Tim Cavanaugh writes March 26 in The Los Angeles Times Opinion section blog:
I’m barely even an armchair Ford watcher, but it seems like every time there’s a brouhaha like this (i.e., every month or so), the conversation turns to whether this time, this time!, he’s gone too far, whether it might finally, finally!, be time to write the Vulcan porn gossip out of polite society. I suspect the reason he always comes back can be found in this recent defense of a Seipp family enemy. If he were just some amoral jerk who constantly turned on his friends, they would drop him without further thought. But Ford always has some elaborately worked-out justification for doing the wrong thing‚Äîand even if the morality is understood only by Ford himself, there’s something compelling in the amount of thought and ethical self-torment that goes into the decision. In any event, the last laugh belongs not to Ford but to Evelyn Waugh, who somewhere in Purgatory gets to look up or down from his holy torments and see the plot inspiration for The Loved One II, wherein an emotional Forest Lawn funeral ends up as some fakakta gossip item that won’t be remembered next week.
