In Search of a Sense of Place, October 8, 2006

In Search of a Sense of Place
Washington
October 8, 2006

I have decided to write an occasional column on life in Washington. I will write about political life in this world capital, of course, but I will also focus on what is happening at street level. What is the fingertip feel of the city? What is the air like, the light? What creatures dwell here with us humans? What goes on here that goes otherwise unnoticed? What makes this capital and eastern city different from other cities and regions of the US? What do the public buildings and monuments tell us about our country, our history and our future?


I first saw them while I was pedaling south on the bike path that runs along Rock Creek and its companion parkway. I was west of the creek and parkway and a little north of the M Street Bridge. At this point the creek was below me and to the left, in a shallow valley. I noticed a sudden blur of gray. I turned and slowed down. Then another one, distinct this time: a great blue heron swooping just above the creek, flying in the rather ungainly but graceful manner of great blues. I stopped and stared as the bird lumbered around the bend, apparently oblivious to the nearby traffic.

I forgot about it. Then I stopped to do some yoga near the Washington monument a few days later, stretching before the long ride home along the Capital Crescent Trail. I was in the head-down part of a salute to the sun when, upside-down, I saw them again, wheeling in the blue sky above Constitution Avenue at 17th Street. I let myself down so I could watch. One flew off elsewhere, but the other made its leisurely way south past the Washington Monument. What welcome wildness in the middle of the city.

Meanwhile scandal has rocked the nation’s capital and the party in power. Randy Cunningham and Tom DeLay resigned a while ago because of financial improprieties. The war in Iraq is not going well. Around 2,000 people are shot and blown up there a month, including many Americans. All this has made it a bad year for Republicans. Yet the party seemed poised for a comeback a week or so ago. Then Mark Foley resigned after the sexually explicit emails went public.

This, for the moment, appears to be the biggest jolt of the earthquake, the big one that comes after the little ones and finally knocks the trembling house to the ground.

How come so many Americans care more, apparently, about a sex scandal in which no has died, and in which, as far as we can tell, no one has even had sex, than they do about serious financial shenanigans and a miscarried war that kills a lot of people day in and day out?

Perhaps it is because most American do not know much about the innermost workings of government and the calculations of foreign policy. They give their representatives and their president, especially in time of war or crisis, wide latitude to use their judgment and govern. Come election day, no matter what happens, most socio-cultural conservatives will vote for their fellow socio-cultural conservatives, as will socio-cultural liberals. This year, whatever the outcome, will be no exception to this rule. If the Republicans lose the House and Senate, the nation-wide shift in vote totals will be less than ten percentage points, probably less than five. Nonetheless, the Foley scandal is deeply disturbing, even to those people who will vote as they usually do. Why?

Sex, unlike budgeting on a national scale and the conduct of foreign policy, is something that everyone knows about. We all have sex, one way or another. Our understanding of sex directly affects our daily lives. People die in Iraq. Congressmen resign or even go to jail. Direct, tangible effect for most people: None.

But is there anyone alive who has never received unwanted sexual attention? Maybe somebody. From powerful people in superior positions whom we expected to model appropriate behavior? Hopefully more people, but what would we do or have done in such circumstances? The threat to young, vulnerable people is just too creepily imaginable.

When wondering thus about the human condition, especially about the baffling intermixture of public and private malfeasance, it behooves one to consult a higher authority. My higher authority in such matters is usually the Blessed Saint Reinhold of New York.

In The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr writes:

“If selfishness is the destruction of life’s harmony by the self’s attempt to center life around itself, sensuality would seem to be the destruction of harmony within the self, by the self’s undue identification with and devotion to particular impulses and desires within itself. The sins of sensuality, as expressed for instance in sexual license, gluttony, extravagance, drunkenness and abandonment to various forms of physical desire, have always been subject to a sharper and readier social disapproval than the more basic sin of self-love. Very frequently the judge, who condemns the profligate, has achieved the eminence in church or state from which he judges his dissolute brethren, by the force of a selfish ambition which must be judged more grievously sinful than the sins of the culprit. . . . The reason for this aberration is obviously the fact that sensuality is a more apparent and discernible form of anarchy than selfishness.”
- Chapter 8, Section III

People are pressured to do things all the time. We are called upon to donate money to various causes, to make purchases, to get yet another credit card, to buy that credit card protection plan. Our superiors order us to work on projects we think ill-advised and onerous. Sometimes we just say no. Sometimes we cough up the money or knuckle under and do the work. Yet the self remains intact and life goes on. Life involves compromises and mistakes. No one is perfect. We can cancel the credit card, stop payment on the check, avoid that store next time, resign.

Sexual predation, on the other hand, threatens the very core of oneself and thereby our social contact with one another. We live in an aggressively boisterous commercial and political society. The rough and tumble of advertising and marketing, of argument and counter-argument, are just facts of life. When it comes to finding a life partner or a sexual partner, adults are free to play by any set of rules they wish.

Niebuhr continues: “The fact that upon the purely instinctive basis both the self and the other are involved in sexual passion makes it possible for spirit to use the natural stuff of sex for both the assertion of the ego and the flight of the ego into another. The sexual act thus becomes, in human life, a drama in which the domination of one life over the desires of another and the self-abnegation of the same life in favor of another are in bewildering conflict, and also in baffling intermixture. Furthermore these corruptions are complexly interlaced and compounded with a creative discovery of self through its giving of itself to another.”

Hurt feelings are an inevitable part of the quest for love. Yet through conscious and mature sexual relationship, find ourselves, while through unconscious and immature sexaul relationship, we lose ourselves. Inequalities of power make many a relationship problematic. There is consensus in our society, however, and there should be, that children should be sheltered from the worst of this jostling. They are more vulnerable; they do not really have selves yet. People who wield power over children must meet a very high standard.

From here the questions just keep coming: How lasting is the damage? Can an unwelcome encounter while young set a bad pattern of behavior for years to come? What if Mark Foley had hit on young women instead of young men? Would the public reaction be different? While Foley promptly resigned, Gerry Studds, a Democrat, years ago simply said that his relationship with a male page was consensual. Although censured by the House, both sides of the aisle, he was re-elected. Is this fair?

Fair or not, the Republican Party has proclaimed itself the party of personal morality. The Republicans impeached President Clinton for having sex – or something - with an adult. “The judgment you give is the judgment you will get,” as the Galilean carpenter said long ago.

If a higher standard is being applied, it is being applied by the very voters whom the Republicans have assiduously courted, voters who may have less tolerance for this kind of anarchy than they have for anarchy on the streets of Baghdad.