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Foleyana

October 06, 2006

Some liberals and progressives are decrying the attention being paid to the travails of one Mark Foley, Republican of Florida. It's distracting us, they say, from more important stuff, like the war on Iraq and the erosion of civil liberties at home. Maybe I'm just another low-life trying to justify my own pleasures -- it's true, I love watching worms squirm as much as anybody, and the current scandal beats any reality TV show that's come down the pike in recent years -- but I do believe that the current scandal is important stuff.

The biggest deal isn't that Mark Foley was putting the make on teenage pages. As with Watergate, the bigger deal is the cover-up. And the biggest deal of all is that this is no aberration: it's business as usual for the Republican House leadership and the current Republican administration, those same dudes who are so into suppressing dissent, diversity, and scientific research in the name of "traditional family values."

As the story was breaking, Cenk Uygur had a wonderfully, effectively polemical report in the Huffington Post: "Putting Party Before Predators." He wrote:

Is there anything these Republicans won't cover up? Duke Cunningham took millions of dollars in bribes. . . .

Bob Ney took gifts and favors from Jack Abramoff.

He has confessed and is about to go to prison. How many ethics investigations? Zero. None. Not one.

Then there is Hastert's shady land deal. Bill Frist's insider trading. Tom DeLay's money laundering. The list goes on and on. Every one of them had their ass covered by the rest of their Republican colleagues, crooks, whatever you want to call them.

Here's where the much-maligned and -misunderstood feminist principle "the personal is political" comes into play. Where this much shit's going down, it's never just a personal issue. It's a pattern, and patterns are political. They're built into a system and underwritten by a worldview, tacit or explicit. Contrary to what the right-wing moralists are saying, it's not tolerance and diversity that inspire this kind of crap; it's repression and hypocrisy. And repression is what the alliance between the Republican Party and the religious right is all about. Repression abroad, repression at home, repression in the heart of a cowardly congressman.

The key issue isn't that Foley was sending "inappropriate" e-mails to House pages of the male persuasion; it's that he was doing it while posing as a defender of those so-called "traditional values." And while we're at it, does the attempt of Matt Sludge et al. to blame the pages ring any bells? Damn right: all those women and girls who "asked for it." Some progressives, Katha Pollitt among them, are making too much of the fact that the pages, at 16 and 17, were over the age of consent; ergo Foley wasn't a child molester. He doesn't have to be. Foley was a congressman in his fifties. The pages were teenage employees. The issue is abuse of power. The issue is also compulsive indiscretion. While the administration is stifling civil liberties in the name of homeland security, this guy who as a congressman presumably has top-secret clearance is blathering blandishments in a medium that leaves a trail in cyberspace. Would any sensible terrorist cell want him on their team?

The privileged white guys have embraced an intriguing form of identity politics: because they're privileged white guys, nothing is ever their fault. (No wonder the privileged white guy Democrats and the privileged white guy journalists want to make this look like just another right-wing sex scandal.)

Repression is what the Bushya administration is selling across the board: repression of dissent at home and abroad, repression of anything they can't control. Trouble is, at best it's a short-term solution, and even in the short term it doesn't work very well. Joe McCarthy was a raving drunk. J. Edgar Hoover was a raving gods-know-what. Repression and licentiousness coexist so often in the same person that there has to be a psychological or spiritual law to account for it. On the societal level -- the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution didn't come out of nowhere. Neither did all the liberation movements that the U.S. of A. has been so busy suppressing all these decades. Step on a balloon very gently and it'll bulge at both ends. Step on it hard and it'll blow up.

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