Beyond Tawdry
The steadily relentless admiration by a young woman whose physical attributes transcend beauty and merge into the kind of physical prowess that former General Petraeus himself valued and exemplified ran its course. That he hadn't the common sense to realize what was happening, to warn him against that all-too-common human frailty simply served to emphasize that fallibility; the id falls prey to the ego and reason absents itself.
The thrill of the hunt is the thing, but the man didn't realize that the thrill of the hunt was on her side, and the triumph of success entirely hers as well, while his thrill was represented by knowing he had transcended his own bounds of careful rectitude and respect for everything that held value for him. An, unfolding, revealingly absurd interplay of four principal characters all engaged in their enticingly unseemly abandonment of decency.
That web so carefully woven, the targets weighing the tenuously ephemeral pleasures drawn from their illicit affairs, became a trifle too tangled. So much so that the two women involved, Petraeus's biographer Paula Broadwell, and family friend Jill Kelley hardly seemed to understand what their misguided jealousy over their conquests would cost their paramours.
And the men, those highly skilled professionals in military strategy, those intellectual giants, those upholders of moral verities?
Virtue an illusion, intelligence highly suspected, drowned in their flirtation with sexual congress which their own military standards forbade as illicit, and which standards they would unblinkingly uphold for anyone under their command for there are such imponderables but highly valued triumphs such as trust and honour and pride involved.
And is their judgemental capacity in situations of personal choices symbolic of their neutral capability to exercise outstandingly needful decision-making in situations of national security? A man set to become the next commander of U.S. European Command and the NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, a busy military commander whose actions and decisions in Afghanistan must have kept him very busy.
Not too busy to accumulate some 20,000 pieces of communication via texting and email to one single communicator. Someone described as a socialite, a volunteer, an 'honourary ambassador' between the countries involved in the Afghan war and the military elite. And who just happened also to be a great personal family friend of General/CIA director General Petraeus. General John Allen, another remarkable man who somehow found time in an inordinately busy schedule to maintain that personal agenda.
Paula Broadwell, too unassumingly bright for David Petraeus's good. Seeming to adore the man whom she publicly placed on a heroic pedestal as she researched his exploits and ideas and military successes and kudos for outstanding performance in guiding the U.S. military to a new manner in which to meet a new kind of warfare outside the conventional of two armies clashing head on. That kind of flattery could melt the most committed to probity.
And it did, did it not?
And just incidentally gave the FBI an opportunity to embarrass the CIA. The challenge to embark on that investigation must have been extraordinarily irresistible. Their legendary jealousies and unwillingness to share files just another symbol of dysfunction in a society committed to public and national security.
As human nature flares into inappropriate and shaming conduct, so too do agencies operated by humans submit to the same kind of failure.
Labels: Human Relations, Social-Cultural Deviations, United States, Values
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 14, 2012
<< Home