The limelight and media attention during the long Fourth of July weekend has been hogged by a certain lady from Alaska with her “higher calling.”
While we are waiting for the next shoe to drop in Wasilla, it’s time to revisit the many shoes that have already dropped in South Carolina.
And who better to take us there than Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts Jr.
While many have tried to capture the essence of the Sanford drama from the perspective of how horrible it is for this man to cheat on his wife, to lie about it, and—as has been my perspective—the supreme hypocrisy “of self-proclaimed moral champions,” Pitts tackles the scandal from a totally different standpoint.
In his “What was he thinking, and what with?” in the Miami Herald yesterday, Pitts lambasts the “I made a mistake” excuse and aspect of the Sanford Argentinean love affair, starting with:
I have a proposal.
Next time some politician goes before the cameras with his figurative pants down around his metaphoric ankles and says, ”I made a mistake,” let’s form a mob and drag him from the podium. You bring the lanterns, I’ll bring the pitchforks.
And, after conceding that all human beings make mistakes, Pitts pulls no punches:
No, what incites this diatribe is those four words of putative explanation: ”I made a mistake.” There is to them a connotation of honest error, unwitting miscalculation, accidental omission and ”Oops, my bad.” They allow the offender to appear to accept responsibility for his offense while at the same time, minimizing it. He just misjudged. It just happened. He was just careless, inattentive or forgetful. He couldn’t help it.
After a few more choice words on those who “get burned,” time and time again, and after pointing out that “your average woman governor-elect has the good sense to tell Sven the Swedish pool boy that she’s about to enter the public eye, and their long lunches will have to end,” Pitts lets us, men, have it:
With the arrogance, recklessness, self-delusion and lack of foresight common to my gender, [the man governor-elect] figures he can handle it, somehow. Granted, he does this figuring with the part of the body that does not contain the brain, but still, he does it. And then, when it all falls apart, he stands there and insults the intelligence of every human being within earshot.
Read and enjoy it all here.
Leonard Pitts Jr. is the author of Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood.
