May 24, 2011
Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger
The child’s actual father was no secret in most circles. Yet Lord Nelson still attended and addressed the House of Lords and was later famously called upon to defeat Napoleon at Trafalgar. Would England have been better served had he been politically ostracized and permanently outcast?
Returning to our own time (or very nearly) is Gore Vidal’s excellent screenplay for The Best Man. The drama is set during a fictional 1960s presidential primary convention. (In those days the outcome at such events was not a foregone conclusion.)
Upon learning that a candidate is poised to win the nomination, his chief rival chides a kingmaker ex-president that he has evidence his competitor has been unfaithful to his wife. The elder’s response? “I couldn”t care less….A lot of men need a lot of women, and there are worse faults, let me tell you.” And the matter was considered closed. Fifty years ago, it would have been.
Today it is not. In fact, the entire subject never is quite closed. Apparently it is everyone’s business to not only comment, but to make sport and profit off what should be delegated to the personal realm. As long as there are men, there will be more women and endless scandal.
As in everything, there are exceptions. Relations with young political staffers can hardly be consensual and are close to pedophilic. An official who wanders off to Argentina in the middle of a session is less a case of sexual straying than someone with a serious mental impairment. But these are the minority of such episodes.
Must weakness of the flesh defeat every other kind of strength? Kennedy was a very failed man, but he often made good policy. For all his detriments, one would prefer a president to decide the outcome of a missile crisis rather than a Marilyn Monroe.
Whether an elected official is homosexual, hyper-heterosexual, or asexual, none of it matters in wider policy except as it can be used as blackmail. If such consenting acts were not so celebrated and aggrandized by responsible-media-cum-tabloid-television, they could not be used with such ease.
This is largely the result of a general fusion between actual news and amateurish behavioral studies which permeates an entire industry. Political policy is news; politicians” personal peccadilloes are not. The sooner this is realized, respected, and remembered, the better off the country’s citizens will be.
Alas, things seem to be getting worse rather than better. The people of the once-republic grow ever more salacious. In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s case, there is a man who was not even a politician any longer”just a man. A private citizen. With this, even the thinnest veil of the “need to know” is done away.
Who profits by this “news”? The former officeholder’s wife? His children? His mistress? The innocent child, who apparently has lived his entire life believing another man was his father? Does it enhance anyone’s lives at all?
No. This “revelation” was an act of gross destruction which has greatly damaged, if not ruined, a number of lives, many of them blameless.
This is not politics. This is not morality. This is animalism writ large for the coliseum mob.
