[A-List] Doing the Laundry

[Bill Totten]

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine Notebook (May 2010)

    To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as
the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep
absolutely sober.

    -- Logan Pearsall Smith



The hanging of a public head in shame is by now a familiar American photo
opportunity, but why almost always as a penance imposed on a male erection
for conduct regarded by the Catholic Church as the spiritual equivalent of
a traffic violation? Why no humiliating act of contrition demanded of
President George W Bush for his criminal invasion of Iraq; of Wall Street
banks for looting their clients, their depositors, and the Treasury; of
chemical companies for poisoning the nation's air and water; of hospitals
for the iatrogenic deaths of their patients; of pharmaceutical companies
for the distribution of drugs inducing the diseases they supposedly
prevent? Why no women dragged into the arena of the tabloid press to beg
forgiveness for embracing the pleasures of the flesh with the "riotous
appetite" likened by the victimized King Lear to that of "the fitchew" and
"the soiled horse"? Why no mumblings of atonement for the predatory nature
of capitalism itself, its core values and standard operating procedures no
different from those of the beasts in the field?

I raise the questions as follow-up to the press briefing staged February
19 in Florida by Tiger Woods, who apologized to a television camera and
his mother for having the same sort of trouble with his penis that he
sometimes experiences with his driver - hitting it wide right into a
cocktail waitress, short left into platinum-blonde rough. Apologizing not
only to his mother but also to fans, friends, staff, young students, board
directors, and sponsors, saying to one and all that his behavior had been
"irresponsible and selfish", that he was both "wrong" and "foolish" to
think that somehow he deserved to enjoy "all the temptations" placed
before him as if they were chocolates on a hotel pillow.

But why not taste the fruits of victory? They ask to be appreciated;
they'd made an effort, arranged the flowers and the mirrors, and it would
be both ungenerous and unkind to refuse their hospitality. If not as
"irresponsible and selfish", how else to characterize the behavior of
Julius Caesar and Henry VIII, of Presidents Bill Clinton and John F
Kennedy? Why else do men seek wealth and power if not to seize the love of
women? For as long as historians have been keeping score, the spoils of
war and stock-market killings include the objects of affection plumped on
the cushions in the other hero's tent, wearing feathered hats in Paris,
perched on bar stools in Las Vegas. The wrath of Achilles in Homer's Iliad
springs from Agamemnon's taking from him the trophy of a captive
concubine; Genghis Khan was of the opinion that "the greatest joy a man
can know is to conquer his enemies" and "to clasp their wives and
daughters in his arms". Bear in mind the seventy-two dark-eyed virgins
awaiting martyred warriors in the Mohammedan paradise; examine the lives
of victorious generals and famous poets, of leading statesmen and robust
financiers (King Solomon, Mark Antony, Emperor Yang Ti, Pope Alexander VI,
Suleiman the Magnificent, Louis XV, Lord Byron, J Pierpont Morgan, Jackson
Pollock), and nowhere is it written that they abstained from the enjoyment
of the ladies of the morning, noon, or night.

Similarly the consensus of gentrified opinion in the early days of the
American republic, maybe not in Boston and its Puritan environs but in New
York and Philadelphia and Charleston, where men of quality and fashion
adopted the eighteenth-century social graces sanctioned by their peers in
London and Paris. Gouverneur Morris shared a mistress with Talleyrand;
Benjamin Franklin delighted in the comforting rustle of feminine undress;
both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson granted themselves the
privilege of an occasional indiscretion. Some sort of public apology or
explanation might be demanded for a pecuniary indecency or a criminal
assault but not for dabbling in adultery. Hamilton published the
distinction in his Reynolds pamphlet, denying a charge of fiscal
impropriety brought against him by the husband of a woman with whom he'd
been having an affair. The pamphlet ran to a length of 28,000 words,
Hamilton conceding "an irregular and indelicate amour" in order to refute
the "more heinous charge" that "could alone have extorted from me so
painful an indecorum". Sex was a secondary and subdominant concern, not
the villain of the piece.

