More than four decades ago, as an underemployed summer intern, I spent idle hours watching from a window of the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare building as the Swift Company meatpacking plant crumbled under the blows of the wrecking ball. The stench of butchery may have left the neighborhood, but today the aroma of corruption still wafts over the three blocks separating the Capitol Complex from the lovely, placid Susquehanna River. Perhaps that persistent feature of political life in Harrisburg isn’t surprising, considering our gilded, American Renaissance-style Capitol building was erected on a foundation of graft. Here, public misdeeds aren’t the monopoly of either political party, evidenced by the “Bonusgate” scandal that saw a Republican Speaker of the House and a Democratic House Majority Leader end up in the same state prison cell. But the latest embarrassment, involving employees of the Office of Attorney General (now Governor) Tom Corbett and others exchanging hundreds of pornographic emails, unmasked following an inquiry by current Attorney General Kathleen Kane into the pursuit of the child molestation case against former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, has its own distinctive smell.
It seems a certain segment of Harrisburg’s political class is afflicted with something akin to the altitude sickness that strikes climbers as they attempt to summit a Himalayan peak. But instead of the headache, loss of appetite, nausea and insomnia that signal the onset of that physical disorder, these men (and this scandal, at least, is male only), suffer from a psychological disease that might be called Capitol Altitude Syndrome. The malady manifests itself in an overweening feeling of privilege, a willingness to engage in inappropriate behavior without any ability to connect actions to consequences and an apparent sense of invincibility. The motive of the Bonusgate officeholders and their staff members who diverted public funds to political purposes—the drive to gain and maintain power—while displaying some of the markers of the syndrome, at least reveals the operation of minds focused on legitimate, if distorted, ends. But how else, but for some form of vertigo induced by proximity to power, can one explain why experienced prosecutors and investigators would leave an easily discoverable trail of misogynistic and racist emails reflecting the sick humor that’s the stuff of locker rooms, not courtrooms? The irony of pedophile-hunting prosecutors indulging in this behavior is undeniable, but it bears all the hallmarks of CAS. If they need a release from the pressure of a high-profile investigation, maybe next time they should stick to towel snapping.
