1 Boring Old Man

Eliot Spitzer’s "Emperor’s Club"

… The real lesson here is the continuity between Spitzer’s professional career and the scandal that ended it. The common theme of his public and personal life is identified, ironically enough, in the preposterously pompous name of the call girl ring Spitzer patronized: the "Emperor’s Club VIP." That says it all, doesn’t it? Spitzer wanted to puff himself up as an "emperor," a big-shot VIP who is the center of everyone’s attention, with everyone else just there to bow to his whims.

The detail that really made this psychology clear–the detail that perfectly fit the psychological profile of a sociopath–was the way Spitzer dragged out his ashen-faced, shell-shocked wife to appear by his side at both of his press conferences this week. Her presence was unnecessary for any rational reason, but she was there because a sociopath views other people are mere pawns to be manipulated to serve his whims–so if he feels he needs Silda to stand by him to show her support, out she comes, and the psychological cost to her doesn’t even register on his consciousness.

The tawdry incident that touched off this scandal is, in fact, the least despicable part of the whole affair. At least the call girl was, to all appearances, a willing participant and well paid. Spitzer was even a generous tipper, we’ve been told. But Spitzer’s professional life, rather than being better than his personal life, was worse. If in his personal life he paid money for attractive young women to create the illusion of his own supreme importance, in his professional life he achieved this illusion by abusing the power of the state, acting as a bully who threatened to "steamroller" over other people’s lives and careers.

Spitzer’s "crusading" career as New York’s attorney general is a catalog of abuses of prosecutorial power. He tried cases in the media instead of the courts by releasing embarrassing documents at press conferences and leaking carefully selected facts to sympathetic reporters. This is slander under the color of law, an attempt to ruin a target’s reputation without actually have to prove the allegations against him. Spitzer smeared his victims by digging into their personal lives and spreading rumors about their infidelity (another disgusting irony of this affair). He blackmailed businesses into paying massive fines by threatening to file corporate indictments that would cripple a firm’s ability to operate, even if it were eventually acquitted. He threatened respectable businessmen with the prospect of being hauled off in handcuffs in front of their families.

He did everything he could, in short, to bully the rest of the world into a solicitous state of submission–the state of terrorized subjects groveling before a tyrannical emperor…

It just keeps building, the Spitzer story. And it’s becoming something bigger than just the story of Eliot Spitzer. It’s becoming a paradigm for our disgust with our politicians. Nixon was bad – a crazy unprincipled man. But Clinton was, in some ways, even worse. He "acted the fool." The Bush Administration, however, has been the worst. No matter which side of our bitter political divide you live on, you would not describe either Bush or Cheney as remotely truthful. So, now the hypocrite of the century stands before us – Eliot Spitzer. He may be a Democrat, and he may be a reformer, but even with those monikers, he has behaved like a sleaze-bag – hardly comporting himself as an honest man. Then we find out that he is a very, very dishonest man. This article dubs him a sociopath. That’s something I don’t much approve of, using Psychiatric Diagnoses as derisive labels, but in this case, it seems justified. It’s what I was alluding to in my last post about his "false self." Probably another way to say it would do just as well. Eliot Spitzer is a crook [a dishonest person, especially a sharper, swindler, or thief]. In psychological circles, a sociopath [psychopath, criminal, crook] is a person who uses communication not as a tool to convey information or meaning. Instead, such a person uses communication to do the opposite – to create an illusion – some way of distorting reality that allows the person to take unfair advantage of others. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, all are crooks. Their campaign to go to war in Iraq was a carefully orchestrated illusion designed [successfully] to lead us into a war they wanted to fight for other reasons. It was a conscious lie. It was communication not to convey a truth to the American people. It was an illusion, a lie, creating a false reality that fit Mr. Bush’s plans.