L'affaire Petreaus has been much in the news. Although I haven't seen everything printed or posted about this, what I have seen has been surprisingly mild. With a few exceptions, I have seen little crowing either from the point of view of moral superiority or from the point of view of political schadenfreude. One can only hope that this is not an anomaly but a small sign of a trend.
The whole sad situation has reminded me of two lines that are both apposite and helpful to reflect on. The first is the old and well-known, "There but for the grace of God go I." This is meant to be not just a statement of gratitude, and certainly not just a way to express relief, but an acknowledgement of the disagreeable truth that we are all susceptible to temptation, that at one time or another we all fail, we all fall. Reminders of this are important because our natural tendency is to avoid such thoughts. While that great philosopher Johnny Mercer was right, we should "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," it is also true that temptation is sneaky and seldom if ever ugly and obnoxious. It's helpful to be reminded of our inherent vulnerability.
But it was another line that struck me as even more appropriate, a line from the Eagles' song "A New York Minute":
If you find somebody in this world to love
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door
In my experience, what is also true of that wolf, is it is always wearing a mask.
ReplyDeleteA mask or an apron... this was the oddest example of bi-partisan kid glove rationalization of Petreaus:
ReplyDelete"You see the medals he has, you see the stars. One day he takes all of that off. He's in a plain blue suit. ... There's no entourage. There's no driver. He gives an order at the CIA, there's discussion, there's flak ... and then he goes home to wash dishes," U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein said on NBC' "Meet the Press."