Love’s Got Everything to Do With It, Congressman

Whatever happens to Gary Condit, the words he offered to a breathless America last week will linger in the annals of politics right up there with “I am not a crook,” “I didn’t inhale” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Not since Patrick Henry said, “Give me politics or give me death” has a single sentence rung with such authority.

Actually, there were several sentences that struck me as I watched the stone-faced preacher’s son face Connie Chung and try to dance, with studied disinterest, around the issue of his association with the missing Chandra Levy.

“We became very close,” he said.

“We had a close relationship,” he said.

“I liked her very much,” he said.

“I’ve never been a perfect man,” he said.

“I was not in love with her,” he said.

Tracking those phrases from beginning to end, one can almost see the building liaison between congressman and intern which, if it didn’t involve sex, must have come awfully close. But since Bill Clinton redefined sex in his affair with Monica Lewinsky, who knows exactly what it is?

It could be anything from a handshake to two women, three men and a duck.

It wouldn’t surprise me that if Condit did have a “relationship” with Levy, he “was not in love with her.”

A relationship, the modern term for what you do after dinner and a movie, doesn’t need love, just two willing adults and a comfortable place in which to, well, establish a connection. The very word implies an association but not an emotion. It’s a linkage. An affiliation. It’s the old one-night stand scrubbed to sterility and elevated to a few days longer. Tina Turner asked the question in a song that rang with unintended irony: “What’s love got to do with it?”

Watching Condit on television, his face peculiarly devoid of emotion, I saw the image of a man not trying to ease the sorrow of a missing woman’s family, but attempting with evasion and duplicity to save his political career.

It was a television appearance intended to kick off an onslaught of poor-me publicity in every medium, a cynical, well-calculated campaign to remain in office. I doubt that anyone ever considered what it would do to the Levy family.

There was no honor in his appearance. No passion. No willingness to risk career for the sake of honesty.

And there was Carolyn, his wife, somewhere off-camera, smiling bravely, standing by her man for the sake of their 34-year marriage--Hillary Rodham Clinton trying to put a happy face on public humiliation.

At the end of the Condit-Chung interview, when television went back to its usual assemblage of stories concerned with other human indecencies, a friend who had watched the interview with me said, “So maybe he had an affair, so what?”

Right, so what? FDR had an affair, Eisenhower had an affair, Clinton had an affair, Kennedy probably had several affairs and even old born-again Jimmy Carter admitted to lusting in his heart. I’m not sure about Nixon, but he did seem awfully close to Bebe Rebozo.

Power, as we all know, is the world’s greatest aphrodisiac. Women are drawn to men in high position as though they had been sprayed with human pheromones. They blink, they smile, they flash a little thigh. So what’s a guy to do?

Condit had an affair, so what? Right. I don’t really care if he slept with Chandra Levy, although one must care terribly if he knows what happened to her. It may be a mystery that is never solved.

What bothers me, I argued with my friend, is the nature of relationships in today’s world, a term that has come to mean satisfaction without commitment, the brief meeting and parting of two people who feed the need of the body but not the soul. The wham-bam syndrome.

There is little doubt in my mind that Condit was trying to say, without saying it, that he did have a sexual affair with Levy. He and many others have become symbolic of a growing coldness in our culture; the kind of chill that ultimately allows savagery and ethnic cleansings to exist.

If time and tendency finally drain us of human emotion, if satisfaction becomes more important than compassion, we stand to face a future more terrible than our past. Caring is a lot more fundamental than the thrusts of procreation.

Love has, or at least should have, a lot to do with it.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.