In a moment of exceptional candour, New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer admitted to calling in the professionals in the handrail waxing business. The episode set him back $4,300, plus his career.
Of course he’s apologized to his wife, neighbours, the state of New York, the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man, the Police, and the guy on 42nd street who talks to his invisible friends. Very nice of him to humiliate his wife in public, by the way.
The screeching hypocrisy is that Eliot Spitzer had a reputation for being a law and order, go after the big guys kind of Attorney General. That’s the part that galls the most: The hypocrisy.
The incomprehensible, in all the sordid sex scandals involving politicians since the dawn of time, is this: Can’t you just keep it in your pants? Yes, I know that men are ruled by testosterone, the Little Head ruling the Big Head argument, but it actually goes deeper than that. What the real intoxicant is not sex, but power.
Power, said Hank Kissinger, is the ultimate aphrodisiac and power does truly warp people even more than testosterone. Some wiser observers than I have determined that the majority of difficulties on the planet come from those with power being grimly determined not to share it, as well as being oriented to using their power flagrantly to demonstrate that they have power and can wield it.
War, for example, is just a power dynamic taken to an extreme. However, closer to home, things like racism are also power dynamic issues: The outsiders want some and the insiders don’t want to give up any. The boss has plenty but won’t let you do the work the right way, in order to demonstrate his power over you. The schoolyard bully knows that he can scare the crap out of you, by making you feel like you have no power, so you give him your lunch money in exchange for not getting beaten.
To carry the argument further, Eliot Spitzer (or any other pol caught dipping his wick) knows that he has all kinds of power and is so besotted by it, he feels he can ignore the rules the rest of us work under. Even bolder, he thinks that if caught up to the bristles in a giraffe, he can make the news media shut up about it.
This presumption has been proven wrong so many times (the media won’t shut up about it) that one would figure politicians would eventually learn the lesson. Even toddlers understand ‘red element on stove means pain’ after one test of the lesson, and usually the toddler will stay away from a hot element on a stove. Empirically, this tells me that politicians are dumber than toddlers.
Again, empirically, this demonstrates that power is even more of a common-sense killer than testosterone. In the grips of a testosterone flood, a male with a raging circus tent can play one-handed Spit in the Carpet with Ms Thumb and her Four Fabulous Friends to get over it.
Someone in the grips of a Power Flood can’t actually do anything to to get over it.
Here’s the hook: We give these clowns the power over us. We willingly submit to their posturing and posing during elections and mark our ballots. In other parts of life, we do the same thing. We let people exercise power over us and we feel miserable about it. Why do we have to feel that way? The answer is we don’t have to feel miserable about it.
Yes, there has to be rules and there has to be sanctions when the rules aren’t followed. Without rules we would have loons driving 190 kph down the wrong lane of the highway, drunk, wearing a pair of granny panties on their head and singing "Mambo Number Five" at the top of their lungs, in a Porsche.
Rules I don’t mind, as the common-sense ones keep dumb humans from being truly dumb and often protect us from our own dumbness. But rules designed to demonstrate power without any benefit to the rest of us, are simply stupid.
Which brings us back to Eliot Spitzer, or any of the other recent crop of wick dippers, toe tappers, goat ropers and reality stylists. If you want to climb up on the mountain top of being a paragon of virtue, be prepared to act as a paragon of virtue, in everything you do. Until then, perhaps you should just shut the hell up and keep it in your pants.
RoadDave 