As the baffling and then burlesque and then baroquely burlesque affair enveloping General Petraeus and his friends, of both sexes, fell upon us like another hurricane last week, it seemed to confirm once again Philip Roth’s fifty-year-old assertion that you can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. The Petraeus story rapidly expanded, novella-like, into a kind of “Fifty Shades of Khaki.” First came the news that the hero of the surge had been surging with his biographer, a woman who, as a quick scan of her book-tour appearances suggests, was not only fabulously appealing but also more or less openly italicizing her attachment to the General. Then it came out that she had been sending notes to another female admirer of the General, which were threatening or, perhaps, merely catty. Then it came out that an F.B.I. agent who admired the second admirer, to whom he had sent a photo of himself shirtless, which may have been meant to entice or may have been entirely wholesome, had sprung to her defense by launching an investigation into the affair, which he leaked to Republican congressmen. Then it came out that a second general, in Afghanistan, had been corresponding with camp follower No. 2 in a way that some people said was “flirtatious.” The national-security establishment suddenly seemed like “Couples” with epaulettes.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The Fox News right, still recuperating from its electoral setbacks of the previous week, tried frantically to connect some part of this roundelay to what had happened at the American consulate in Benghazi, in September, but nothing stuck. Benghazi is a tragedy in search of a scandal; the Petraeus affair is a scandal in search of a tragedy. It is proof only that what Roth called the human stain spreads, and sooner or later stains us all. Any bit of schadenfreude it might provoke rises only from the way in which the by now too automatic American soldier worship—which is not always shared by actual soldiers—had, for once, to pause in the midst of its moralizing. There was something truly entertaining about seeing the usual officer-lauding pundits reaching a finger for stop A on the organ of indignation (the moral collapse of everything, owing to the promiscuity of everybody) and then, while longing to land on the usual stop B (the moral superiority of the men of the military and national-security services) having to pause, trembling, in midair.

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Presumably, it is a bad idea for spies to have embarrassing secrets that other spies might learn—and what goes for the smaller spies should go for the big spy—and so the resignation of General Petraeus may have been necessary. But the rest really did seem to be nobody’s business but the General’s and his family’s. If there is a small truth to cherish here, it lies in the reminder that Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner and all the other earlier, undecorated sinners were not heated by undignified lusts because they were baby boomers or Democrats, or because they lacked the moral core of real men making real decisions, or because they had spent too much time on Twitter, or whatever the latest explanation for self-destructive sexual behavior is. The truth is that the force which through the not so green fuse drives all our flowers, and much else besides—the force of wanting that can cause women of substance to send pestering e-mails, leaving distinguished generals caught in the middle—is the force of life.

Petraeus, and his defenders and attackers alike, referred to his “poor judgment,” but if the affair had had anything to do with judgment it never would have happened. Desire is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own. The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power. As Roth’s Alexander Portnoy tells us, “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd”—a Yiddish saying that means, more or less, that when desire comes in the door judgment jumps out the window and cracks its skull on the pavement.

The really big news of the week was that Roth had stopped writing fiction, for reasons of his own, one gathers, though it isn’t hard to imagine him awed into silence by what American reality had once again wrought. Let’s hope that a novelist’s retirement may be, like a soprano’s, quickly reversible. In the meantime, let’s recall, from “The Human Stain,” the narrator’s dream that, at the height of the Clinton imbroglio, someone had hung a banner from the White House reading, “A Human Being Lives Here.” The more such banners fly—from houses, and from tents and barracks and G.H.Q.s, too—the better off we will all be. ♦