Soon you will be able to say the name “Mark Sanford” and no one will know who you are talking about. But I know and I am angry at him.
Because the words of this blog are immortal — as I explained here — I need to tell future readers that Mark Sanford was a conservative American politician who became Governor of the American state of South Carolina in the early days of the 21st Century. A Republican, (Look it up future reader, I don’t have all day.) Sanford built his career on his conservative Christian family values, once announcing that President Bill Clinton should resign the presidency because he had oral sex with a woman not his wife.
Soon Sanford got caught in an affair with an Argentinian woman not his wife. That happened a lot to politicians of both parties. Gail Collins of the New York Times wondered if maybe heterosexual middle-aged males might not make the best political leaders since they always were getting caught in sexual hypocrisy.
Bathsheba as imagined by Willem Drost
Sanford, who as I said, was a conservative Christian, compared himself with King David of the Old Testament. Really. I am not making this up. Probably he couldn’t find anything in the New Testament that could rescue him, so he compared himself to King David; and his mistress, to Bathsheba. That was probably not a good idea. Certainly it could have brought no comfort to Sanford’s wife with whom he supposedly was trying to reconcile. David, after arranging the death of his mistress’s husband, married her. Sanford also has four sons. Did he forget what one of David’s sons did to his father? (Because this is a family blog, you’ll have to look that up if you don’t remember. Hint: II Samuel 16: 20-22, and remember when the Bible says he “went in”, it means it literally. That is not a metaphor.)
But that is not my beef with Governor Sanford. I can forgive him the affair. What I cannot forgive him for is the lie he told to cover up his trip to Argentina to see the mistress: He told everybody he was off hiking the Appalachian Trail by himself.
Throughout my life, I have often gone hiking and backpacking by myself. Alone. Without human companions. And I certainly was not jetting off for assignations with Argentinian mistresses. Or any other kind of mistress. I went alone. Do you hear me? I went by myself. And will do so again and again as long as I am able. I need the solitude. I do. Please believe me.
But now, everybody will wonder, “Did he really go alone? Isn’t backpacking alone kind of weird?”
The next time I go, will someone follow me? Will some spy satellite watch my infrared image to see if I am alone? Will they wonder? And all because of some stupid, lying, politician who tried to hide his affair by giving a bad name to solo hiking. It’s not fair.
Tags: Appalachian Trail, backpacking, Bathsheba, hiking, II Samuel, Kind David, Mark Sanford, sex, sex hypocrisy
