Scandalous!

This is our national season of discontent. Election time is a time of bitter partisanship, a time of sniping, innuendo, bitterness, suspicion, and vitriol. Yes, the facts that on Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 Americans will go to the polls, cast their vote, and go home without fear for their safety and without fear that the country will fall into anarchy based on the outcome of the national election. Regardless of your personal misgivings, there will be no tanks in the streets, barricades of burning tires, or rock-throwing protesters in the streets. We’ll all go on and in a month the politics will die in the dust and we’ll go back to our lives and personal issues.

Many times I seek refuge on the dance floor. It’s a safe place, a fantasy zone where all is music, harmony, and the one I love. In an ideal world the dance floor is about order, it is a universe in miniature, orbits within orbits. In reality, though, the dance floor is much more like the real world.. There are dancers who do the West Coast Swing to a samba, those who do a travelling dance while most people are doing a slot dance, and those to whom the beat is just a suggestion to be ignored as they see fit. To those who would say the electoral temperature and disharmony on the dance floor are both symptoms of the unraveling of society, I offer two tidbits:

The election of 1828 pit Andrew Jackson, a man famed for his temper who had participated in several duels, against John Quincy Adams, a man falsely accused of playing pimp to the Russian czar and misappropriating government funds for the purchase of a pool table. The conflict between the two candidates became so heated that, after arriving in Washington for his inauguration, Jackson refused to pay the customary courtesy call on the outgoing president. And John Quincy Adams reciprocated by refusing to attend the inauguration of Jackson.

The waltz was introduced to England sometime between 1790 and 1812 and was brought to France when Napoleon’s triumphal soldiers returned from Germany in 1805. As the first closed position dance done by aristocracy, the waltz gained a scandalous reputation. After all, dancers actually embraced, holding each other so close their bodies and even faces touched while they danced. Women were thrown around exuberantly, something considered immoral and even sinful at the time. In England, Anglican archbishops denounced the waltz as “a lust-inducing, decidedly degenerate action to be left to those hot-blooded, silly foreigners.”

So what should a level-headed person make of these examples. Maybe that the good old days weren’t always all that good and that today’s “scandal” will be tomorrow’s humorous footnote, For me it simply means that this Tuesday, after I’ve cast my vote I’ll step onto the dance floor and I’ll try to appreciate the ordered chaos that is dancing and our nation and simply marvel at the fact both continue unscathed in spite of all the so-called experts’ predictions of perdition and woe.