Celebrity scandals raise some good questions!

Monica Lewinsky, now aged 40, is back to my mind from the far overseas, riding on my flights of fancy, like she had once done nearly one and half a decade ago, to win over my attentions and admiration. When she was found weeping inconsolably on television camera for the lost love. Or was it specially for the loss of her ephemeral love because she had herself spilled the beans and caused a kind of nearly irreparable damage to the image, successful political career and private life of the great object of her affection, and to the subjects of her (great) nation. But neither the nature of the scandal nor her great looks were the reasons for a few of us, who kept curious track of the developments out there, which all of the oriental males watched for a special reason with a sense awe literally imbued on with zealous curiosity, for turning themselves into her fan.

Wait, well of course, those two reasons were true! I would like to turn honest now, like her, who decades later, upon getting wiser with life, is able to write articles reflecting on issues relating to her reaching a mental vantage point with maturity, experience and wisdom so that she might wisely look back on the days gone by and chart out how she was going to live the days ahead with confidence and satisfaction, what’s wrong with a similar trying at this hand.

Great! Though her full 4,300 worded forthcoming article in the coming issue of Vanity Fair magazine is yet to be read, her wise reflections on the forms of quoted excerpts are already doing the rounds in the media and over the Internet. She’s said to have absolved her boss of any abuse or compulsion, still maintaining that whatever happened, happened consensually. She’s brave and confident, wiser yeah, sure when she asks people to stop tiptoeing on her past or other people’s future. She says she wants to give a different ending to her story. Now, accusations have already started to pour in that she’s being used again by some vested interest for somebody’s future political interest. But, sorry, I am not interested in the development of the story from that angle.

My interest was love. The perspectives of love including the angle from which Frederick Nietzsche saw it. He said that a pair of powerful spectacles would sometimes suffice to cure a person in love. With a quote like this, I felt years ago, he was being rude to people who claimed that their particular love affairs were not based on mere physical attractions, but on much more. Platonic would be too studious, but maybe heartfelt or deeper, whatever. Not impulsive, but intuitive. Now what intuition has got to do with people falling in love, teenage love, scandalous love, love between aged, married people, whatever. Maybe, it’s the gut feeling that the person is just right for you. Right for the moment, the time being. Found wrong after beans are spilled. After new realizations and repentances follow. Ephemeral love is a post beak-up strong definition of love which hangs like a bad qualification in your love profile if you are a serious stuff. If you have ever paid more than what you had bargained for in love, like both sides in the Clinton-Lewinsky affairs did, you too might surely have felt at that time quite pessimistic about everything you once found beautiful and loved. Maybe, then you too would grow up experienced enough to get Nietzsche’s perspectives and you would wish you better had a pair of powerful spectacles instead that would have cured you of the love you once thought was something you would not be able to live without.

Thankfully, and to the disappointment of Nietzsche, but certainly to the joy of the fans of the Bard of Avon who gave us a bagful of wonderful sonnets that clad love with breathtaking feelings and emotions from the wardrobes of eternity, one does hardly wear spectacles in his or her teenage. Though a few young men do wear lenses, but then the nerds are more for the serious type of love which is of incurable kind. Spectacles or no spectacles, many of them would rather love themselves continue to be helpless even when in a helpless relationship. Cicero is closer to the modern day reality. Closer to the insights into feelings on both sides, like the case concerning the old Monica Lewinsky affairs. He, perhaps knew that it was the Stoics, who define love as a kind friendship inspired by beauty. True. When love is an affair and not a relationship, then a bit of lust, a whole kitchen load and not pinch of passion govern that friendship. Lewinsky was young, she was beautiful. And she was willing, something she herself has kind of admitted in her revealing article in Vanity Fair. However, that should not absolve a husband or a father, as it should not also a country premier, of moral obligations his family or country folks, which he owes to them. But a psychiatrist or a philosopher surely is a better friend when a thorough gentleman is caught in such a situation. These types understand well the working power of very many types of passions, which chemically their scientist brethren call overflow of male or female hormones. The rest of the bulk who scans the situation are scathing in their evaluation of what happened, which is always what went wrong in a man or woman’s character. if one is high and mighty, then he must be infallibly respectable even behind the closed doors! Lewinsky won our admiration, then not because she was great, but because we were young. She has now won our admiration because she appears like having come of age mentally with regard to the follies and foibles of her youth, and that I assume that she probably has learnt so much from her media-focused life. She’s surely now in a good position (with her mental poise back on track) to add up to some nice quotable quotes about love or about the mistakes of it in some contemporary book of quotations on love. This I am sure the media will be as interested in as it would be in publishing more excerpts of her revealing article. Rumour is that she probably has secretly done a million dollar book deal with a big publishing house on her past, brief but almost earth-shattering escapade. Please don’t blame me for calling incidents involving emotions by that wrong word, I would still prefer to call it a type of love and not an affair, which then the president’s opponents and the media loved calling as.

In any case, I was disappointed to read the excerpts of her article. She apparently talks about depressions and feelings of suicides, and her determination to move on confidently to wisely live a better life, but she is not insightful about the feelings which is said to cleave to these silky soft goings in the world and get the going get stronger in the Universe’s mental realm, which is the reason of its sustenance despite the havoc played by global warming. A little ghost writing by some copy editor would have surely boosted the morale of few oriental male losing hope on love.

Love is love. It is there when it is there with nothing but truth. Momentary or fleeting though it may be. Love is what we feel for a friend, for parents, for siblings, for children and for anybody and everybody. The last kind is for the saints and leaders. It is also between concubines and paramours. For those who are unachievable! For those who hate in return! This is for the saints and the psychos. Sorry, if I sound distasteful to a conservative mindset. But this is how it is. Ephemeral though, but ruling all the roosts in your brain at that point in time, as if there is no tomorrow and nothing beyond the now. If you are an ordinary guy and involved, wait for a sure disgrace which is coming. If a celebrity, keep your diary handy and fill it for a future advance book deal that would keep you supported for a nice living.

Who else than the celebrated Hollywood filmmaker Woody Allen can help close this critique cum admiring write-up with true insights into the confusions between love and a scandal, here he comes with his witty quote on the topic, ‘ Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.’ Agreed.