A Tiger divided against himself ...

The rumor goes something like this, give or take a few sordid details:

The Great Athlete, flush with success and fame, sees a beautiful woman from across the room at a swanky party. The woman, who recognizes the Great Athlete, is flustered and nervous. But the Great Athlete is confident and full of brass. He approaches, she waits – What will he say? What will she say? He arrives, looks her in the eye, and asks, “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised by this line, even finds it ridiculous, but after all this is a Great Athlete and she’s always wanted to meet him – to bed him – and so she indulges the conversation. After 20 minutes, the Great Athlete gives her a card with a number on it, the number that when called will summon his driver. And with that, the Great Athlete disappears. After the party, she calls the number, and sure enough a driver comes and picks her up and takes her to an apartment building, where she takes the private elevator to the penthouse suite, where on a bed lies the Great Athlete, shirtless. He politely but firmly informs the woman that they are going to have sex, and they do. Quick, business-like sex, the woman will report later: functional and to the point. The next morning the Great Athlete has his driver take the woman back to her home. Tryst complete.

Punchline:

Several months later that same woman is at another party and sees the Great Athlete from across the room and he sees her and walks over with that same confidence and brass, and she smiles this time, less nervous, ready to reminisce about the evening they spent together, ready to rekindle. And what does the Great Athlete say when he arrives? “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised but decides to play along; surely he is just being coy. But wouldn’t you know it, after 20 minutes of conversation, the Great Athlete is handing her a card with a number to call that will summon his driver, who, sure enough, at the end of the evening takes the young woman to that same building with that same private elevator that leads to that same penthouse, where – sure as you’re born – the Great Athlete is lying on his bed shirtless. They proceed to make quick, business-like love, and in the morning, the Great Athlete’s driver takes the woman home. At no point does the Great Athlete give any indication that he has any idea the two of them have ever met, much less done this peculiar mating dance – step for step – once before.

Ladies and gentleman, that great athlete: Derek Jeter.

That’s right: The captain of the world champion New York Yankees, the Sports Illustrated 2009 Sportsman of the Year, the man who’s honor and decorum the likes of Michael Jordan and 60 Minutes‘ Ed Bradley have lined up to celebrate. Hell, even  legendary writer Gay Talese once wrote, “[i]n this era of boorish athletes, obnoxious fans, greedy owners and shattered myths, here’s a hero who’s actually polite, and that has to have come from good parenting. You can’t compare him to Joe DiMaggio, for DiMaggio didn’t have bad manners — he had no manners. Where have you gone, man with manners? Here you are, Derek Jeter.”

But then look at the stream of self-affirming moralist rhetoric that was spun in the direction of Tiger Woods this week, post-automobile incident. Those same sportswriters and society pundits who for years have been falling all over themselves to praise Woods’ playing and his work ethic and his character turned on him with the fanaticism of the newly converted when they learned he had cheated on his wife, peppering him with the condemnation, luxuriating in their disappointment, and waiting patiently for the inevitable public apology.

And that might be the lesson that we should take from all of this: Woods and Jeter are both sports starts of gigantic proportions — men being supermen, larger than life, yet excelling at an activity that, in its basic form, extends back to humanity’s primitive days in the caves and that speaks directly to the most basic breeding instincts at the center of our reproductive process. The difference? Tiger tried to deny his place in the world and settle for family life … and the eventual (and perhaps inevitable) fall from grace that so many public alphas have had to endure. Jeter, on the other hand, inoculated himself against the ethical quibbling and criticisms of the mortal chattering class — in this case, the sportsfan blogosphere and celebrity gossipmongers — by simply being that thing that they would all hope to be had they been born with his … talents.

We love Derek Jeter because he acknowledges who he is (a superstar) and what he is (a philanderer) and acts accordingly (Hopes, anyone? Dreams?), while we resent Woods for desiring normality, breaking vows he probably never should have taken in the first place, and apologizing to millions of people he’s never even met, much less wronged, when he got caught. The same way we loved the lecherous, hard-drinking, cocaine-using politician Charlie Wilson and hate mealy-mouthed family man Governor Mark Sanford. The same way we celebrate George Clooney for brazenly taking 52 models a year to his seaside Italian villa and attack Jude Law for furtively cheating on his fiancee with only one nanny. We like our stars brazen and brave, convinced that society’s conventions don’t apply to them and celebrating the fact that they are beyond the need for explanation or apology.

