Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Rudy Guliani. Three men: one liberal, one moderate, one conservative. All deeply embroiled in politics and society, in one way or many. And all three being criticized -- expecially by more conservative media -- in a sick, sad way by people whose hypocrisy knows no bounds.
We're a nosy bunch, the human race. We like to gossip, and we enjoy celebrity, especially in America. Our wanton desire for the Beautiful People leads us to elevate public figures of any sort as role models and shining examples. They're supposed to be our best, so perfect.
Puh-lease. Celebrity is simply a human condition, like poverty or wealth. It's a product of hard work, determination, placement and stature, and pure, sweet luck. Celebrities are no more immune to bad behavior and judgement than straights are immune to AIDS or minorities immune to racism. Just because you've been skilled and lucky so far doesn't mean that one or both can't fail you.
But, you say, adultry? Cheating on your spouse? Having sinful, dirty, immoral relations with THAT woman? Even, simply, having sex outside of marriage? Yes, I say: Adultry, the worst of the worst. A cruel act at the least, horrible mistake at the very best. And, yes, sex outside of marriage. Perhaps your moral beliefs do not allow for sex outside of marriage -- I suggest you simply not have any. Others may choose differently. I tend to believe that we are innately sexual creatures, by biology and by psychology, with a healthy helping of sociology. Our art, our poetry, even our music, are innately, at times, sexual. Some of the most dramatic books and plays of our time, the biggest stories in our history, revolve around this very deed that we both despise and desire -- mental and physical adultry. Nathanial Hawthorne, Shakespeare, John Updike, Toni Morrison. They're not telling stories about another society, another people. They're telling stories about us.
And the statistics support their fictional points of view. For the first time in history, the US census reported that the majority of US households with children were headed by only one parent. Divorced couples are more common than married couples, and the average lifespan of a marriage has fallen every year since 1994. Statistics vary wildly on adultry -- after all, who would consistantly tell the truth when being asked that question? -- but few dip below 20-30%. Even if it's only a quarter of the sample or so, we have more than enough roughshod celebrities to make a good sample-size.
But let's think about that rough estimate percentage a little more. If a quarter of all people cheat at least once in their lifetime, odds are you know someone that has committed adultry. But you'll likely never know that. Would you even care to? Perhaps the librarian who shelves the science fiction once had a drunken one night stand at her best friend's wedding. Maybe the virginal babysitter shacked up with a frat boy on a weekend in Aspen. Suppose your wife once, when you were strapped for cash and could barely afford formula, gave in to a lecherous boss who gave her a raise in exchange for certain, 'favors,' but threatened to fire her if she refused. People do bad things, make mistakes, give in to temptation. But do you really have any business knowing their every foible? And especially so their every sexual mistake? Do you want people to know those sorts of things about you?
It simply seems ridiculous to me that we'd hold this particular group of men -- or any group of human beings, no matter what social class or agenda, with a few particular exceptions* -- to a higher standard than that of the whole. If the are employed by our establishment, our government, then we can expect them to act in an appropriate manner during the visible hours of their working day, but really, truly, we should ask no more than that. They already work under the bright, hot lights of public scrutiny with practically every word and deed recorded for posterity (one would note that the media was not without plenty of footage of Monica and Bill together. one would think that they saw one another daily from the number of photos, but even Starr's report admitted that they met probably fewer than 30 times, only a handful of them privately. it is simply that the President is constantly surveilled, his actions recorded every moment of the day. i challange anyone to be photographed 24x7 and not come up with something incriminating.).
*I can understand levelling a certain moral high bar for officials of religious or ethical sects. One must, in some sense, practice what they preach. What does perplex me, however, is the oft-forgotten notion of forgiveness. What other organizations choose to do, and what certain circumstances require, is understandable, but it does tickle me somewhat to see moral leaders being cast down from their Ivory Towers for personal indescretions. Forgiveness comes easily, but the forgetting -- that's pretty permanent. I find it a shame that they can't learn something from the fallen angels, but that is not the way of it.
