfort-person relationship is a feeling of friendship and warmness that can only ever go one way. It’s a relationship that does not, and I’d argue, cannot, exist in real life.

That person isn’t really a person but a projection of what we think of them as a person. So we’re comforted by our own imagination.