Pandora’s News

This has been quite a year - for philandering.  All of this sordid business ought to have remained personal.  There have been political scandal sheets and prurient pamphlets throughout history. In the United States these reach back to Jefferson, through Jackson, unto Lincoln and beyond.

With the understanding that private matters are private, the responsible parties and those in authority politely overlooked such allegations, even if accompanied by outright proof. Only recently has such reportage been elevated into the atmosphere of legitimate news.

With a voracious appetite for the lascivious and a wider market thereby created for it, modern media opened a Pandora’s Box which has seriously eroded the public square’s foundations.

At least as far back as the Regency era it was reasonable to assume that almost anyone within the upper classes, socially and politically, could very well be one’s own literal cousin (or perhaps closer) by blood, though less frequently by marriage. Contrary to popular belief, this was not restricted to royalty but often encompassed both the aristocracy and commoners who had become notable through deed or talent. One keen example is Lord Nelson and his much maligned Lady Hamilton. Although lampooned by the aforementioned scandal sheets, Sir William Hamilton had no misapprehensions as to the true father of his child by Emma. Neither had he any qualms, it seems.

And why should he? The septuagenarian and his much younger wife lived in agreeable circumstances in a home shared with the national hero, whom Sir William greatly admired. It provided William with a child he never expected to have, and historians agree that this situation was congenial for all concerned.  Back then if a man’s wife found herself pregnant and her husband recognized the child as his own, it was no one else’s affair. Literally. 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.  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. Then, it would have been.

Today it is not. In fact, the entire subject never is 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 women.

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 exeptions not the rule.

Must weakness of the flesh defeat every other kind of strength? Kennedy had many weaknesses yet for all his detriments one would prefer a president to decide the outcome of a missile crisis rather than a Marilyn Monroe.

An elected official sexual orientation really 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.

Alas, things seem to be getting worse. The people grow ever more salacious. Who is enlightened by this “news”?  Does it enhance anyone’s lives at all?  No. These revelations are acts of gross destruction which greatly damage, if not ruin lives, many of them blameless.  This is not politics. This is not morality. This is fodder for the coliseum mob.