Wicked Game

I continue to listen to the podcast "Wicked Game" about the American presidential elections.  This week the episode leads in with a scandalous story about Warren G. Harding and an 18-year-old girl, an incident that was rumored but covered up.  Harding and his people spent a great deal to cover up such stories.  This much I already knew.

The narrator made an observation that caught my attention, that scandals usually come to light eventually. I have thought so.  I have believed that while stories about some still-dangerous people do not emerge until after their death, and perhaps not even then, that The Truth Will Come Out. I thought of some present scandals.  When even conservative friends have assured me that Obama was merely wrongheaded and a decent enough individual in his own way, I have muttered darkly that he was trained as a Chicago politician, and more importantly, is possessed of a narcissism that leads to self-righteousness which is an easy lead-in to doing underhanded things to keep one's side in power. They think I am overwrought, but I told myself I would simply bide my time.  The "scandal-free" president would be revealed as deeply corrupt.

While that seems to be becoming at least partly evident, and may give me warm feelings of vindication in days to come, I think my basic premise bears examination.  Do scandals eventually come out?  Do the mills of God grind slow but grind exceeding fine? That quote was first from Plutarch, not the Bible, and then from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was not writing theology. Is it not possible that the exposure of scandal is uncommon? Our data is biased entirely in the direction of incidents that did come out.  Yet if they do not come out for a decade, or a century, doesn't that suggest that they might have just as easily remained hidden but for some off chance?

It is an impression question.  How could one measure what percentage of scandals actually come out? Priests might have a better sense than the rest of us, though there would be holes in that data as well. Some things may not even be confessed. We may all be well-equipped to forget the unpleasant we have done and be taken by surprise when some opponent holds a letter or photo aloft in our later years. The priest may not ever know whether something has come out.  The shameful act may have later come out to family, a scene ensuing, yet nothing more be said.  Still, a priest would have a better sense than the rest of us.

I have some slight experience with such things, taking mental health histories. I learn of incests, and addictions, and illegitimacies not even known to family and friends, let alone the general public. Doctors, lawyers and others who have rules of confidentiality must have some of the same sense. Sometimes we see the dark undersides of prominent families. More usually, the scandals are found among those whose lives are so reckless that the faults are visible to anyone who has had contact with them.  One more scandal would hardly make a difference to them.

What about political scandals and business scandals, though?  I have no sense of those.  I have spent my life believing that while many disappear beneath the waves, a great many more, especially among the serious breaches of law or trust, float back to the surface like corpses, discovered eventually.  I think the full Clinton stories will have to wait, because of their reputation for vindictiveness, which caused even Donna Brazile to fear for her life. I expect it to come in a trickle, then a torrent after their deaths.  Yet...yet what percentage will come out and what will be buried forever? Dr. Armand Nicholi had some revelations about Freud when comparing him to CS Lewis.  But there were revelations about Lewis as well that came out only after his death, in some cases long after. Some of the late-revealed items about the long-deceased were known only to a single person.  And some of those hesitated.

There are at least two stories I will take to my death. No one needs to know.  It will help no one's life.  There are probably others that I have mostly forgotten or think less important that will go as well.