This Foley scandal has my head spinning. He resigned, signed himself into rehab for alcoholism and now his lawyer admits Foley is gay and claims he was molested as a teen by a clergy member. Let's not forget that this man is 52 years old and that all of his personal demons could have been dealt with long ago through professional help and that his behaviour was enabled by those who knew he had a problem but did nothing. Instead, now that he's been busted, he's dragging out his laundry list of reasons for his predatory behaviour against children after being more than aware of how inappropriate that was through his work as a children's rights advocate in government and, really, as a human being in a society that outlaws the harassment of those over which you have authority.
Another sex scandal. Another political party falling because of it because that is what it takes to outrage Americans of all political stripes in the US. Not illegal wars. Not admissions of secret torture and prisons. Not constant lies from this neocon administration. Not the mismanagement of the country's finances. Not the loss of America's reputation in the world. Not evidence that Condi Rice was warned two months before 9/11 that a plot was in the works. Not the malfunctioning of Diebold voting machines. Not the endless corruption of the party in power.
No. It's scandalous sex, the intimations of it or instant messages from a US congressman abusing his power over children.
Americans have an odd relationship with the topic of sex. While its airwaves and magazine racks are full of every kind of sexual behaviour you can imagine and are in a constant battle with the puritanical attitudes of conservatives who who rather pretend that sex doesn't exist to the point where they think schools should actually ban sex education because it might corrupt the minds of the young who need to understand healthy sexuality, what erupts is a twisted national psyche that cannot come to terms with the role of sexuality in society and prefers to live in a suspended state of horror, shame and giggles. It's taboo and forbidden while at the same time being a topic of voyeur-type interest that many rubberneckers just can't get enough of once somebody drives it off the rails right onto the teevee screen.
It also mirrors, however, the reality of the anxiety in society to discuss very uncomfortable issues that still have major societal impacts like racism and poverty. Instead these issues are poked with little sticks in various ways while the big discussions just are not taking place - still. That's why they keep bobbing to the surface in such dramatic ways, just as hurricane Katrina brought to the fore the plight of the poor and black people of NOLA in 2005 while those topics were quickly filed away again once the public spotlight dimmed.
There is one guarantee involved in that type of denial: whenever behaviours, attitudes and thoughts about uncomfortable issues are suppressed they will always resurface - usually in a destructive way on a personal and/or societal level. Psychiatrist Carl Jung paid particular attention to this phenomenon in his work on the importance of integrating the shadow side of our personalities. But, Jung was not the first to acknowledge the shadow. As St Paul stated: 'ROM 7:19 For what I do is not the good thing that I desire to do; but the evil thing that I desire not to do, is what I constantly do' although he then went on to blame his failings on the 'sin' and 'evil' within him just as this modern American president similarly sees 'evil' as the enemy - not the failings at the core of mankind to practice self-integration which leads to basic compassion and goodness.
That failure to take personal responsibility on a deeper level for the darkness within us and the projection of its remedies on outward fixes - whether by addiction, willful ignorance or in extreme cases the making of war aimed at exorcising such evil is the mark of a society that chooses not to come to grips with its most basic flaws thus externalizing the pain and causing others to suffer. That is probably much of mankind's fundamental flaw: the refusal to heal ourselves.
The events of this week are coincidentally occuring with the release of Bob Woodward's new book State of Denial - a title that is more apropo now than ever. Although his book is about the Bush administration's mishandling of the Iraq war and the denials they have perpetrated and lived in, it also mirrors the denial of people in power who have enabled someone like Mark Foley to abuse his authority to harm the vulnerable he had contact with. More than likely, that connection will not be made in the broader public: that those in charge of protecting the security of all Americans have failed in a massive way (the GWOT) just as they have in the most personal way (the abuse of congressional pages). But they are both examples of the results of the inability and unwillingness to wholly investigate the facts (the WMDs and other claims by Bushco against Saddam and the obvious examples of Foley's improper relationships with pages brought to the attention of the house's Republican leadership in 2005). The reasons in each instance may be different but the underlying flaw is the same: a denial of the uncomfortable truth with the hope that it will never be exposed, causing a virtual and literal explosion once it is resulting in unnecessary suffering.
When we deny reality, we create an environment in which we are ruled by the fear that we are, ironically, so afraid of to begin with.
There may well be some larger discussions of crucial issues related to America's love/hate relationship with sexuality happening right now, but they will soon be replaced by the new scandal of the week and those who have been caused anxiety by this issue once again appearing on the front pages can rest assured that they won't have to talk about it again until next time when the same old tired debate will be hauled out again while failure to address the underlying issues is sure to continue ad nauseam.
And, the broader issue of abused power in society and its effects on its unwitting victims will only extend to getting rid of those who knew about Foley and didn't take action while not one person has yet been held responsible or accountable for the tens of thousands of lives lost in the Iraq war because, although it's uncomfortable to talk about sex, it's almost unconscionable for some to even imagine the magnitude of that reality - a shadow side of America that has already caused so much destruction that one wonders exactly what it will take to fully integrate those lessons. After all, look what it took for the Germans to understand how their patriarchal, repressive society had so immeasurably damaged all of them and the millions of victims killed in concentration camps due to a national psyche perperated by the strict 'father knows best' cultural attitudes of the time.
We all ignore our shadows at our own and others peril and we need to be more than concerned when the sexual exploitation of teenaged pages takes on a larger impact on the consciousness of Americans than the tortured and mutilated bodies found every day on the streets of Baghdad in a war that their government ought to be held fully responsible for.
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