If you're a late-thirty-something like me, you've spent the last ten years bewildered by "emo," a youth movement celebrating histrionic displays of emotion, skinny jeans, and hair that looks like it was put on backwards.
I'm no emo expert, but I'm pretty sure 49-year-old Republican governors from South Carolina are not its core demographic.
However, as a great man once said, the arc of history is long... but it bends towards Dashboard Confessional.
Emo's moment has arrived.
If Barack Obama is America's first nerd president, surely Mark Sanford is America's first emo governor.
EXHIBIT 1: The scandal. Sanford had an affair with a "dear, dear friend" in Argentina with whom he emailed/texted about emotions and relationships. In his own words: "We swapped e-mails, whatever..." PURE EMO!
EXHIBIT 2: The press conference. In contrast to most politicians' revelations of infidelity -- which unfurl with a defensive, android predictability -- Sanford explored the deepest emotional caves of his being with a teary-eyed grandeur. That he undertook this psychosexual spelunking on live television is pure emo. I raise my lighter to him.
