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No one seems to have noticed that the most powerful force in American society these days must be the Purity League. It's the only factor which can explain why John Tower is unlikely to become Secretary of Defense.
His credentials are impeccable. He's a Republican from Texas, and so is the president. He once chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee. He's been a paid consultant to major defense contractors. That may be an ethical complication for some of us, perhaps, but it is certainly not significant in Washington, where public servants often retire from government to peddle their connections, and sometimes desire to return to government to improve their connections.
That isn't what bothers people about Tower, though.
Senators keep rushing to the microphones to announce how
horrified they are by Tower's alleged boozing and wenching.
(I know, the preferred term in these decadent times is
womanizing,
but wenching
is a fine old word
employed by Dryden and Byron, while womanizing
sounds like the medical treatment that Christine Jorgensen
received.)
Some have suggested that such episodes are unfitting for a man who leads the nation's military. In actuality, his supposed bad habits should make it easy for him to identify with the sailors and soldiers under his command, because they don't think about much besides boozing and wenching.
If you don't believe me, drive down South Nevada Avenue in Colorado Springs sometime, toward the gates of Fort Carson. Is the street lined with churches, exercise clubs, philosophy parlors and health-food stores? Or is it a row of pawn shops, taverns and the motels that rent rooms by the hour, complete with X-rated fare on the TV set?
You get the idea that the Purity League believes that people who are not in a state of perfect grace have nothing to contribute to society.
I just read that Ray Charles did his most brilliant work
during the years he was addicted to heroin. I'm not a Ray
Charles fan, but I do know that Keith Richards has
confessed that he was a total junkie, living from one fix
to the next, when Exile on Main Street
was recorded,
and that album has more great loud and dirty rock 'n' roll
on it than any dozen recordings by people who could pass
blood tests.
And it isn't just musicians. Do we want to ignore the contributions of William Stewart Halsted to medicine? Sterile operating rooms, thin rubber gloves, residencies for training -- most of what we think of as modern surgery was invented by Halsted at Johns Hopkins from 1890 to 1922. During that entire time, he had a morphine habit.
Should we go without electric lights, phonographs, motion pictures, fluoroscopes, alkaline batteries and dictating machines? Those were among the inventions of Thomas Edison, a man who slept only two hours a night and who gladly endorsed a concoction whose major active ingredient was cocaine.
Who contributed more to the political structure of America? Jimmy Carter, pure in all things large and small? Or Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his daily nip, his jutting Camel and his mistresses?
Who would you prefer on your baseball team? Some clean-living nonentity, or Babe Ruth, whose drinking and skirt-chasing were as legendary as his hitting? Who would you hire as your attorney? Some recent vegetarian law-school grad, or chain-smoking Clarence Darrow?
The problem with the Purity League is not its goals. We would doubtlessly be a better society if people drank less and took their marriage vows more seriously. But we're ending up with standards that aren't relevant to the immediate issue.
Our society now judges people, not by what they do, but by what they don't do. Thus any mediocrity who can pass a urine test somehow becomes superior to a talent who can't, and any man ever known to wink at a waitress is exiled from public life. We'll lose the contributions of a lot of bright people. John Tower may not be one of them, but why can't the Purity League worry about something important, like sleeping with defense contractors, rather than secretaries?
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