Jon Gosselin: Assholery at Warp Speed

Thanks to an alert Facebook friend, (thanks MET), I learned the whiny douchebag otherwise known as Jon Gosselin recently appeared on Larry King Live and is now denouncing the production of the reality show based on the life of his family. In fact, he is taking legal steps to halt entirely the production of the show that made him (fairly) rich and (in)famous. A show he repeatedly for years defended as an absolute positive in the lives of his kids, an enterprise he claimed provided learning opportunities and life experiences for them they would never have enjoyed otherwise.

Again, all this (it just so happens) in the wake of the announcement that his role in said reality show will be diminished likely due to the fact that he is a whoring jackass with little or no sensitivity the impact his sudden and very public extra-marital actions might be having on the psyches of his minor children.

That's right, folks. Jon Gosselin, the guy that, not two weeks ago, announced on national television that he "despised" the woman who bore him eight children, preferring instead the charms of his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, Hailey Glassman (that should be a Very Special Google search for his children in a few years) has suddenly, and without warning, grown a conscience. A conscience as big as Olde Texas. A conscience SO BIG that it simply does not allow for the continued production of the show he enthusiastically participated in and defended for the last eight years (and as few as six days prior). A show that makes his Ed-Hardy-tee-shirt buying skull-ring-gifting, Manhattan-based lifestyle possible.

Poor, sensitive Jon, ya'll. He's HAD AN EPIPHANY. And a very suspiciously timed epiphany, at that.

Not that Jon is alone in his recently oh-so-recently acquired conviction that the show is detrimental to the welfare of his children. As I've written before, Jon & Kate Plus 8 is a show that was no stranger to controversy long before the specter of the Gosselin divorce reared its ugly head. There has been, since the beginning, a large group of detractors opposed to the production of a show dependent on its pint-sized stars for content. This particular controversy has been brewing almost since the beginning. The movement just never before had one Jon Gosselin in its camp until a minute ago, when Jon realized he was OUDT (Heidi Klum).

Then? For the fickle Jon Gosselin, the show was suddenly a Bad Idea all around. Wow. Who knew?

I've written extensively, probably too extensively, about how certain of my own life experiences make me perhaps overly (and unexpectedly) sensitized to the fate of the Gosselins. Jon's most recent and almost unbelievable antics only serve to strengthen my conviction that maybe, just maybe, Jon Gosselin is actually The poster boy for the bad behavior of divorced (or about-to-be-divorced) fathers everywhere.

This seems to me to be the sort of behavior we see every day in real life, but that is seldom so publicly presented as it is in the Gosselin case. Behavior that, clearly, is way more about this father's own personal well-being than that of his children. Behavior that would indicate that, not only is he not acting in a way that would show respect and care for his children and the union that produced them, but behavior that would actually indicate he doesn't have many qualms about using his children's fate and future as a weapon against his former wife. A former wife already disproportionately shouldering the lion's share of responsibility for their children. Their eight children. While Jon, in the meantime, despises her at his leisure. On TV.

I think, in the early years of JK8, Jon Gosselin garnered a lot of sympathy from the viewing public for having been "man-handled" by a wife that often seemed controlling and overbearing. In hindsight, and with the added benefit of recently having observed a now-rudderless Jon Gosselin in action, it's pretty easy to see how she got that way.

Somebody with a clue had to be in charge of the Gosselin ten. And it sure as hell wasn't going to be Jon Gosselin.