Otherwise, they’d be just like us.

One of the primary concerns of the great human philosophical project — that largely futile effort to define ourselves in terms of collective existence — has been to draw an appropriate line between the respective levels of consciousness of the inhabitants of planet Earth. Humans, by right of consciousness, we say, are the rightful superiors of the rest of the animal kingdom. Scholars John Peter Anton, George L. Kustas, and Anthony Preus (thank you, Google Books) remind those of us who haven’t spent much time with the Toga-sporting set that, in ancient Greece, “[e]ach thing, according to Aristotle, is defined by its ergon, that is, its power….[that] virtue is the completion or perfection of that power….[and] the virtues of plants, beasts, and human beings will themselves be different.” The implications of Charles Darwin’s take on all that blurred the line — sure, humans were separated from other fauna (and certainly all of the flora), but only by virtue of lapsed time. Still, for Darwin, we were more evolved than our knuckle-dragging predecessors (and thus the Geico caveman commercials). Spiritually speaking, there is of course Genesis 1:26, a rather strong divine endorsement of the idea that human beings are A-Number One on this here planet.

Never mind, for a moment, that some adherents to the latter two ideas seem unable to reconcile their systems of belief: There is common ground here — for both groups, it is important that human beings have a place at the head of the earthly table. Trouble comes when Darwin leaks ever so slightly into King James and the chosen species is reminded of the real reason for its existence. Namely, that we are here to procreate (thus, most recently, John Ensign and Mark Sanford).

So we get anguish. And a press conference. And sometimes even an honest reflection about what this all might mean in the scheme of things. (If we were bested by lust, is this not a surrender to animal instinct?) And then we get the tears. As wielded in exemplary form this past week by the philandering Sanford, these things are a deployable tool that, spiritually speaking — and that’s certainly how Sanford intended them — seem to come out as a reinforcement of one’s humility before God. Here, in front of the podium, coming on as a public supplication, they serve as a protestant replacement for kneeling; “I spent the past five days crying in Argentina” is, in the hands of a Mark Sanford (as Indiana Jones reminds us), a sign of penitence.

Funny thing is that, even in this seeming act of self-degradation, humans may be continuing to play out the concept that they are better than any of their animal kin. As Vassar College psychology professor Randolph Cornelius told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2003, “[t]he kind of crying that humans do is very special because it appears as if only humans cry in this emotional way.”

For Sanford and his dick-thinking brethren, this presents an interesting dichotomy: Sure, their tears may, in the eyes of science, signal a certain human superiority, but the very act that leads to those hanky moments remains a perfect illustration of how the need to procreate — a base animal survival instinct if there ever was one — can win out over each of our “better” natures. For his part, Sanford doesn’t seem to quite get this (as he wrote in an e-mail to his lovely Maria, “[h]ow in the world this lightening [sic] strike snuck up on us I am still not quite sure”). But then, how could he? To him (and his ilk) humans are still the creatures who were told that, not only were they created in God’s image, but that they would have dominion over “the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 

Gov. Mark Sanford is in love.

That’s the only conclusion I’ve come to after watching and rewatching the press conference he gave this past Wednesday upon returning from his mystery tour of Argentina:

Pundits can argue all they want about the political implications of yet another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful crumbling under the weight of expectation (see Bobby Jindal, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, etc.). Religious leaders can pontificate about the sanctity of marriage, the need for forgiveness, and the importance of sending our prayers to Sanford’s wife and four sons. And prigs disguised as newspaper columnists can scream and shout about yet another politician who is guilty less of committing adultery than of divulging “too much information,” as if our tender eyes can’t possibly bear the sight of lightly erotic e-mails.

But those seem to me tiny issues when compared to the reality that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is in love – really in love – and that, in a remarkable public act of contrition/admission/confusion/desperation, he declared as much, for all the world to see.

