OTHER THAN THAT, MRS. SPITZER, HOW WAS THE PLAY?

3/10/08

Eliot Spitzer is just too juicy a target after his reprehensible, but predictable (After all, he is a politician; see my 2/18/08 post, “CYNICAL ENOUGH FOR YA?”) conduct. Plenty of people are going to have a field day with this latest poltroon who thought he was going to be President of the United States one day. Come to think of it, perhaps Eliot the Lech will be president one day. What has he done that virtually every other aspirant for that office has not done, literally or figuratively, at one time or another? Every politician engages in meretricious behavior of one kind or another; Spitzer just got caught in an especially salacious form of such behavior. And we keep electing these clowns, so whence does our right to complain and moralize arise? But I digress.

So I am not going to beat up on Eliot Spencer, but not because this particular popinjay doesn’t deserve it. No, I am refraining from castigating Mr. Spitzer because plenty of less insightful thinkers will be doing that over the next few days. Instead, I am going to tee off on another target, and I can already hear the pious, self-righteous accusations of “Blaming the Victim!” However, such callow codswallop never deterred me from saying things that had to be said, and won’t in this case, either.

What in the world was Mrs. Spitzer doing up there when her sexual bindlestiff of a husband made his eminently predictable, “Hey, let’s see if they’ll fall for this pile of malodorous baloney” statement? Why do these wives of political and financial powerbrokers feel the need to stand by their men when those men spit in their faces? Even if (and this is a huge “if”) this came out of the blue, that there was no hint of such conduct in anything that her husband had done or said up until the point he was caught, she should not be absolving him of such conduct. As a woman who is especially close to me said on viewing the Spitzers doing their shuffling two-step on stage, “If he doesn’t show up in some emergency room tonight with his male member severed, she ought to be ashamed of herself.” (Doubtless if I ever entertained thoughts of such extracurricular activity, that notion has been permanently removed from my thought process.)

More likely, this did not come out of the blue, but Mrs. Spitzer somehow managed to forgive, or overlook, her husband’s conduct. The more mawkish among us will say something like “Oh, but she loves him!” Hmm… The more realistic (some might wrongly say cynical) among us will counter that this is probably just another case of the wives’ of powerful and/or wealthy men overlooking the priapean escapades of their men as long as the access to power, money, fame, etc., continues.

We could call this tendency of the wives of powerful men to stand by their men for solipsistic reasons the Hillary Clinton Syndrome, but that would be too easy. Perhaps it would be more apt to call it the Carmella Soprano Syndrome.