[Marxism] Katha Pollitt on the Spitzer's deeply deserved ruin

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is the article that comes nearest to expressing my view of this matter.
I really think that Spitzer belongs in jail for putting his wife in the
position of having to do this. And I hope the next wave of feminism forces
the men to face the music the same way they enjoyed it -- without the
support of their "family."

This is one of the best exposures of the myth of bourgeois "family values"
since The Communist Manifesto.

I think Spitzer is a deeply ugly character and I have no regrets, to put it
mildly, about the loss of his "promising political career."  We need to lose
many more such careers, in my opinion.

Yes, there were violations of privacy rights and so on, but these are
standard, as no one knows better than Spitzer.  I admit that I have always
hated prosecutors and especially "crusading prosecutors" who are often the
most brutally heedless about the rights of defendants and witnesses. Of
course, once the Republican administration realized they had nailed Spitzer,
I am sure they experienced a collective orgasm. But so what?

Was Spitzer targeted? I tend to suspect not. He was engaging in a wealth of
illegal activities, most of which he had put people in the pokey for.  I
suspect his  bank really did find illegal activity that they felt obliged to
report. Most likely, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what he was up
to. He was an accident trying to happen. 

Personally I think prostitution should be decriminalized, and I also tend to
oppose laws targeting johns.  That might make me hesitate to support
prosecuting Spitzer, but it would never have stopped Spitzer.  But I believe
prostitution is a morally and socially criminal business, exploiting women
savagely and doing other harms.  I am just not convinced it can be
eliminated through repression. But eliminating it is what I aim at.

But I don't think that Spitzer's activities are no skin off our nose, I
should care why, or whatever his defenders are saying at the moment,
including the unspeakable Alan Dershowitz.

Also, I see no necessary connection between his downfall and the current
lenders' crisis. I see no sign that Spitzer represented any problem for them
as governor. 

Unlike the article below, I think the prostitute "Kristen" is a victim
regardless of what offers she gets as a result of her 15 minutes, and that
she will probably remain a victim no matter what kind of a killing she makes
for the moment.

I hope Spitzer's wife takes him for everything that the feds don't get.
Fred Feldman

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/pollitt\

subject to debate by Katha Pollitt

John Q. Public
[from the March 31, 2008 issue]

Just once I'd like to see a male politician caught in a sex scandal stand up
there at the press conference all by himself. You want to be an alpha male
with extra helpings of testosterone and appetites that cannot be denied?
Fine, but if you get caught, Be. A. Man. Don't drag your wife in front of
the cameras to prove how strong your marriage is. Practice saying these
words: "No, darling, I could never live with myself if I let you humiliate
your self in public to help my career. I know people always want to blame
the wife, but this is all my fault. Besides, I don't want our children to
think marriage means wives have to put up with their husband's crap--that's
what prostitutes are for! No, wait..." 

Silda Wall Spitzer looked so sad and stricken standing next to her husband,
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, as he issued a brief statement apologizing
to his "family" and "the public"--in effect acknowledging the truth of
revelations that he was Client 9, who had paid a prostitution ring called
the Emperors Club VIP for (very expensive) sex. Has nothing changed since
1969, when poor Joan Kennedy faced reporters with Ted after Chappaquiddick?
In just the past decade we've had, among others, Suzanne Craig, Wendy
Vitter, Dina McGreevey and, of course, Hillary Clinton. I'm not saying the
wife has to divorce her ethically challenged spouse, although, come to think
of it, that would make a change. But just once I'd like to see her skip the
press conference and fly off to Paris instead. And then I'd like to see a
political husband stand by his wife when she's caught, oh, I don't know,
giving a no-show job to her tennis instructor. Except that particular shoe
never does end up on the masculine foot, does it? Because female politicians
don't go to whorehouses, or troll for sex in public toilets, or give a top
job to their completely unqualified lesbian girlfriend while pretending to
have the perfect white-bread family. They are too busy finding clothes that
are businesslike but not mannish, and feminine but not sexy, which takes
pretty much all day. But if the roles were reversed, do you think her
husband would stand up there, bravely, nobly, silently, as Cuckold 1? No,
he'd be in the corner bar--or down at his lawyer's. 

People may use words like stoic and dignified to describe the
stand-by-your-man act, but really what they're thinking is either doormat or
enabler. (Dr. Laura Schlessinger, on the Today show, to a startled Meredith
Vieira: "When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings
sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a
success, to make him feel like her hero, he's very susceptible to the charm
of some other woman making him feel what he needs. And these days, women
don't spend a lot of time thinking about how they can give their men what
they need." This of Silda Spitzer, who gave up her career to facilitate her
husband's political ambitions! If the New York Post is correct that his use
of prostitutes goes back ten years, he started when his wife was raising
three small children--nice.) 

With Silda's ashen face still vividly in the public mind, this might not be
the best moment for male bon vivants like Alan Dershowitz and Bill Maher to
pooh-pooh prostitution as a trivial private matter that no one really cares
about--it's just how men are. And probably I would be more sympathetic
another time to the notion, expressed by some young feminists and
professional sex workers, that the real victim of this scandal is "Kristen."
"Whether or not she will face prison time," reads an e-mail from a coalition
of sex workers, "'Kristen' has been dragged into the spotlight and will be
subjected to public humiliation." Prison? Public humiliation? More likely, a
spread in Playboy, a book deal and a new career teaching New Jersey house
wives how to empower themselves through pole dancing. 

There are a lot of things I don't understand about the governor's behavior.
Like, why didn't he just take a few hundred extra dollars out of his
personal checking account every few days and pay for his $4,000 good times
that way, instead of channeling funds into exactly the kind of shell account
he, as New York Attorney General, encouraged banks to monitor? And what was
he thinking, this famously arrogant and rigid scourge of Wall Street
wrongdoers, when he busted a high-end escort service in 2004 during the same
period that he was reportedly a john himself? ("This was a sophisticated and
lucrative operation with a multi-tiered management structure,'' he announced
at the time. "It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.") 

Some have described Spitzer's fall as Shakespearean, but the character he
most resembles is not a tragic hero like Lear or Macbeth; it's the
puritanical zealot Angelo from Measure for Measure, who sets out to enforce
Vienna's long-disused death penalty for extramarital sex: 

You may not so extenuate his offence,
For I have had such faults; but rather tell me,
When I, that censure him, do so offend,
Let mine own judgment pattern out my death,
And nothing come in partial. Sir, he must die. 

Angelo is a lustful hypocrite, far worse than the trollops and roisterers
and young lovers he condemns, and he's eventually caught in a sting
operation. Since the play is a comedy, his only punishment is loss of
office, and marriage to the woman he jilted and who loves him despite all.
Governor Spitzer, who as I finished this column resigned, with his wife once
more appearing by his side, could do a lot worse. Meanwhile, his downfall
means joy on Wall Street and, no doubt, satisfaction in the White House
too--another Democratic pol brought low, whether or not through Republican
skulduggery, as some suspect. Hillary Clinton loses a superdelegate but
perhaps picks up some votes from women fed up with male politicians. And
there's a promotion for Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, a well-liked
liberal Democrat who's not only black but legally blind. Only in America! 




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