South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has been laughed at by pretty much everyone who’s read the emails between him and his Argentinian mistress. Looking in on anyone’s romantic letters is invariably funny from the outside, or at least amusing as you imagine the feelings and desire running around and between the words themselves. But what makes them so painful to read is their thudding reality. Sanford never reaches for any poetry, or special turn of phrase, anything that would lead someone to think that some actual time had been taken to write the emails.
This is partly due to the nature of email itself – fast, efficient, and with none of the epistolary touches of a letter. When writing a letter, you are forced to prioritized and think of ways to order what’s most important to share. You’re pulling together several days’ or weeks’ worth of activity, and you’re not sure when you’re going to write again, so we have to make choices about what goes in and what stays out. Email’s immediacy favors the quick update of what just happened, likely followed by what just happened since then. Reflection isn’t favored.
But then, Sanford did write some long emails down to Argentina. One of them, from July 10, 2008, runs to 1,300 words, which is longer than most of the New York Times‘ op-ed pieces. But the deadening, cliche-ridden style is just so awful, so lacking in any attempt at metaphor that would give the reader something other than “I think you are so special,” that it’s just sad. Sad that an educated public official can’t express himself any better, sad that he gets so boxed in by his own thoughts, sad that this is, more or less, the state our education system has led us to. It didn’t have to be this way.
For evidence, go back to the letters sent from the front lines of the Civil War. Hearing actors read these during Ken Burns’s documentary was my personal favorite part, hearing how these common men tried to convey their reality to loved ones back home.
On July 25, 1864, W.F. Testerman, a soldier in the Tennessee Cavalry, wrote home to Jane Davis about his feelings. Despite his struggles with spelling and punctuation, you can feel the immediacy and the hopes he’s writing to get Ms. Davis to feel, as well.
“The letters that you wrote to me has proved verry satisfactory to me[.]if you will stand up to what you told me in your letters I will be satisfied which I have no reasons to Doubt[.] [...] if you was to fail it would allmost break my heart for you are the girl that Iam Depending upon and if it was not for you I would not be riting by mycandle to night as you wrote to me that many miles seperated us in person…Though we are fare apart at present my heart is with you everymoment for I often think of you when you are alseep when Travailing the lonesom roads in middle Tenn[.] The thought of your sweet smiles is all the company I have[.]“
He is “depending upon” her, and her devotion is the very thing that leads him to write by candlelight, when he could be using the time to rest. You can’t help but choke up a little when you read his closing, too:
“remember me as ever your love and friend. Excusebad riting.”
Or the letter from Harvey Black, a surgeon from the Union Army, who wrote back to his wife this summary of their relationship from the time they knew each other as children to the present. At the very end, it turns from a summary to a projected hope into the future:
” May it ever be so, and may I ever be a husband worthy of your warmest affections. May I make you happy and in so doing be made happy in return. A sweet kiss and embrace to your greeting.
“But maybe you will say it looks ridiculous to see a man getting grayhaired to be writing love letters, so I will use the remnant of my paper otherwise…”
She was probably getting over swooning, Doc, and not thinking it was ridiculous.
Then you have Mark Sanford, writing on July 10, 2008, about how the love of his family has allowed him to become one of “but 50 governors.” He then goes on to write about how that support allowed him to start the day:
“[T]hat foundation of love and support [was] so critical to getting up in the morning and feeling you could give and risk because you already had a full tank of love in the emotional bank account.”
This is so confused that it beggars clarification. You have a gas tank in the bank? The bank’s attached to a gas station? Love is the gas in the bank account? You know exactly what he means, but his way of expressing it runs a waterboarding session on your brain.
Then there’s this nugget, from the same email:
“I certainly had a special feeling about you from the first time we met, but these feelings were contained and I genuinely enjoyed our special friendship and the comparing of all too many personal notes (and yes this is true even if you did occasionally tantalize me with sexual details over the years!) — but it was all safe. Where we are is not. I have thought about it and in some ways feel I let you down in letting these complications come into a friendship that I hope will last till death.”
“Contained”? “Enjoyed”!? “Safe”???!!! Are you trying to melt her heart, Mark, or wuss out? Because you sure aren’t going to make any headway with this. Maybe you’ll get a few points for the “friendship that I hope will last till death” bit, but even then it’s a “friendship,” and unlike the Civil War soldiers who invoked that line, they were being polite and modest, and not chatting up a hot Argentinian they’d been having an extramarital dalliance with. Gah.
What saddens me about all this, apart from the sight a family falling apart in public, is the clueless pall that hangs over Sanford’s emails. He’s clearly out of his element, which makes sense for a married Episcopalian with four children, but watching him keep digging the hole deeper and deeper just wants me want to hand him a shovel, to keep him from hurting himself.