Mark Sanford

Every now and them something happens that exposes cultural fractures we don’t even suspect exist.

In 1989, Marc Lépine opened fire on female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. This was the first of the mass student shootings, years before Columbine and Virginia Tech. His suicide letter claimed his life had been ruined by feminists.

Men were able to distance themselves from his actions by suggesting Lépine, in fact, was not a typical man. Instead, psychologists reassured them Lépine was a disturbed Catholic, or the son of a foreigner who had left him to be raised by his mother, or an abused a child who had failed at previous attempts to learn engineering.

Women could not ignore the 28 dead or injured young women. No matter how rational the psychologists’ explanations, they were frightened for themselves and their daughters.

When couples, even those married for decades, responded differently they couldn’t ignore the fundamental differences that existed between themselves and in society. The shock of the assault could not be excised.

The recent travails of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, threatened to develop into a similar rift. When he first appeared before the press to confess he had actually fallen in love with another woman, a number of male reporters, including Salon’s Gary Kamiya, were sympathetic. Women, like the Times’ Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, were more cynical, but noted it was a nice change that he didn’t humiliate his wife by forcing her to be present and didn’t treat the other woman as an object.

We’ve all suffered enough watching the forbearance of Silda Spitzer and Hilary Clinton. We’re tired of Elizabeth Edward’s passive aggression, and may have been just a bit suspicious of Jenny Sanford’s bitter comments during the time her husband was incommunicado.

Then, Sanford spoke to the press again.

Women’s views didn’t change much, but men, especially conservatives, found the personal nature of his comments disturbing. The Republican party has become a pragmatic coalition of religious conservatives and men bent on holding wealth or power who tacitly agreed neither would reveal their abiding interests.

Mark Sanford seemed their perfect spokesman, an educated Episcopalian married to woman who left Lazard Frères for her husband and four sons. But then his refusal to accept stimulus money, invoking South Carolina’s nullification crises, led some to think his lust for power was blinding him to the necessary political compromises. Now his refusal to follow the accepted method for dealing with moral transgression suggested someone who failed to understand his world.

His fellow Republicans in South Carolina, who are primarily concerned with their own reelections and pursuing their agendas in the legislature, began suggesting he was temporarily insane. Larry Grooms said "he is coming unhinged." Larry Martin. believed he’d heard "the ramblings of a troubled man" and "that man needs help."

The deeper problem is a cultural expectation that one not become too serious about anything, that passion is the mark of the unstable. If genuine excitement should arise, it should be channeled into following a sports team. When that wasn’t sufficient in the past century, it could lead to anonymous mob violence. In this century, we’re supposed to have progressed beyond that. Respectable southerners especially do not want to be reminded that cultural outlets may fail.

Many Canadians marriages are not the same after Marc Lépine, and neither will Sanford’s political life. Genuine shocks always do isolate people, no matter how unruffled the surface remains, and only a few outsiders are willing to learn from them. Resorting to using psychologists as gatekeepers of the damned only limits the utility of our tools for coping with crisis.

Notes:
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique Massacre provides a good summary.

Barr, Andy and Jonathan Martin. "South Carolina GOP: Mark Sanford Must Go," Politico 1 July 2009, interviews Grooms and Martin.

Collins, Gail. "An Affair to Remember," The New York Times, 1 July 2009.

Dowd, Maureen. "Rules of the Wronged," The New York Times, 30 June 2009.

Kamiya, Gary. "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford," Salon, 25 June 2009.