Every time it's the same story.
He failed. He screwed up. He fell. He let down his wife, his children, his constituents, his god. He continues to struggle with it, and he's praying for the strength to move beyond it and return to his life. He apologizes profusely to everyone who has been hurt by his behavior. He's only human, flesh and blood, born to make mistakes.
And she forgives him. It's been hard on her and the kids, and they too have been struggling to deal with this. But she believes in the sanctity of marriage, and she's willing to accept him back and work through this with him, for the sake of the children. She asks the press to give them privacy in this difficult time.
It's one of the worst ways in which one person can hurt another. But it's so common that the culture has evolved a ritual for atoning for it, one which plays out in essentially the same way in the media every single time it happens. There are usually tears in their eyes, pain on their faces. The pain and tears are real, but the scripted artificiality of the ritual makes them seem farcical.
It would be so refreshing if just one of them, for a change, would break from the script and tell the world the full story, the real story, about the pain and passion and confusion that he is really experiencing.
Like Dagny Taggart, announcing to the world her affair with Hank Rearden, and revealing that his cooperation with the oppressive government was merely the result of blackmail over it.
But the world needs the ritual. The fabric of society is built on the fundamental unit of the family, and the ritual preserves the illusion that the family is a sufficiently strong base. As long as the morality play repeats often enough on the world stage, we proles will be able to see that even the paragons of virtue who rule them sometimes fall, and they still work to preserve their marriages, and so should we. It keeps us docile and outwardly content. It prevents us from wondering why the fabric of society needs such frequent repair, and if it is really reasonable for it to be cut from such flimsy material.
But it's not us, the words of the ritual reassure us. It's something from the outside. It's the devil. It's the sin. It's not something we do, it's something that happens to us. We fall into it. We struggle with it. We fight battles with it to preserve the integrity of our souls. It's not a choice, it's an epic showdown with the Other. It makes it easier to preserve the heroism of the Glorious Leaders, fighting for their own marriages just as they fight for the sanctity of all of ours. It makes it easier to project the sin onto the enemies of the State—those gays, those liberals, those sluts, who have no shame and would tear asunder the gauzy social fabric that veils our true souls.
As the current drama plays out more or less predictably, though, the public is offered a rare look into the reality that lies behind the ritual. And that story, from the few chapters of a greater work that we are shown, just doesn't fit the narrative it is meant to. It's not a story of a person falling and rutting furtively in the gutter. It's a story of two people wishing to rise together above it all, but finding it impossible. As with all good stories and all real stories, it's complicated.
Because love isn't clean. It doesn't organize itself for our convenience into neat little social breeding units. It's terribly messy. The epic of love covers all the scope of human history and is full of forbidden affairs, impossible choices, unrequited wishes, unfulfilled fantasies, lovers who should never have become life partners, life partners who would be better platonic, friends who might as well be lovers, temptation, surrender, guilt, loss, regret, anger, compersion, jealousy, and sometimes even happiness. The scope of it is too immense to be contained in the one syllable that most of society imagines can express it. Even the more specialized vocabulary of connoisseurs—eros, agape, philia, NRE, limerence, ORE, pragma, storge—is more often than not inadequate. It often comes out of nowhere—in Sanford's words, like a "lightening strike"—at unexpected times, involving unexpected people, and generally makes itself highly inconvenient. The Greeks were right in imagining it as a blind youth with a bow, firing haphazardly into crowds and laughing maniacally at the chaos that results.
Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote:
Off into the world we go,
Planning futures, shaping years.
Love bursts in and suddenly
All our wisdom disappears
Love makes fools of everyone;
All the rules we make are broken.
Yes, love, love changes everyone—
live or perish in its flame.
Love will never, never let you be the same.
Yet we persist in trying to mold our most important life plans around something that simply cannot be planned or controlled. We try to deny the undeniable, resist the irresistible, all in the name of a social order that has more to do with ownership of property and of women than with the actual nature of humanity, and again and again people get hurt and humbled by it. Why can't we accept that love is real, that A is A, no matter what, even if the A that it is is something other than the A we would like it to be, and that acceptance of the facts of reality is the only way to attain control over it and to make plans within it? Why can't we recognize that like nature, love, to be commanded, must be obeyed?
In the mythology of Jacqueline Carey's Terre d'Ange, the only commandment Blessed Elua gave to his people was "Love as thou wilt." And a key theme of Carey's work is that this is no simple statement of license handed down by a weak love god, but a challenging percept that requires all our courage to obey fully. Because love demands much of us. It asks that we put aside fears, doubts, and preconceptions. It calls upon us to rise above our situations to meet it, and in so doing become better people.
The consequences of violating Elua's precept are explored in Kushiel's Justice, in which Prince Imriel agrees to marry the Princess Dorelei mab Necthana for political reasons, despite his love for Sidonie de la Courcel, the Dauphine, which would cause political chaos if consummated. But his attraction to Sidonie cannot simply disappear, and that unfulfilled attraction makes him vulnerable to a witch's curse that controls him. The theme is similar, in fact, to the blackmail of Hank Rearden in Rand's Atlas Shrugged mentioned above. Denial and shame make you vulnerable to control, while only by accepting love and taking pride in it no matter who questions it can you find the freedom to choose your own path.
Consider that the press evidently had Sanford's e-mails proving the existence of an affair long before his disappearance last weekend. They chose to hold the e-mails until they could break the story in a dramatic way. But what if they had instead used them to blackmail Sanford? What would it mean for the people of South Carolina if an outside party had that kind of control over him? And how many other public figures are engaged in similar affairs? How many of them might be equally vulnerable to blackmail? When the issue is framed in those terms, doesn't it almost seem like our insistence on the use of guilt and deceit to preserve an artificial social framework creates a real national security risk?
More and more ordinary people, no longer able to ignore the reality of love and the demands of Elua's precept, are questioning that framework. They are loving as they will and choosing paths through life that acknowledge their loves, and as a result concepts like same-sex relationships, transgenderism, polyamory, BDSM, sex work, swinging, platonic relationships, and casual hookups have come almost into the mainstream of cultural discourse, and probably there are even more diverse life paths being explored by people which do not as yet have names.
But the culturally conservative political and cultural elite continue to lag behind the values of the broader culture. Rather than acknowledging the complexity of love and their own paths through life and opening an honest discussion of it in the media, they simply follow the scripted rituals and hope that love will conform itself into the paths that have been chosen for them. And until one of them stands up and refuses to mouth along with the ritual, the pain will continue—for themselves, for their families, for all the people who look to them for moral leadership.