A few years back when Hoopi Goldberg was telling whoppers about lynchings in Chicago, she kept saying she “remembered” reading about them in the news when she was a kid. Five minutes of research revealed that it was an impossibility. Not only were lynchings rare in American history, none occurred in her childhood. Presumably someone got to her and told her to stop it because she has not talked about it since.

Bill Clinton suffered the same memory problem with church burnings. Confusing Hollywood’s version of reality with his own, he claimed to remember black church burnings in his youth. In one of life’s ironies, no churches of any color were torched in his youth. There had been a bunch of church arsons at the time he made the claim and the press tried to make it into a race thing, but it turned out that many, even most, of the churches were white, not black.

Anyway, Denzel Washington is recalling memories that never occurred. The locals would have fainted if anyone used such language. Unless he and his old lady were dressed as pimps for a role, no one was mistaking him for anyone other than the star of the most popular show in town at the time. St. Elsewhere was a huge hit and based in Boston. The stars of that show could have robbed banks in the city and no one would have thought ill of them.

Everyone is tired of famous clowns and jugglers pissing and moaning about how tough they had it. In this age, no one has it that tough, unless they did something incredibly stupid like commit a crime. Denzel Washington was raised by prosperous, middle-class parents. He went to private schools as a kid. Maybe he encountered a bad word here and there, but the guy has otherwise lived a charmed life. Instead of pissing and moaning, he should be thanking white people.