When people read magazines and newspapers out loud, my teeth ache. My husband feels likewise, so we rarely torture each other. However, every now and again, we just have to share our sputtering flabbergastedness.
Thus begins my husband’s out-loud reading of an article about Carolina Gov. Mark Stanford — who, you probably know, was caught having an affair.
He gets to a painfully personal, lovely-dovey, embarrassingly private line that I’m sure the article writer has made up. “No,” says my husband. “He really wrote it in an e-mail. Don’t you know his e-mails were published?”
Yes, I know, and frankly I resent it. I resent that even though elected officials get caught lying or cheating or stealing again and again there always are new ones so swollen with power or arrogance or both that they think the rules are different for them.
I resent the idiocy of Sanford believing, in this day and age, his behavior would go undocumented, and I resent his subsequent microphone dancing that turned what should have been a private matter into a peacock- flare screen performance.
I resent that anyone thinks it’s OK to steal and publish private love-letter e-mail, but mostly I’m mad because of how the whole drama affects me.
Yes, me.
Keeping up on community, national, and international events now means that I have to constantly wade through the very personal and frequently very messy emotional lives of elected figures. For heaven’s sake, there are bigger issues to attend to.
If I want to share the emotional lives of strangers, I buy novels. Or, I share real emotional angst daily with my two teenage sons. I also have a husband, and though he’s near great-enough, we have our own private, messy, battles about how he, and I, can be yet better. I have friends and families with dramas unfolding in their lives, and sharing with each other is a gift. These people are my business.
Sanford’s fall, his love life, his distraught emotions are not my business. Nor is his wife’s surely formidable pain. Nor his mistress’, nor his children’s.
I don’t need to watch the governor’s private demise. He’s not the Wicked Witch melting melting melting. He’s not entertainment; he’s a real man. Though even he seems to think his bad-boy behavior warrants too-much-information coverage. What he did lacks self-control and smarts, playing it out for the public lacks dignity and smarts.
He should have saved us all this soap opera.
I want a shift toward dignity. When those supposed-to- be-our-leaders fail, I want them to say so. If that failure is a crime, or in some other way means that they can no longer serve our needs, I want them to let go of their power and walk away toward another, new, hopefully better and eventually healed life. Go away.
If the problem is a tangled web of love and does not affect their jobs, I want them to deal with it respectfully and privately. And quietly.
We all do stupid things. We all falter and fail and fall. Life is dramatic and not always dignified.
I feel bad for this man. I feel bad for both women. I feel bad for all of the children and the staff members and the supporters and friends and family of all of these people.
But Sanford shouldn’t be discussing it all with us. And, aside from any legal issues, we shouldn’t be asking, or camping out in his wife’s driveway, or tracking down his girlfriend. It’s all so sordid. His behavior, yes. And, ours as a public that tolerates such utter lack of boundaries.
The cycle of exposure lacks dignity all the way around. Yes, public figures do need to hold themselves to a higher standard when it comes to making mistakes — even personal ones. Whether or not this is a good thing is a topic for another column. For now, it’s an overobvious fact and to ignore it is naive, or arrogant or just plain lazy.
We should demand our drama fixes come from other sources; we still have novels and soap operas and sitcoms. And because such stories are made up, they aren’t quite so sad, the pain isn’t quite so real, the damage isn’t quite so costly — to everyone. Some dignity, please.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
