No one feels sorry for Eliot Spitzer, least of all me. But his fall is a farce ... and pile it on to the indictments of the religious and ideological dimensions of American culture ... and more than a farce, a tragedy. We have made the moral bar for public office so high, so perilous, so idiosyncratic, that it is a wonder that anyone shy of Jeeezus is allowed to run. That's how they handle it in Iran, by the way. Only they call Jeeezus by a different name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was an idiot, and arrogant, and all that ... I am referring to Spitzer not to any putative Jeeezi. But so the flock whot, if you grok my vowel dissimulation.
Let's look at the great mystery ... it turns out that ... that people have sex. Yes, they do. People have been having sex for a long time. People also pay for sex. They pay for sex in many ways, and it is only a small minority of those who pay for sex who do so by transferring amounts roughly equivalent to a happy monthly wage for most us in exchange for present and future considerations.
Frankly, I tend to be impressed by a man who knows that he knows how to pick his whores, and how to treat 'em well. Can anyone in whose mouth butter assumes its natural warmed-up fluid state actually believe that perky Ashley Alexandra Dupre would be better off or happier in a job at MacDonalds or perhaps as a meter maid or, gawd phorphend, as a state bureaucrat processing license applications in Albany. Not saying that I recommend a life of prostitution, but there are plenty of folks who have done well by it, and that goes lo these centuries and millennia.
The morally rousable will point to the poor crack addict whores who people the dark alleys roughly a 13 minute walk from where I write. But I aver that their biggest problem is not prostitution but the illegality that accompanies it and serves as a shield between them and help and care. How does busting them, dragging them to jail, and then dumping them back into the hands of their pimp actually help them? Riddle me that.
But I digress.
So, let us accept as our starting point that people have sex ... yes they do. Let me go further in asserting that American society right now, as we speak, is the most sexually active, sexually diverse, and sexually prolific society in the history of humanity. Gosh darn, it's a heck of a lot of fun ... barrel of monkeys. The vast majority of sex going on is victimless ... sure we have rape, and we have coercion, and we have manipulation. But some degree of evil attends all human endeavor. Even figure skating has its Tanya Hardings, for crying out loud, and no one is calling for an end to figure skating as far as I know. Imagine if we applied our fevered public face against sex to religion ...
Governor Spitzer today admitted that he is a member of a church that requires its members to pay for services, and moreover, Governor Spitzer secretly wrote large checks to a institution that lies, bedevils the innocent, manipulates the hapless into wasting perfectly good Sundays listening to their nonsense, and propagates fantastic idiocies as irreducible truths. The National Commission on Good Sense is outraged. Rationalists all over the country are demanding his resignation. The governor is currently cloistered with his priest although reliable reports indicate that both are still fully clothed. No choir boys are known to be involved at this juncture.
There is much falderal about feeling sorry for his wife. Let me state my bias ... I have been in three fabulous committed relationships, 10, 6, and 10 years and all of them open. I would have been in no relationships had they been "closed". Of course, now I am happily single and about as far from the dating scene as a jackass from a salmon fishery, but I think you grok the nature of my approach to sexuality. I think it is one of the pleasures that gawd gave us, and she-he who forsakes it gives up a good time when few await us beyond the grave. There should be no coercion in matters of sex, but let anyone who wants it seek it out.
The point of regulating sex is to regulate human economic, political, and social power. The point of the monotheistic religious loathing of sex is that sexually free people have no need of priests or their black magic. The point of applying ludicrous sexual rules to politicos is not the "honesty" thang, but to make sure that free thinkers play no part in public life.
One day, some horny politico is going to give a speech like this:
Okay, you caught me. I am not going to resign because I am a good person, an honest person. My wife knew I screwed around, and she told me more than once that if a whore kept me from buggin her at 3 in the morning because woody was interfering with my sleep ... well, bully for her. The only thing is that she has always insisted that I never see the same one more than twice. Anyway, I still love the old broad, and I hope she doesn't sue me for everything I am worth. I promise to publish the names of all my whores, but only 96 hours after we meet so they have time to change their aliases.
Larry Craig came close, but not close enough.
Photos of Arod by various homoerotic images about town, all from a walk with Loki a few weeks ago ... Rufus Wainwright, some advertising dude, something crypto-classical in the Mission.
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