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ShareLove, sex, and power are three fairly short words that kept popping up in my mind all this week. I hasten to add that this has not always been the case. It's just that I have been in Washington, DC, for over a month. A citadel of power very much like our own Delhi, the long, embracing shadow of politics and politicians falls on most aspects of life here and hypocrisy is an established way of life.
Reputed American politicians with facades of moral rectitude as solid and imposing as Mount Rushmore have been falling like pins over the past few months -- caught in flagrante as it were, obviously practising what they preached loudly, self-righteously, and vehemently against from their high pulpits.
Take the latest to fall, the rather tortured-looking Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, who recently made a public, rather melodramatic confession about an extramarital affair with his Argentinian paramour. It was straight out of a soppy soap opera, almost like a mea culpa Oprah moment, with teary eyes and confused blabber.
Perhaps it's the domino effect. Sanford is just the latest in a long line of highly placed American politicians increasingly being found guilty of extramarital flings who once cast stones at former president Bill Clinton over his various infidelities and his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Some called for his resignation, others for his impeachment.
Undoubtedly, Bill Clinton must be chuckling quietly in some corner these days. "Power," Henry Kissinger once famously said, is "the ultimate aphrodisiac". And he should know, having served presidents and long supped with the powerful elite of Washington, DC.
It would take up much of this column space just to list the senators and governors and mayors who went on and on about ethics and family values (many of them were Republicans) and then were caught cheating on their wives with interns, staff members, call girls, even other men. Former presidential hopeful John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York state, and senator John Ensign from Nevada (the last scandal before this one) are among those to have been publicly disgraced recently.
Thus far I have only dealt with sex and power. Love still remains to be discussed. Certainly, power goes to the head and to other parts of the body: it normally bypasses the heart. For most of the disgraced American politicians, lust was probably the only overriding emotion propelling them to venture outside their respective cordon sanitaires. Lust and that ultimate aphrodisiac of power, that is.
However, in the case of governor Sanford, Cupid's arrow presumably struck his heart. It was painful to watch the middle-aged politician -- and father of four -- talk about his star-crossed love as if he were a pining teenaged Romeo. Or a tearful child whose favourite toy had been snatched from him. His very incoherence was proof of his sincerity. He referred to his Argentinian lover as his "soul mate".
The governor's love letters -- email exchanges between the two lovebirds -- published in a newspaper have now become a reference point for a discourse on the nature of romantic love -- by ladies who lunch, authors, and newspaper columnists. The epistles, full of passion, honesty, warmth, and underlying vulnerability, as well as guilt about their adulterous relationship, have even initiated a debate about the power of love to drive one insane.
Sanford has probably lost his shot at running for president. In her article in The New Republic, Cristina Nehring writes that Sanford "might, nonetheless, have limited the damage in the style of his colleagues in Washington... had he been willing to disown Maria once he was discovered... piously, proudly, unfeelingly, with not a thought for the projectile at the base of the trash bin." Validation for a 21st century love story.
The writer is a social commentator.
