Sherry Chandler

Remember here a while back I went on a rant about the implications of considering Barack Obama as a type of the American Adam? Well, today in the Washington Post, Richard Russo muses on the novelistic possibilities of that American Adam, Eliot Spitzer:

Back when I was teaching fiction writing, I used to pitch my students, especially the beginners, on complexity. They seemed to think that readers would be attracted to their characters’ virtue and would recognize shared humanity in their strength and courage; I argued — perversely they thought — that unrelenting virtue is not just unrealistic but uninteresting.

Gatsby, I reminded them, is a damned fool who falls in love with a woman unworthy of his affection. Because he’s blind, he does everything wrong, and we sympathize because we, too, have been blind and done things wrong. Granted, Huck Finn is an innocent, uncorrupted (as yet) by a depraved world, but he’s never more interesting than when he’s convinced of his own depravity. We like him right from the start, but when he says, “Okay, I’ll go to hell” — that’s when we fall in love.

For most people, mine is a losing argument, and one night recently, as I stayed up watching television coverage of Eliot Spitzer’s disgrace, I found myself losing it all over again as the media turned a complex drama into a simple story line: Now that he’s no longer their unsullied white knight, Spitzer must be a complete hypocrite. Later, I lay awake in the dark thinking about how a novel about Eliot Spitzer might go and what kind of novel it would be.

… people (in fiction, in life) aren’t meant to be saints, or to be treated like saints. That’s the hard lesson Hawthorne’s Reverend Dimmesdale learned from the pulpit.

For years now, my Eliot (himself no stranger to the pulpit) has been besieged in restaurants, on the street, everywhere, by people telling him to keep fighting the good fight because, Eliot, you’re our best hope in a world that’s as depraved as Huck Finn’s. Even his prostitutes agree — don’t they?

I cannot speak for the real Eliot, but some part of my Eliot has known all along that he’s no saint, that he’s not anybody’s best hope, not even his own. He knows this even as some other part of him believes what people are telling him because, of course, he wants to. This has been his true conflict all along, and finally, explosively, it has been resolved.

I clipped a whole bunch out of the middle of this but it really is worth a read. It isn’t that Spitzer’s pattern is new to us, after all, so it must be part of the American or just the human condition. There’s been a whole lot of moralizing going on, which is fun when it’s the other side that’s getting roasted, but not so much when it’s your own good guy going down. But what I see is the perpetual naïvité of the citizenry with regard to their public figures. We’re always looking for the next saint, the next hero, to lead us out of the darkness.

The attacks on Silda Spitzer are infuriating and remind me of the attacks on Hillary Clinton. Maybe Hillary hatred is as simple as the fact that we can’t forgive her for being wronged. But am I mistaken in thinking we don’t see this kind of thing when a Vitter is caught whoring or a Craig tapping his foot in a bathroom stall? Echidne says Silda Spitzer’s situation is a click experience for some younger women.

Elsewhere Yale Law School professor Jack M. Balkin looks at the implications of the Spitzer case and living in a surveillance state:

The Spitzer story shows both the promise and the threat of these developments. On the one hand, reporting financial transactions makes the job of law enforcement easier, and it uncovers crimes (and terrorist plots) that might never be discovered otherwise. Mandatory disclosure (or in this case, voluntary disclosure by banks) of private individual’s financial transactions, and sharing of data between intelligence services, federal, state and local law enforcement helps the state identify patterns of criminal activity, prevent crimes before they occur, and punish them after the fact. These techniques and technologies allow governments to do the jobs entrusted to them more powerfully and more efficiently than ever before.

On the other hand, these developments carry all of the potential risks of a powerful National Surveillance State: Governments can make mistakes in assessing levels of criminality and dangerousness; and their data mining models may characterize innocent activity as suspicious. Without sufficient oversight and checking functions, government actors may misuse the additional knowledge they gain, for example, by instigating abusive prosecutions, or creating discriminatory systems for access to public and private services (like banks, airports, government entitlements and so on). And the more powerful government becomes in knowing what its citizens are doing, the easier it becomes for government to control people’s behavior.

…

Whether you like or fear the National Surveillance state, it is not a utopia or dystopia of the future; it is already here. It is the way we will govern and be governed in the years ahead. Spitzer’s crime is his own; the techniques of surveillance, collation and analysis that caught him are ours and they will be applied to all of us.

I found both these links at War and Piece.

Update: But enough prosing. We’ve read the novel, now it’s time for the poem, Mad Kane’s Ode to Eliot Spitzer.

Carp, carpe diem, carpet bomb,
like shooting goldfish in a barrel. Seize
the day. Harvest the democracy. No
one could have imagined a smoking gun,
a mushroom cloud. But stop
your carping, go and do your shopping,
a little shock, a little awe,
and folk will shower flowers
on our Humvees like there’s no tomorrow.
They will pluck the myrtle and the parsley
to crown our crusading heads. I wouldn’t neocon
ya, freedom will reign, dominoes will fall,
we will chew up the world like very hungry
hegemons. What you have to understand
is the oil will flow like wine.

Today is the last day of Winter Soldier:

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan will feature testimony from U.S. veterans who served in those occupations, giving an accurate account of what is really happening day in and day out, on the ground.

The four-day event will bring together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan - and present video and photographic evidence. In addition, there will be panels of scholars, veterans, journalists, and other specialists to give context to the testimony. These panels will cover everything from the history of the GI resistance movement to the fight for veterans’ health benefits and support.

When: Thursday March 13 to Sunday March 16

How to Watch.