So matters remained throughout the nineteenth century and well into the
twentieth. The newspapers damned Commodore Vanderbilt and Big Jim Fisk for
their manipulations of money but not for their dealings with women.
Campaigning for the presidency in the summer of 1884, Grover Cleveland was
confronted with a Buffalo newspaper story naming him as a cad who had
impregnated an innocent woman and then forced her to deliver the child to
an orphanage. Cleveland's political image rested on his reputation as a
righteous man, his moral and his financial probity programmed into the
slogans "Cleveland the Celibate" and "Grover the Good". The churchgoing
friends of the Republican candidate, James G Blaine, sought to bury
Cleveland's campaign under an avalanche of scandal. Crowds appeared in the
streets chanting, "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa?" Cleveland declined to discuss
the subject. Nowhere in the press was it suggested that he repent, and in
November he was elected president of the United States.

Nor was any admission of sin required of presidents in the early and
middle chapters of the twentieth century, among them Woodrow Wilson,
Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and
Lyndon Johnson, known for consorting with women other than their wives.
The redemption narrative doesn't make its appearance in the ballrooms of
wealth and power until Jimmy Carter introduces the evangelical tone into
the 1976 presidential campaign. Sitting for an interview with Playboy,
Carter presented himself as a good Christian who had struggled mightily to
dodge the snares of Satan. "I've looked on a lot of women with lust",
Carter said. "I've committed adultery in my heart many times". But not,
praise Jesus, with any other part of his anatomy.

The historian Susan Wise Bauer attributes the revival of the old Puritan
practice of washing one's dirty laundry in public to the celebrity culture
and the various modes of group therapy, chief among them the television
gossip shows, coming onto the American scene in concert with the 1960s
sexual revolution. Her book, The Art of the Public Grovel (2008 ), traces
the evolution of the standard act of contrition from the secular excuse
offered by Senator Edward Kennedy for having drowned Mary Jo Kopechne in
1969 ("My conduct and conversations during the next several hours, to the
extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all") to the
biblical pleading placed on the altar of repentance by Bill Clinton in
1998 ("I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned").

I don't question Bauer's reading of the record, but she omits the point
about the money. The 1960s opening of Pandora's box loosed entirely too
many freedoms of the spirit threatening to deconstruct the society's sense
of itself as a congregation of Latter-day Saints. To regulate the suddenly
overabundant supply of sexual energy running around half-naked on suburban
lawns, it was classified as a commodity somehow akin to breakfast cereal
or unleaded gasoline. The policy allowed Eros to be borne aloft on the
wings of commerce, powdered and freeze-dried, lemon-scented and
cherry-flavored, floating in cloaks of as many colors as can be crowded
into the supermarkets of desire - as breast enhancement and penile
implant; as sadomasochistic fantasy, hard-line feminist theory, and the
Victoria's Secret catalogue; as travel advertisement and Budweiser TV
spot; as gentleman's club, Versace gown, and the pornographic film
industry, which in 2009 provided 15,622 new releases as compared with 677
supplied by Hollywood.

The glittering invitations to everlasting orgy pour forth at all hours of
the day or night from every orifice of the media (movie and television
screen, newsstand, cosmetic counter, Internet), but as Woods sorrowfully
informed his mother, it's "foolish" and "wrong" to think that they mean
what they say, to mistake the sales pitch for a tourist destination. One
is supposed to look, not touch; to abandon oneself to one's passion not in
a cocktail lounge but in Bloomingdale's, in a BMW showroom, not in the
back seat of the car.

The failure to read the manufacturer's warning on the label is what sets
up the market in salacious scandal and sustains the belief in the
fearlessness of the American free press. Celebrity is a consumer product
manufactured by the media, and the floating exchange rate between sex and
money determines the size of the tabloid headlines, makes possible the
playing of the story on both sides of the transaction, meets the demand
for rising stars and fallen idols. The celebrity in the mud sells as many
papers as the celebrity in the sky, but in neither circumstance is the
celebrity to be confused with a human being. In play for the television
camera in Florida was not the ball-flight of a man's immortal soul but his
missing the fairways groomed to attract a television rating and proud to
bear the weight of Nike golf shoes, Woods joining the long roster of other
brand-name consumer products (among them President Bill Clinton, Woody
Allen, Eliot Spitzer, Jude Law, John Edwards, David Letterman, Alex
Rodriguez, Mark Sanford) forced to respond to customer complaints about
their sexual components - faulty marriage fixtures, upper and lower lip
malfunction, loose steering, torn moral fabric.

