©2008 UrbisMedia
I hate morning television, in fact I hate most television. But I was up in the middle of the night with jet-lag, having flown fourteen hours to Hong Kong, so I turned on the set at the earliest for some distraction. Eliot Spitzer was already all over the news, being masticated with glee by people who are called, inappropriately, “the media.”
Sex, Americans love it, and hate it. They (I can call “them” “they” since I am a temporary “expat”) are obsessed by it the way a bunch of Puritan prelates having a circle jerk are obsessed by it. They wallow in the sinfulness of it; the forbidden fruit tastes so much better, and like having a cigarette afterwards, there is the lingering twinge of guilt and the frisson of anticipation for the next time. They love it, they hate it, they can’t do without its “sinfulness.”
Spitzer, the unlikely “hero” who went after white collar criminals and rode his legal gunslinger AG image, to the governor’s mansion in Albany. Let’s face it, he guy looks like one of those “ugly dolls” that are all the rage, and seems barely taller than the podium. The picture the “press” enjoyed running of him was of his Muppet-mouth all contorted in shame and what remained of his bravado. Now he has gone down like a gunslinger from a ricochet from his own six-shooter (forgive the simile, please).1
Then along comes Dr. Laura Schlesinger, the Republican advice-show, bitch-bot, hyping a book she wrote about why guys like Spitzer cheat on their wives—basically (and I think I got the right from the show, not the book) because it’s the wives’ fault. Dr. Laura says the wives should look to what they are “doing wrong,” and not blame their husbands.2 Wow! Mrs. Spitzer needs to run out and get a copy of that gem, instead of playing “stand by your man” while he temporizes over whether his peccadilloes3 will end his political career. (A day later it did; the gunslinger bit the dust).
See, that’s what American attitudes about sex will get you. A crusading governor goes in the tank and a crusading sex advice BS artiste gets free publicity for her book. And some people call it “American civilization.”
Spitzer is another bright guy with a loose zipper, but not bright enough to realize that you don’t piss-off a lot of people with money and then go off banging $1000 and hour hookers and think they are not going to get hold of your you-know-whats and squeeze them till your eyes water. Bye-bye Eliot, you have become the Leno-Letterman joke writer’s dream for a few weeks, and this one will be your epitaph (maybe earlier than would have been.)
But while I detest Schlesinger, who trades on the American sex-sickness and adds to its inanity, I have some sympathy for Eliot Spitzer, because, in some sense, he is a victim of that sickness, as well as his own concupiscent-stupidity. Much has been made that he may have committed a crime in his escapades—the Mann Act, for getting an under-age girl to cross a state line—for example. Give me a break! I think this was last used on ancient tennis star Bill Tilden. Spitzer’s bigger crime is getting his wife to stand next to him and have to suffer for his deeds (not according to Schlesinger, of course, since Mrs. Spitzer needs time to find the blame in herself).
The real perversity here—not to excuse in any way the harm Spitzer did to his wife and children and the nine American males who have been faithful to their marriage vows—is American’s just can’t seem to let go of that Puritan heritage of running around the village whispering, or shouting, “guess who is porking who (whom?)? Dust off the pillory, get that old corpse of Clinton down off the gallows, we got fresh meat.” All over America bosses are “doing” their secretaries and subordinates, professors are “doing” their graduate assistants, politicians are “doing” their staff, and where is the “Forty-million-man march on Washington” for a mass confessional, a massive public mea culpa. Adulterous vow-breakers arise, come forward with your secret charge cards for the motel trysts and “tennis” bracelets” for your ladies who make your secret porn site fantasies come true (for a little extra)! Confess! Dr. Laura says it’s OK. It’s not your fault. It’s your wife’s fault. Get her the book! You thought the Koran was the ticket to a suicide bomber’s paradise? Dr. Laura’s book is a free pass to “Mr. Goodtime’s” paradise. It comes with everything but a Taliban’s turban.
Do Spitzer’s adulteries make him a worse political leader? Did Clinton’s? No. And they were not hypocrites—the way Larry Craig is and was—about saying we should not do what they have given themselves permission to do. It doesn’t make them good husbands who kept their nuptial vows, but they didn’t overthrow the Constitution they way Bush and his minion Mukasey have. We just can’t seem to draw a sensible line between the public and the private, as we can’t seem to between church and state—and here they intersect at the corner of Hubris and Hypocrisy.5
Schlesinger’s crime—a crime against logic and reason—is far greater in my scheme of things. She might place the scene of the crime where it belongs, in the relationship between marriage partners, but then perverts justice by blaming the victim. She is one sick woman, and she wants to pass it on to her sisters. In America she will probably get richer doing it.6
Eliot is probably toast. America seems to prefer blurring important lines to delineating them, whether it’s about worship, water-boarding, or what whores have to do with the political system. But Eliot is really toast because nothing in American draws a crowd to the television more than an “execution”—particularly if it is preceded by a castration.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.15.2008)
1. Spitzer earned his bones bringing down the Gambino crime family, then defeated Dennis Vacco for NY Attorney General, then John Faso for governor, not to mention suing Richard Grasso, former Chairman of the NYSE. So what it is with this guy and Italian Americans? Doesn’t Princeton-Harvard rich-boy Eliot know that when the going gets tough, the goombahs get tougher?
2. I think the book is titled The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. That is just one reason I hate this woman, the other is that she gets to hype this garbage on television and I’m doing interviews for the South China Morning Post to hype my new novel to the limited English reading pubic of Hong Kong. And, of course, she is another despicable right-wing radio talk host.
3. Or would that be “peckerdilloes”?
4. Look, post-Lewinsky, it should be no mystery: it takes blood to make a guy a “stand-up” guy and, when that blood goes south to perform its stand-up function, it deprives the brain of the much-needed blood it needs to formulate the crucial postulate “Is it really myself that I am about to screw? Forget the Harvard-Yale-Princeton education; “Mr. Goodtime” went along, but only for the ride (and the coeds).
5 My nine Republican readers—No, they are not the same nine who have been faithful to their marriage vows!—are wondering why I haven’t put Larry Craig in this group. Because he is a hypocrite, and is still lying about it, that’s why.
6. Yes, I realize that there are some “un-responsive” wives, as there are such husbands, and that men are not the only ones to break marriage vows. The same goes for the reverse situation.