5/15/2023 0 Comments Hidden agenda meaning![]() In hindsight I find a goodly portion of my magazine writing over the past five decades has focused on scandal. Consider Saint-Simon’s chronicle of Louis XIV’s scandalous love life, which “spread through Europe, confounded France, unsettled the state, bore evils that almost toppled him from the throne,” or James Thomson Callender’s scandalous but true charge that Thomas Jefferson kept “as his concubine one of his own slaves.” (An underestimation, as it turns out.) The texts in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly attest that old scandals retain the shock of the new in the hands of a gifted storyteller. The best scandals, the ones most engaging to follow as they unfold, have a good deal in common with literature, and much great literature is generated by small-time, nonfamous scandals à la Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. William Hazlitt finds readers of newspapers “cannot take their eyes from the page…cannot live without” news of scandal. The timeless fascination with scandal is recognized by Theophrastus circa 320 bc, who tells of a “newsmonger…who always has ready gossip” to be “noised all about the city.” By the nineteenth century, These two piggish bullies fighting over a poor trafficked girl was a scandal with epic consequences. And it is often forgotten that Homer’s Iliad begins with a bitter tabloid squabble between Agamemnon and Achilles over a captive sex slave named Briseis, the outcome of which, the true “wrath of Achilles,” prolonged the Trojan War’s slaughter. ![]() Vulcan trapped the two in a net-Love and War embracing-a mythological equivalent of TMZ. It was a scandal when Vulcan, Olympian blacksmith and armorer, discovered Mars, god of war, coupling with the Olympian blacksmith’s wife, Venus, goddess of love. In Roman myth Mount Olympus was a hotbed of scandals of the gods. To set aside celebrity scandals is not to diminish fascination with tabloid news, nor is it to dismiss interest in or discount its ability to open otherwise concealed aspects of human nature. Only occasionally when you crack the gilt carapace of the scandals of the rich and famous do you discover that they can illuminate the hidden secrets of the human heart.īoris Kachka’s report on the world of public figures getting themselves into trouble admirably captures the formulaic nature of celebrity scandals, called “disgrace events” by a company that insures against the financial consequences of poor behavior, offering to make the risk of “celebrity downfall” as “quantifiable and reimbursable as that of floods and car crashes.” Yes, scandal may involve celebrities, but all too often scandals about people famous for being famous amount to little more than insipid self-promotion. In taking up this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, cast aside the notion that scandal requires the presence of celebrities. It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
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