In 1621, my ancestors (the Raes) arrived with the second batch of pilgrims and set foot on the miserable ground that is now Massachusetts, and still miserable ground. They brought with them and helped instill a spirit that is still alive in America: the Puritan spirit. Loosely defined by Baltimore's own H.L. Mencken, Puritans live in the constant fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time.
And so it is with today's media, including the New York Times, who relish and continues their descent into tabloid status this week by reporti ng that now former New York governor Eliot Spitzer was caught on a wiretap setting up an appointment with a prostitute in Washington D.C. Spitzer boldly characterized his personal sexual life as "private," but it is safe to say that his life is going to be quite public for the next few weeks.
The pilgrims, being the first white people here, defined the culture with their drab clothing and lousy beer (passed on to us as Sam Adams), both designed to be too gross to keep people from getting drunk enough to have judgment lapses. As a result of the Pilgrims, the Puritan Spirit lives on, and American media and print outlets love nothing more than to bring down a public servant who has committed a foolish indiscretion in his private life and turn it into a monstrous cluster of their own.
Thanks partly to a reasonable concern about human trafficking and partly to Puritan dislike for people having sex for pleasure, prostitution is illegal in our country except in Nevada. However, like other laws that repress an unstoppable market demand, the prostitution law obviously fails a lot of the time.
But I make the following argument: with a small increase in oversight from the New York Morality Times and other such purveyors of all that is Fair and Balanced, prostitution could become legal and transgressors in the public eye could still be held accountable for their actions. The fact is simply that we are better at judging people on moral grounds than legal grounds.
The legal system has been rocked in recent years by a number of miscarriages of justice. Ray Lewis ("allegedly") killed two men and then won a Superbowl ring. O.J. Simpson seems to be unable to avoid getting in tax trouble (which the legal system is good at enforcing) but somehow avoided doing jail time for ("allegedly") killing his girlfriend. And these lapses do not just extend to getting people off the hook who should instead be strung up by it. I'm sure you are familiar with the Duke lacrosse case: It is probable that no crime was committed, and yet the accused endured a punishment that was probably as bad as jail time.
The moral system that we have in this country, in contrast, has curbed unscrupulous individual behaviors and ambitions. For example, the advancement of many politicians has been ruined by their personal indiscretions such as cheating on their second wife when she had cancer while yelling about America into a bullhorn and standing on rubble. Other cheaters, such as Newt Gingrich and our 42nd president have also had their careers derailed by personal mistakes.
Even Kobe Bryant, while not a politician, will never be able to escape from the mistakes he made in Colorado. The ironic overlap is obvious too: Gary Condit ended up leaving Congress due to the moral outrage from his many affairs, and yet the murder of Chandra Levy is still unsolved. Not that I am assigning guilt or anything.
It is still too soon to know how the whole Spitzer ordeal will turn out, but one thing is certain: It will be well covered. (A March 12, 2008 New York Moral Times article credited 17 different reporters with contributions.) In general the track record for people at the center of well-covered affairs is not good.
The real point, though, is this: The news outlets are the real prostitutes, and we are client #9. We pay them to be titillated by reports about the moral indiscretions of others, and like Spitzer, we frequently return for more. Otherwise, we wouldn't get reports about the price and looks of the service provider Spitzer allegedly met with. (She weighs 105 pounds, and is a brunette.) The Puritan spirit is yet alive and well, and has ended yet another political career.
True to form, it's been reported that Spitzer will probably not face legal charges for the acts themselves, but for the method of payment. And it will go down as just another chapter in the vast records of the Moral Court of the Puritan Spirit.
