Sex Scandal Lives On

To paraphrase F Scott Fitzgerald: The Americans are different than you and me. While I am bemoaning the passing of the good old ‘sex scandal’ tradition here they are in the old US of A still steaming along merrily.
As recently as 2003 the then Governor of Kentucky, the ‘popular for a while’ Paul E. Patton was caught playing footsies with an honest to goodness female. None of this backdoor stuff for him!
While there was some suggestion, never proved, of using his influence to favour his nursing home owner sex kitten, his real crime was getting caught doing the naughty.
I’ll admit Mrs Patton might have had good reason to be pissed off, but the whole voting community of Kentucky? Give me a break, that takes a real leap of double standards.
Are we to believe that this esteemed region of the United States is absolutely beyond reproach in matters sexual?
In a previous carteleblog I suggested that we grown ups were past that level of thinking, but a little bit of a dig about reveals it’s still alive and well in some parts.
Ryan’s ex-wife, "Boston Public" and "Star Trek: Voyager" actress Jeri Ryan, 36, alleged that during their eight-year marriage, Mr. Ryan took her to sex clubs in New York, New Orleans and Paris.
Jeri alleged that she refused Ryan's requests for public sex during the excursions, which included a trip to a New York club "with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling."
While Ryan, a former Goldman Sachs executive, confirmed the trips with the actress, he described them simply as "romantic getaways," denying her claims that he sought public sex.Who knows the truth, and frankly, who cares? Surely that is between the adults involved. As Ryan pointed out, however, it is difficult to argue serious issues when you are being bombarded for information of a sordid personal life.
The real danger, as politicians elsewhere well know, of shoveling this kind of dirt, is that it might come back to haunt you. At the very least it gives some kind of authority to what is essentially irrelevant to the public good.
Besides making all politicians more vulnerable to banal scandal it generates a dangerous ‘tit for tat’ process. Dangerous, given that elected officials tend to mirror the society they represent and few out there are above reproach.
Whether it is a result of popular film and TV culture, the more rabid ‘Christianity’ of the country, Clinton’s loose fly buttons or some other phenomenon, the good old sex scandal is still alive and well. More power to the simple things in life.