Lance Mannion: Pecksniffery

The whippersnappers among you don't remember, but one of the most annoying things about Jimmy Carter, a better president than he's remembered as and a man I admire but still annoying, was his habit of proclaiming his own virtue.

"I will never lie to you," he promised.

When he admitted to lusting in his heart, he boasted at the same time that Jesus had forgiven him for it and implied that he hadn't done any lusting anywhere outside his heart.

I understood at the time that he was simply trying to assure us that he was no Richard Nixon. And I knew Carter came out of a religious background that emphasized public confession, so I tried not to be annoyed.

But still, every time he told us how good he was I couldn't help wondering just how bad he really was and I suspect most people felt the same unease and doubt.

That's because we all know the type. The people who proclaim their own virtue over and over again? You can bet the farm that they're lying hypocrites, if you could find a bookie willing to give you odds that would make the bet worthwhile.

Carter, it turned out, was not the type. But it would not have been surprising if he was, because it's an old and all too common type.

The type is there in Shakespeare, as a type, an old character with a list of ancestors stretching back to the dawn of the theater---The Greeks and the Romans featured him in their plays---whom audiences immediately recognized and knew to despise. Angelo in Measure for Measure, Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Moliere wrote about him. He called him Tartuffe.

Dickens gave the type a name that has stuck. Pecksniff.

Seth Pecksniff's the pious fraud in Martin Chuzzlewit:

Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man: a grave man, a man of noble sentiments and speech...Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff: especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus's purse of good sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man: fuller of virtuous precept than a copy-book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there: but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.

Pecksniff spends a lot of the book standing, metaphorically, at the front of the Temple reminding God and everybody else within earshot of how virtuous he is. So we're not surprised when first chance he has he gets a snootful and makes a lecherous lunge at Mrs Todgers.

In fact there are critics who think that Dickens wasted ink on that scene. Pecksniff's such an obvious type that the fact that he drinks on the sly and pinches women's bottoms is a given.

Sitcoms and movies love Pecksniff and trot him out again and again, in various disguises, even in drag. We know the guy. We laugh at him as soon as he starts in pontificating. We don't believe in his moralizing for a single moment...except when he appears in real life in the guise of a conservative politician or pundit.

One Pecknsiff after another pops up and gets knocked down and just as soon as the remains are swept up and carted away another one struts up the aisle and plants himself before us to tell us how good and pure he is or she is.

Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, William Bennett.

Only Bakker and Swaggert have had the decency to go to ground. The others returned to center stage as fast as the laughter died or never left.

Pecksniffs are always ready with an excuse that explains how it was that they didn't commit the sin we thought they did and how it wasn't really a sin at all.

"A youthful indiscretion."

"It's not like I was losing the rent money in the slots."

"I'm not a junkie! Junkies use illegal drugs! And they have to buy their shit themselves, they don't have maids to run out and get it for them!"

"I didn't do or say anything she says I did and anyway she encouraged it and she must have liked it and besides she was just a golddigging floozy and hey, isn't anybody going to help me defend Christmas?"

One after another.

A new one today.

Former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik conducted two extramarital affairs simultaneously, using a secret Battery Park City apartment for the passionate liaisons, the Daily News has learned.

The first relationship, spanning nearly a decade, was with city Correction Officer Jeanette Pinero; the second, and more startling, was with famed publishing titan Judith Regan. [The emphasis is mine.]

His affair with Regan, the stunningly attractive head of her own book publishing company, lasted for almost a year.

The Pecksniff here isn't Kerik, who's a different but just as common brand of hypocrite. Wolcott gives a quick and damning sketch.

The Pecksniff is "the stunningly attractive" Judith Regan.

The story, by the way, is from the New York Daily News and you gotta love their headline on their online front page:

BERN'N LOVE!

Beats me why they couldn't get "hunka hunka" in there, but at least the subhead tells us that Kerik had two "gal pals."

Josh Marshall, still the source for all the news about Kerik, has added Regan as an intriguing supporting character. What Josh doesn't have, Steve Gilliard's got covered. Serendipitously, Vanity Fair's just out with a profile of Regan as a sociopathic narcissist whose life is a trailer park soap opera being played out in New York publishing and media circles.

Regan's Pecksniffery includes spending a lot of time on TV condemning other people's less than wholesome sex lives. Bill Clinton's and Monica Lewinsky's, for example.

Atrios has a hit parade of Regan's Pecknsifferisms. My two favorites are:

REGAN [talking about Monica Lewinsky on Fox News]: Well, partially, but it's also an "amorality tale" because the one thing that's missing from "Monica's Story" is, you know, deep thinking about her own amorality, which we saw -- was in ample evidence during the Barbara Walters love fest the other night. I mean, here's a woman who clearly knows a lot about sex, but knows nothing about right and wrong.

And:

REGAN [about Bill Clinton]: Well, I think that the social fabric of this country has become completely unraveled. I think the sexual revolution had a lot to do with that. I think that we are in terrible shape. I think we have a country where half the kids are being raised by single mothers. A lot of that has to do with male behavior. We look at the men in this country who do not want to be accountable to their wives, do not want to be accountable to their children and we have as a president a man who could be a symbol of everything that is good; he could be a wonderful husband, he could be a wonderful father. He is in a position of great authority to show this country and to lead this country in a way that is much more important than economically.

People who spend a lot of time tsk tsking over other people's bad behavior are usually trying to deflect attention away from their own. Often the person whose attention they most want to deflect is theirself.

People who spend their time lecturing others on their immorality are usually pots calling kettles black.

People who brag about how much they love their spouses are running around on them or abusing them or terrifed their spouses do not love them back.

People who boast of their courage and toughness are frightened and weak.

People who tell you how honest they are are planning to cheat you.

People who belligerantly defend what doesn't need defending---Mom, the flag, apple pie, Christmas---are scoundrels.

If I was looking around to cheat on my wife, I'd target the women I know who are proudest of their virtue. If I wanted to run a con using a shady business deal as my hook I'd make my mark the guy who's always bragging about how he knows all the angles.

We know these people. We meet them all the time. When Pecksniff walks into a room we've got his number the minute he opens his mouth and starts to spout.

Except when the room he walks into is a TV studio or a Congressional hearing room and Pecksniff has had the sense to identify himself or herself as a conservative.

Give her a year. Judith Regan will be back on Fox telling us all about immorality and the death of outrage. Right alongside Bill Bennett and Bill O'Reilly.

July 2008