Earlier this week, I recorded a commentary for “All Things Considered.” It didn’t run — apparently, some news of some sort had be reported. The text is after the jump.
Frank Bruni, normally the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times, asks the real question brought on by the serial scandals/admissions/accusations concerning the private lives of the Governors of the tri-state area, or, as it should be known from now on, the Northeast Threesome:
[A]re the rest of us idling in the sexual slow lane? Come to think of it, are we even traveling the same highway?
I’m joking, sort of, but the fact of the matter is that Eliot Spitzer, James McGreevey and David Paterson have, among their other contributions to public life, provided a behavioral yardstick as unsettling as any that Alfred Kinsey or Masters and Johnson ever produced. They’ve underscored our flimsy grasp of what goes on inside marriages and outside of them, making us feel like sheltered boobs…
It’s not just about political careers dashed and campaign funds pillaged. It’s about libido and limits. About where philanderers go (the Days Inn?), what they hunger for (T.G.I. Friday’s?), and when prophylactics come into play.
Huh… what an interesting notion… this idea that stories of remarkably adventurous sex and/or other kinds of moral misadventure make the rest of us vanilla folk wonder what the heck is going on, and what we’re missing. If only a representative member of the Rest of Us were to explore these other lives, and report back! That would be cool, wouldn’t it?
Oh, and to answer his questions: sometimes; you’d be surprised; and most people, escorts or not, insist on them.
Sorry for the silence… I actually wrote a post the other day, then thought to send it instead to my editor at ATC… she liked it, and it’ll be broadcast as a commentary soon.
In the meantime, whoever this Equapluh person is, he/she/it really wants to post comments on this blog. I realized if you take away the hyperlinks for fake Viagra, you get a kind of lyric, almost Emily Dickinsonian poetry:
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So interesting there was that I fell asleep…
I’ll be joining Talk of the Nation today in the fourth quarter hour to comment on Spitzer. 2:45 or so eastern time… tune in.
Update — Wow, live radio. You say things, and then you think later, did I say that?
Here’s some further, day-later thoughts on two things I did say:
First, my spinning out a theory that Mr. Spitzer came late, as it were, to his expensive hobby, perhaps even getting the idea, and even the website URL, from one of the targets of his many investigations. News reports today indicate that (duh) I was wrong, that Spitzer had been hiring call girls for a decade or more. Even if those news reports don’t turn out to be true — I’m sure there are a lot of false claims and claimants swirling around the case, right now — it’s obvious that I was laying out a storyline I’d prefer if I were writing this movie, rather than any evidence. I will stand by my claim that Spitzer’s legendary personal anger at the targets of his prosecutions was real, and was directed, I would guess, partly at the fact that these guys could get away with all kinds of misbehavior that was forbidden to him.
Second, my statement that prostitution should be legal. I’ve thought about it, and still stand by it — understanding that there is an important distinction between saying something should be legal (like, say, smoking cigarettes) and declaring it to be right. I know there are a lot of credible experts (and I am not one) who speak of the destruction and depredation that prostitution does to women caught up in it. But I would respond that certainly, legal prohibition has not done them any good, and (as with drugs) since this business is removed from any legal oversight, we’re pretty much letting the criminals do whatever the hell they want to whomever they can. I compare it to the porn industry, which these days operates in the open as a legal business. The women in porn — for the most part — have chosen that profession freely, if not perhaps wisely. They work under certain voluntary and legal protections that increase their safety and security. With each passing year, they gain a larger share of the financial reward and the power in that business. You may argue that it is wrong, and destructive for the women involved. But making it illegal (again) clearly won’t stop it, and would make things much, much worse for the people in it. I await a good counterargument as to how, and why, prostitution is so different.
(This opinion, BTW, like all such represented here, is entirely my own, and not that of NPR, or WWDTM, or my friends, or anyone else at all.)
UPDATE THE SECOND — my mother just left me a message saying that she was reading my blog at 3 AM and wanted to let me know that she agreed with me that prostitution should be legal. If that’s not a sign from God to never speak about such topics again, I don’t know what is.
That quote, of course, is from “Kristin,” the young woman who was paid handsomely (can you be paid beautifully?) to travel from New York to Washington, DC on February 13th (the day before Valentines Day! as two women of my acquaintance pointed out) to spend some quality time with Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-Toast) at the Mayflower Hotel. “Kristin” was talking about her understanding of the stark nature of her profession, and in a single phrase, dismissing all the verbal persiflage (”model,” “escort,” “companionship”) hanging off the modern iteration of the oldest profession. She’s not a moron. She’s a prostitute. And her customer on this occasion is… well, what? It’s a persistent mystery how men who are so smart could be do dumb. Somebody should write a book about it.
