c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) No surprise here. Schadenfreude sells.

Amber Frey’s book on her affair gone awry with Scott Peterson hit the top of every best-seller list in its first week of distribution. Frey cooperated with police to bring Peterson to justice when she was alerted to the manifestly obvious: He had murdered his wife and unborn child, apparently to clear a path for his relationship with her. And now, Amber Frey is a superstar, vying with a tsunami for airtime, and often winning.

How do we get Frey and her like to retreat to obscurity, silenced by the shame of their amorality? How do we temper our lust for salacious tales that lionize self-righteous tartlets and their handlers, instead of relegating them to disrepute? What of something so elementary as a sense of decency?

In 1954, Joseph Welch toppled Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror with just two sentences: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Today, that indignation likely would be noted nowhere but the Congressional Record.

I am inclined to give Frey every benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she will grow into a sense of decency. The deck does not seem stacked in that direction: an affair with a married man, two kids out of wedlock, hubba-hubba with a guy she’d met just a couple hours earlier … all by her mid-twenties.

The first step in the right direction would have been to stay home and shut up, or at least not to let opportunists convince her and a hungry public that she is a hero. If this were heroism at all, it was strictly the titillating faux-bravado of “The Survivor.” In the course of bailing out of a relationship grown sick and dangerous, she found the most secure route of escape.

We ought also suppose that the police enlightened her that continued silence might implicate her as an accessory after the fact. Within hours, the attorney Gloria Allred was by her side, spinning a not-too-smart, but very lucky, young woman into a bona fide hero, postured for all the benefits of celebrity.

And so it has become: Amber, Gloria, Dateline, Matt, Oprah, books, movies, bling-bling, tearful talk of threadbare emotions, pensive questions self-righteously asked and answered. And in the end, all the self-righteousness is about licking a lucrative bone from the brutal murder of a young woman and the baby in her womb.

I offer these self-revelatory words with reticence, but perhaps they will soften the edge of preachiness to my indignation and counsel:

I have done things in my adulthood of which I am deeply ashamed. Perhaps some of you can identify with that. I doubt that any of my foibles would rise or sink to the level of a best seller or an hour on Oprah. Yet, they harmed my reputation and caused grief that I well deserved. They have, however, left me more circumspect and with a tremendous desire to help, not hinder, people’s lives.

Despite my ability to move on, there will always remain in me the shrapnel of irreparable shame, something that will forever prevent me from thinking of myself in heroic terms, something that will counterbalance my grandiosity with penitent humility. If I ever write a tell-all book, you may be sure that it would be a cautionary tale with a large chunk of proceeds going to charitable causes.

Amber, the moment you took that tumble with Scott, like it or not, celebrity came a-knocking. Opportunistic folks knew you were a cash cow, so they convinced you and the dimwitted public, if not themselves, that you were a hero. The illusion was money in the bank, and life’s all illusion anyways, right?

In so many ways you are still a kid, so maybe you couldn’t be expected to have had the smarts, rectitude, resistance and discretion to choose a wiser path. But this I do know: You never really had a chance. If you had, your book, like mine, should have been a cautionary tale. You might have bared your soul about the irretrievable consequences of adultery, unwed motherhood and first-date promiscuity before you’re 30. The majority of its proceeds should have gone to charity. The keynote should have been, “This is one hell of a way to become a celebrity.” That might have been the surest way to stop the craziness, not stoke its flames.

Amber, maybe you ought to just sit in time-out for a couple of years, like I did, to figure out how to make the next half-century of your life a little more honorable. Gloria, Oprah, the Dateline bunch, and their schadenfreude-hyped minions, let me ask you: At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Ech, they’ll probably want to contact their lawyers before they answer.

MO/JL RNS END

(Marc Howard Wilson is a rabbi and syndicated columnist in Greenville, S.C.)