Lately, I’ve been thinking about falls from grace. Specifically, the arbitrary nature of them. How are certain scandals allowed to occur? What incredible short-sightedness, or perhaps hubris, is it that makes people play a role in their own downfall?

What, for example, could have possessed the good Reverend Al Miller to be caught out in that bit of unpleasantness last week with Jamaica’s most wanted, resulting in the police requesting him to turn himself in to them for questioning?

Surely he, a man of the cloth, could not have been as feeble-minded as he made himself to be, as to have thought he could simply roll up to the US Embassy, toot his horn and deliver Coke into the care of staff members who hadn’t yet left for the evening?

This being Jamaica, however, I reckon it still remains to be seen whether his congregation will finally wake up and see that someone with such stupefying clouded judgement perhaps may not necessarily be the most reliable person they can count on to keep their spiritual frequency to God all-clear. And considering that the Prime Minister, who is a friend of Rev Miller, is still walking around, and (surprisingly) still in possession of the title Chief Servant, after admitting to perpetrating one of the biggest “samfies” in the history of our nation, in the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips affair, I don’t know that Millergate will be considered that big a fall from grace.

Which leaves me to ponder, therefore, the week’s other WTF moment: General Stanley McChrystal’s spectacular head-tek-him-is-the-only-way-to-explain-it bit of nonsense last week.

McChrystal, up until last week, was the top US commander in Afghanistan. That is, until President Barack Obama relieved him of the post last Wednesday, when controversial and, frankly, scornful statements he made about the war effort and the Obama White House, and in particular, Vice-President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser James Jones, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and US Special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, surfaced in Rolling Stone magazine. The statements were downright scandalous, what amounted to really the airing of bundles of dirty laundry in public, and not at all remarks befitting a subordinate military leader of his commander-in-chief, the President.

“I welcome debate among my team but I won’t tolerate division,” Obama said, accepting McChrystal’s resignation. He’s right, of course. For that’s exactly what it was. I’m all for frankness and self-expression. (If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t write the kind of column I write each week.) But while I ruminate aloud in this spot each Sunday, there are some opinions I understand to be best kept to myself or for the ears of people close to me. That’s not hard to work out.

What I can’t understand is this: upon granting Rolling Stone the interview, what did McChrystal think? That the comments would not make their way to print? That nobody would read that very public and contemptuous challenge of the president and his team? Was he one of those people so out of touch with reality that he assumed the readership was relegated to a handful of backwater or boondocks types who would never repeat what he’d said? Or did he tire of his job and wanted simply an out?

It’s the same perplexity I felt when our prime minister kept insisting that he had no knowledge of the Manatt situation. Even when it was obvious to everybody else, with each day that passed and every nugget of information that was released piecemeal, that that avowal was nothing but a bald-faced lie. Did he not understand that there are no secrets in the world in which we now live? Did he not get the concept of, like, Facebook? Similarly, I’m confused about people who still become embroiled in sex scandals. How does this still happen in 2010? With the preponderance of camera phones and whatnot?

The latest in a long list of sports stars to be found with his pants around his ankles, so to speak, is football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor. Taylor, 51 years old, was charged last week with allegedly paying a 16-year-old girl $300 for sex. He also racked up a bunch of other charges including rape, criminal sexual act, sexual abuse, patronising a prostitute, and endangering the welfare of a child. How has he not received the memo that as a celebrity sports figure, there is no need to pay for it? To be fair, though, he’s reportedly maintained that he engaged in self-love, ahem, a masturbatory act — not intercourse — with what he thought was a 19-year-old girl.

OMG, really? That’s the defence?

First, ignorance of your sex partner’s age is no excuse; at 51, this should not be news. Second, self-love doesn’t require somebody else present in the room. And third: Lawrence, you’re not the first celebrity, certainly not the first black sports celebrity, to be caught out there in a sex scandal. Hello: Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson. Need we go on? Does nobody learn from the mistakes of others anymore? Or is it hubris — ego — that allows people to imagine that they are exempt from falling to the humiliating depths to which others have plummeted before?

Regardless of the outcome of this case, a Hall of Famer’s reputation and what essentially was a stellar career will have been tarnished. Same thing with General McChrystal. Their falls from grace will unfortunately be their legacy. Still, the lesson to be learnt here is the banality of pride. We’ve always acknowledged that pride cometh before a fall.

But, frighteningly, anyone can be susceptible. Which is why this quote from Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison will be my talisman, Lord willing, from here on out: “The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony… or as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, consciousness.”