And that, pretty much, is the point. Even the righteous have fallen ones, can we expect better from John Q. Public, the world at large? If Jerry Fallwell can't control his Johnson at the sight of ankle-length Laura Ashley and hairpins, why should the presidential penis be any less twitchy over a nubile twenty-something's saucy thong display?
And I'm even willing to go so far as to suggest that fame and fortune (or public office) not only do not preclude "bad" moral behavior, but in fact, probably encourage it. Our celebrities are glamourous, and many many people equate glamour with sex appeal, power with prowess. Even in purely professional situations, we gravitate towards representitives who are attractive. Much ado was made of Clinton's boyish handsomeness, Jackson's mature elegance, Guliani's kindly smile. We like them sexy, but not sexual. And some of us take it too far.
People in power have the ability to attract other people. Some call it charisma, some call it charm. To succeed the way our public figures do, you have to have a healthy dose of it (or something even more interesting). You attract people, like a moth to a candle. They love you, they want you. And that, perhaps, is the simplest factor of all -- people in power have more opportunity. The moral among us say that we must resist temptation. I know I do, daily. I resist the temptation to yell at my boyfriend when he comes home late. I resist the temptation to strangle the guy with the really annoying cel phone that he brings to meetings. I resist the temptation to have another slice of cheesecake. And, yes, occasionally I've had to resist the temptation to go home with someone I shouldn't. But that's not a devil that appeals to me every day. I don't have handsome men leaving me flowers or swooping in to carry my groceries. I don't have nubile young women offering me their phone numbers, or sneaking into my quarters just to say a bashful hello and ask for a kiss with stars in their eyes and heat in their... uh... you get the picture.
I'm sure if I had to stare down the barrel of people throwing themselves at me daily, I'd have an entirely different grasp of what self-control is, what morality really means. I suppose if I had their life -- the stress, the pressure, the constant feelings of being watched, judged -- I might see some sort of attractiveness in something so basic, so human, so reckless. I might see some escape in the normality of it, the feeling of having something finally completely to myself.
Fact of the matter is, I can't say at all what mistakes I would make, what any of us would make. We punish people for their mistakes, when they violate certain rules we have established. The penal codes, the Constitution. The only law that even touches people's personal behavior is that which deals in divorce, a civil matter for a civil court. A court which, I might add, has private proceedings.
Even if we were to ignore the logical imperative of asking not of your neighbor what you cannot possibly expect from yourself, what right does the public have to incriminate someone for an action that is neither criminally illegal nor civilly prosecuted? (Guliani gets a bit of a smudge here, as his divorce, it seems, is currently on the docket.) There is no law of the land against adultry, against sex outside of wedlock. (In this, I ignore the mostly non-prosecuted state laws against all sorts of sexual 'deviancy', like sodomy or sex outside of procreative purposes.) There is no proviso on the presidency -- on any job that I know of -- stating that the employee must be faithful in his marriage. It is a violation of all sorts of equal rights acts for my employer to ask if I am married at all, much less for them to pry into the state of my marriage or any other personal matters.
Why, for gods' sake, are these people in the public employ afforded such little of that respect? I would shudder to think what the world would be like if we were all scrutinized so carefully about our private deeds. We would exist in a world of Orwellian observation, with every person acting out the part of the suspicious boyfriend or clingy wife. I'm certain that what we would find would confirm our deepest fears -- we're all like Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Rudy Guliani. We all have our skeletons -- what good does it do to fling the doors wide open and revisit our culture's unfortunate hedonism?
In the event that we cannot control our insatiable curiousity about the private lives of our most public figures, I at least hope that we can reach some sort of rational response to the humanity we find there. If not, I imagine we will find that we place our brightest hopes on the shoulders of those from a limited pool of applicants, and so stunt our growth by shutting out the best and the brightest simply because they are, in fact, human enough to make visible mistakes. What a pity.
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