SETTING A TERM TO DISGRACE

Somewhere in a basement box rests a editorial cartoon, circa 1973, of Watergate snitch John Dean wearing a button declaring, “Nixon’s the One!” By the next year, Nixon had resigned. A month later, Ford pardoned Nixon. For years to come, Ford was hung out to dry.

Now in his death, we adulate Ford’s decision as self-sacrificial and courageously conciliatory. Time has vindicated him, and well it should. He intrepidly led us to the beginning of reconciliation.

Regardless, America is still not kind to the spat-upon. We have lived through the scandalizing of Nixon, philandering Clinton, Foley, Haggard, e t al. Deservedly or nor, their foibles have fed America’s insatiable appetite for schadenfreude, the delight in someone else’s troubles.

If you are wise, you ignore it. If you are gutsy, you denounce it. But chances are that you publicly eschew it, but privately relish each tawdry detail. If you are its object, you die a thousand deaths only to be resurrected to someone else’s salacious jokes. A society that luxuriates in scandal must always have a bogeyman to slake its blood lust and to reassure itself that real evil lurks menacingly "out there" not "in here." It is the stuff of beasts victoriously circling their prey before moving in for the kill.

Let us not trivialize the consequences of wrongdoing and moral corruption. Avarice, unbridled ambition, and lust are acts of betrayal that deserve accountability and recompense. But, the punishment that the subjects of our derision withstand also should not be trivialized. We have contrived an elaborate ritual of humiliation to destroy any last pretenses of dignity to which a public wrongdoer might cling:
The social analysis of wrongdoer and wrongdoing become sanctimonious debate on Nightline and Face the Nation. Then the salacious expose on O’Reilly to his self-righteous mob. The ritual is complete, as one becomes the butt of jokes in a Letterman Top Ten and joining a list of pop-culture nouns and adjectives: Anyone over 18 (12?) knows the sexual implications of “a Lewinsky.”

The only chance we have of distinguishing ourselves from beasts is to create a countervailing "rite of reconciliation," a national temperament that is just as zealous in welcoming the penitent as it is to humiliate the sinner. We know too well, what one must do to fall from grace. We have little sense of what one must do to regain honor.

What penance must Foley and Haggard perform to regain public honor? How much time must a shamed Nixon spend being subjected to derision?
Should we not at least ponder the time that should elapse, the quantum of worthy deeds one should perform, the changes in demeanor and attitude one should evince, before he may re-ingratiate himself as a respected member of the community?

This rite of reconciliation, however, is not a media-hyped jailhouse conversion followed by a tell-all book ballyhooed on Oprah that paves the road from sinner to saint. That is just another snack to feed society's insatiable appetite for public spectacle.

No, the real rite of reconciliation demands more from the smirk-faced good-guys in the pews than it does from the sinner. It calls us to account for all the righteous Judeo-Christian virtues we piously affirm each Sabbath, only to betray them each weekday – virtues like forgiveness, tolerance, abhorrence of sin but not sinner, the granting of second chances. Creating a rite of reconciliation means to forge a communal mind-set that demands no more penance from those we have condemned than we would want for ourselves, were we someday to be held accountable for all the lofty values we have preached with our lips but then denied by our deeds.

People who have now fallen from grace, the ones we were too eager to strip of their humanity, deserve a chance, maybe even two, to regain our trust and our respect. Ford pardoned the errant Nixon only to suffer his own derision. Will we ever welcome the once bogeymen so much with our hearts as we do with our tar and feathers?