The current Congressional-page sex scandal, and the popular reactions to it, remind me of Tippi Hedren’s climactic tirade in Marnie: “I certainly am decent. Of course I’m a cheat, and a liar and a thief, but I am decent.”
Like Hedren’s character, the right-wing sleaze machine’s goons and power-whores had convinced a large number of people, including themselves, that the only standard of decency was adherence to a draconian standard of sexual discipline. With that in place, all other sins, high crimes and misdemeanors were all fine-n’-dandy, from simple lying and graft to murder, torture, the launching of a bloody, needless war and the trashing of the Constitution.
As “Shamanic” writes at Shakespeare’s Sister, conservative voters “have narrowed the categories of actual [moral] failure to just one: sexual impropriety. You can lie to them about budgets, wars, murder, mayhem, and any other thing and they will find it in themselves to forgive you on election day; but if you lie to them about sex, especially if you’re gay, your fate is sealed. There is no redemption to sexual impropriety.
“This narrowing of sin to just one thing is not an advantage for conservativism. It allows all manner of sin and shenanigan to be ignored. It is a willful moral blindness that gives the bulk of believers cover. They can say ‘I am not an adulterer. I am not a pedophile. I do not buy pornography. I am good.’ This is such a limited view of goodness that it is merely a form of vanity, nothing more.”
Thus, it’s only natural that six years of political, social, economic, and ethical de-evolution, greeted with gleeful smirks and exhortive shouts from the right’s official media/religious cheerleaders, would finally reach the boiling point of public awareness with the discovery that one Congressman had been hitting on boys, and that his higher-ups had covered up for him.
So now we get Time discussing “The End of a Revolution:” “Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left.”
Time still won’t say that power always was the neocons’ only idea.
To this gang, ethics always was a slogan and nothing more. Morality was simply a ruse for engendering a passive-aggressively obedient electorate. Family values, personal responsibility, small government, “protecting marriage,” and, yes, even homeland security–all were sham cover stories for the gang’s real agenda, furthering the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