The procedure is a form of money laundering, the sending of the banknote
otherwise known as Tiger Woods to a sex-addiction facility in Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, comparable to a crime syndicate's placing bundles of shopworn
fifty-dollar bills on deposit in the Cayman Islands, or Goldman Sachs's
setting up a cross-currency swap for the government of Greece. For the
media the seating of celebrity in the bath brings with it something for
everybody, upmarket prudery and down-market prurience, sermonettes in the
New York Times, clucking and sniggering in the New York Post, everywhere
the joyous dancing around the maypoles of seventy-two-point type. The
chasing after the golden geese (at any given time hundreds of paparazzi in
pursuit of Tiger Woods) relieves the media of the tiresome and
time-consuming chore of having to report on something that might point to
the systematic deconstruction of a public rather than a private good. The
recycling of gossip is easier than the assembling of facts.

But other than the media, who else profits from the proceedings? What is
to be learned from watching one sum of money say, "simply and directly",
to another sum of money, that it's "deeply sorry" for the embarrassment it
may have caused? Whose spirits are uplifted, whose hearts made young and
gay? Conceivably, those of the anonymous faces in the crowd who can say to
themselves, "I'm not rich, I'm not famous, but I'm good", the brief glow
of moral superiority their compensation for a poor and empty life - safe
at last to lust after the girls on the hotel pay-per-view but, happily,
traveling on a budget that doesn't include the temptation of ordering one
or more from room service.

Acknowledge the extent of the social and technological change that over
the past sixty-odd years has reconfigured the relations between the sexes,
and maybe the time has come to cut down on the scolding of both history
and human nature. The women romanced by Woods complained that on his list
of apologies he neglected to give them a producer's credit. It's a wonder
that Woods wasn't asked to apologize to the golf balls he had abandoned in
the hazard of the Pacific Ocean. Take the redemptive therapies to the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth steps, and pretty soon we'll have
more apologizing than can be rinsed and dried in the prime-time laundromat.

We're probably better advised to take instruction from the Pentagon than
from the Gospel. Obliged to preserve the combat strength of America's
military forces for what in March 2003 was looking to be a prolonged
deployment in Iraq, the general staff adopted the practice of issuing
"moral waivers" to prospective recruits exhibiting the blemish of a
criminal arrest record. Since 2006, still finding itself short of
volunteers, the Army has extended the shelter of amazing grace to an ever
larger company of felons.

If the media were to take a similar approach, the country might be served
by a better class of politician. Given the constant croaking of the blogs
that live in hope of catching flies, any politician old enough to know
that he hasn't led a blameless life must also know that sooner or later
the National Enquirer will empty a chamber pot on his head. Which means
that the only people likely to stand for public office will be those as
self-deluded as John Edwards and Sarah Palin.

It's even possible that an issuing of moral waivers might promote women to
the rank of human beings, reconfigure them as subjects instead of objects.
Under the current arrangement they arrive in the arena of the tabloid
press in the manner of the exotic booty dragged behind the chariots of
imperial Rome. No point in their begging ritual pardon for their sins,
because the stain is unredeemable, the futility of liquid cleansers
determined long ago by the fathers of the early Christian church.
Daughters of Eve and therefore of Satan, doomed to go for the ride and
take the fall, in medieval Europe as in Puritan New England and the mouth
of Howard Stern. But if the US Army can overlook an arrest for grand theft
auto on the record of a private first class, surely, as a society, we can
overlook the prior conviction for wrongful gender on the rap sheets of the
women in the room.

_____

Lewis H Lapham is the National Correspondent of Harper's Magazine and the
editor of Lapham's Quarterly.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/0082912

http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
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