As the author of a book about it, what’s my guess? Well, who the hell knows, at this point, but we can make some suppositions:
Many, if not most of the politicians who get caught in sexual scandals (vastly outnumbered by those who indulge but are never caught) seem to treat their sexual conquests as yet just yet another accomplishment to be checked off the list. They want a corner office, they want advancement, they want power, they want women, and they’re not used to being denied. Bill Clinton has become the poster boy for this sort of thing, but a better example is JFK, whose sexual appetites and casual indulgence of same put him in the same near-pathological stratosphere as Bob Crane. JFK indulged his desire for, say, a threesome in the White House swimming pool the same way you or I might decide to sneak down to the fridge at 11 PM for a piece of cake. Except we don’t need to ask our senior aides to procure cake for us.
That ain’t Spitzer. We know this much from the information released so far: Spitzer did his business with an extremely expensive private escort service, which presumably charged its high rates based on the promise of absolute discretion. He was afraid of getting caught, as is also evidenced by the fact that the conversations about fees and deposits, etc. caught on tape by the Feds were all with “Client 9″ himself. One of the oddest things about this whole episode is the image of the Governor of the Empire State himself negotiating with a madam over deposit money. Second, this was not an isolated incident. The New York Times reports today that what sparked the Federal investigation was a bank noticing significant and suspicious movements of money in Spitzer’s accounts. He was trying to hide something. They thought it was bribes. If only.
So: not a reckless egotist, indulging his appetites with no care for appearances, trusting that those around him would keep his secrets for their own good. Instead: a man desperately trying to keep his sinning private, even as it cost him tens of thousands of dollars, and, long ago, put everything he had devoted his entire life to at profound risk. We can smell the shame from here.
Ultimately, this is the sort of thing you need a psychologist to figure out, not a humorist. I would guess, though… looking at Spitzer’s career of moralizing, public rectitude, his promise to Clean Up New York, Wall Street, The Mob, Albany, etc, etc, etc, the personal virtue that so inspired his followers and so annoyed his enemies (there was cheering on the floor of the Stock Exchange when the news broke) that whatever happened in room 871 of the Mayflower, the odd and ungrantable request that Kristin handled by saying, in her account, “Listen dude, you really want the sex?” — whatever it was, it involved Mr. Spitzer behaving very very badly.
It’s hard out there for a saint. More this weekend.
While in Aspen last weekend, after the show I did at the Wheeler Opera House, Graham Veysey from Plum TV came by to do an interview on the deck of our borrowed condo. Plum TV is a cable network for resort communities — Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Aspen, Vail, etc. Graham did a terrific job with it… I particularly like the bit where they impose my face onto a Gustav Dore etching of Hell. Check it out.
A commenter noted that I don’t have anything posted in the running category, yet… so here’s something. When I was interviewed by Runner’s World last year, I complained, more or less in jest (actually, less) that one of the disadvantages of running as a hobby was that there was so little to buy… all guys love to go out and go shopping for stuff. Well, we don’t call it shopping. We call it “equipping ourselves.” But in running, you buy some shoes, you buy some shorts and a top, you’re done. Right?
Apparently, wrong. David Willey, the RW editor, responded quite graciously with an offer to become a gear columnist for the magazine, along the lines of Barry Sonnenfeld’s columns for Esquire… that is, I’m not an expert, in fact I’m fairly ignorant, but I will go out and use this stuff and tell you what I think. My first column, about a $75,000 zero-gravity treadmill, is now online here. Of course, I would urge you to go out and buy the magazine, of course. In bulk.
Let me join the throng of grieving geeks and note the passing of Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons. He’s being credited with a lot of things, justifiably: inventing the whole genre of role-playing games, which over the years led directly and exponentially to video games, massive online games like World of Warcraft, and of course the vast universe of heroic fantasy fiction that’s arisen in the last thirty years, good and (mostly) bad.
I’m tempted to say he also saved my life, but that may be putting it too strongly. Okay: he vastly improved it. I was a bookish, wonkish kid, who found other people my age to be far more confusing than the schoolwork and books that I had no trouble with. I escaped into fantasy and science fiction, which presented worlds far more interesting, and yet more comprehensible, than the obscure social mazes of my junior high and high school. In retrospect, though, what drew me to that kind of story was a common theme of friendship. In most fantasy adventures, warriors and seekers and star-pilots or whatever join forces to accomplish their quest. The ur-text, of course, is Tolkien — not for nothing was the first book called The Fellowship of the Ring. When I used to daydream about Middle Earth, I didn’t imagine, say, fighting an orc, or casting spells… I imagined being myself, but somehow being able to join that company of heroes. To be their friend.
Dungeons and Dragons began just as a way to expand Gygax’s hobby, ie, playing wargames on a tabletop with miniature figurines. But the key innovation of the game — far more important then the d20s and elaborate tables and character attributes — was that it did away with the whole idea of opponents. All the players worked together. You and your friends played the part of friends. If you didn’t have any friends, or enough friends, playing the game gave you them, by design. My most vivid memory of my D&D-playing years wasn’t a game at all — (for those who are curious, my character was a mage named Scar) — but one day when, with my game playing friends Tom and Jim, late in high school, we put aside the charts and dice, and made sandwiches, and drank beer, and told jokes, and played darts, and just had a hell of a time together, there, in Jim’s parent’s basement. I felt befriended, and that’s better than fighting an orc.
