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Spitzer, a Proletarian View


The question is: Now that former attorney general of New York and former governor the Big Apple Elliot Spitzer has suffered public humiliation, lost his job and his reputation and seen an earthquake size crack begin to form in what previously had been supposed to be an ideal if somewhat Hollywood-like marriage, where do we go from here?

Should Spitzer be prosecuted? In other words, now that the scourge of Wall Street has been flayed and executed, what do we do with the corpse?

Some few rotten businessmen at the receiving end of Spitzer’s lash and some few newspaper owners determined to show the world that, even though they are by profession and inclination conservative Republican slayers, they too can cry with the best of them “I’m fer’sticken his head on a pike and show’n it on Brooklyn bridge,” are for further prosecution.

My proletariat workmates watched the unmasking of Spitzer on television between lunch and coffee breaks.

Working folk are not quite as severe in these matters as ass bone wielding Samson-like journalists. But don’t for this reason think any of the proles were buying the pitch of the many psychoanalysts trotted out by faux news shows –headline services really – to account for Spitzer’s erratic and doubtless insane behavior.

We think Spitzer’s behavior was unusual for so saintly a man, if all the other reports about the white horse riding, ass bone wielding, selfless, dogged, prosecutorial machine portrayed by the tribunes of the people were true -- which they weren’t: The ego driven Spitzer was out for glory and a possible berth in the White House, God, his gubernatorial staff and his publicists willing.

There were loud guffaws in the employee’s cafeteria when one particularly sardonic daughter of Freud said it was impossible to talk of “responsible” behavior in Spitzer’s case because he was afflicted with a narcissistic syndrome that rendered all such moral claptrap pointless. If Spitzer’s errotomania was “irresistible,” the man obviously was blameless. He was sick, mentally. He needed a daughter of Freud to heal him and make him whole.

This loop carried us from lunch to coffee break: The psychoanalyst woman with unkempt hair, the unquestioning news analyst with perfect hair, slices of photographs showing Spitzer in his glory days, accompanied by his dear wife, now brokenhearted, more psychoanalysts, three of them, two women with a man for balance in the middle, like a psychoanalytic peanut butter sandwich –with nary a rabbi in sight.

“Aw, look at her,” said a maintenance lady, pointing to Spitzer’s wife, “she’s been crying all night.”

There was some division in the room between men and women. The women were prepared to kick Spitzer to the curb very early on in the controversy and thought no more of him. He was simply the occasion of Mrs. Spitzer’s present misery. They were, shall we say, not willing to give the benefit of psychological doubt to the third party in what the “news anchor” before them called the former attorney general’s “dalliance.” To them the dalliance was the point of the dagger in Mrs. Spitzer’s back. Their attention was fastened on the muscles of her face. Mr. Spitzer’s “toss in the hay” was a hard working prole afflicted with Madonna-like ambitions. “I’d do anything for my music,” said the trick-turner on her MySpace page.

Sympathy did not flow her way.

The men were thinking, and saying, would I be so stupid? They decided they wouldn’t. Their exasperation exploded often into the usual formulation, “Ya’know what I don’t understand,” followed by what they did not understand.

Why couldn’t Spitzer have been more careful, more French about all this stuff? The guy is shifting money around through accounts; this excites the interest of a sleuth in his local bank who supposes that someone may be bribing St. Spitzer; he or she contacts some glory hound at the SEC or FBI or whatever; and then the Spit asks his bank to REMOVE HIS NAME FROM THE TRANSACTIONS?

WHAT A (expletive deleted) JERK!

Both the men and the women, however, came to agreement on two points: First, that Spitzer, perhaps the most willful man in New York State, was responsible for every tear that coursed down Mrs. Spitzer’s cheek; and second, that future news loops about Spitzer should include his mother and his rabbi as authoritative “experts.”

No more psychoanalytic JERKS.

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