Wednesday’s press conference wasn’t your typical post-affair mea culpa designed to save some horny politician’s career. Instead it was a cri de coeur from a man who had just made the decision to deny love for the sake of duty and tell the world about it, a man set loose from his moorings, rambling incoherently, reaching for words that weren’t there, crying out for, if not help, then at least a little empathy.

Of course, he’s not getting any. This is America, after all, land of sanctimony. Instead he’s receiving scorn and skepticism and moral condemnation – always, always moral condemnation.

And, to be perfectly honest, on most occasions I would be right up there with the rest of the vultures, heaping scorn. I would be luxuriating in the sight of a hypocritical, self-important, sanctimonious windbag getting his comeuppance for all those times he tried to crush other men of weakness from atop his own personal Mount Sinai (see Sanford’s role in the Clinton impeachment nonsense). But, I just can’t summon any ill will toward Sanford today. I hate everything he stands for, disagree with everything he fights for, and loathe those pompous claims about being a “man of faith,” made while he was secretly slobbering all over the seventh commandment in Buenos Aires. But I just can’t seem to make myself indignant. And the reason is simple: How can you attack a guy who just publicly sacrificed love in the name of honor or duty or family or religion or confusion over all of the above? That seems to me the very definition of kicking a man when he’s down.

Check out the video tape. This is a Southern Republican governor admitting to the whole world that he had spent the last five days crying in Argentina. That admission alone is political suicide: Americans can tolerate their politicians showing emotion but not on foreign soil.

No, I can’t feel hate. All I can manage is fascination. And pity. A whole lot of pity. And a little bit of awe at what we’ve just witnessed.

Indeed, Wednesday’s press conference was a remarkable piece of political theater because it wasn’t theatrical at all; it was just an unscripted display of human desperation. Sanford wasn’t there to renounce and deny his mistress; he was there to proclaim his love, in all its jumbled, self-destructive, incoherent beauty. It wasn’t just guilt that drove him to that microphone, but a need for human compassion and understanding, a desperate cry for help from a man who has convinced himself, though years of religious indoctrination, that love – even true love – outside the bounds of wedlock is a sin. This past Wednesday, we got to watch a man’s religious convictions crash headlong into his human desires on national TV.

Listen to Sanford at the 14:17 mark, when he says, “She lives thousands of miles away.” Listen to the crack in his voice. Listen to him mitigating his speech with ungainly phrases like “zones of protectiveness.” If that sounds to you like a man cynically manipulating his way back into the public’s good graces after cynically manipulating a woman into bed simply for the sake of getting himself off, then you’re more jaded than I am.

I watch that footage, I listen to Sanford calling his mistress a “dear, dear friend” and talk about their “remarkable friendship” that “sparked into something more than that,” and what I hear is a man thinking to himself, “All I want to do is leave this press conference, resign the governorship, jump on a plane, and get back into the loving arms of my girl.” Like Mark Antony, he’d be willing to sacrifice the whole world for this woman … if he could only find the guts to do it.

Problem is, Sanford doesn’t appear to have any guts, and it looks like he’s going to sacrifice the whole world and sacrifice the love he was sacrificing that world for and, as a consequence, lose both and get neither. What kind of thinking is that, Governor? You’ve come this far; you might as well go all the way. True, you mistreated your wife and deceived your kids and maybe even broke your oath to the people of South Carolina, but turning back now out of some deluded sense of religious obligation means you did all that sinning for nothing. It’s a rare thing to find true love in this world. Are you really going to throw it away out of guilt?

Remember, Guv, God spits out the lukewarm.

Pray for Gov. Sanford, religious pundits tell us. But he doesn’t need our prayers. On the contrary, we should all be so lucky as to find true love in South America. And despite my cynicism and my political prejudices, the simple fact is, my heart’s with the guy. Because anyone who’s ever been in love knows it makes you do crazy, self-destructive, embarrassing things.

And that press conference was so crazy, so self-destructive, so embarrassing, it could only have been orchestrated by a man in love.