The Dissociative Mood
What I liked about the Times article about the Patersons' affairs was this censorious observation by reporter Danny Hakim: "The admission is likely to be a distraction for the new governor at a difficult time." It's a classic instance of what I call the dissociative mood, a grammatical tone that is struck when something that should have been stated in the first person with an active verb ("I or we did something") is uttered in the third person with a passive verb ("something was done to someone, mistakes were made, the whole thing is a mystery to us"). This inflection, characterized by bat-your-eyelashes disingenuousness, is found largely in government statements, for obvious reasons, and in the media, especially when we in the media report the effects of our own reporting but leave ourselves out of the account.
So: Why is admitting to consensual extramarital affairs that have long since ended likely to distract from Paterson's gubernatorial agenda? Why, because we, the media-or perhaps I, Danny Hakim-mean to make it an issue! Who else gives a damn?
Speaking of which, did any of you who read Rick Hertzberg's comment in The New Yorker go and look up the Martha Nussbaum article he quotes, the one written from Belgium, in which she declares that Spitzer was hounded out of office by "quintessentially American" Puritanism and mean-spiritedness? If so, I'd love to hear what you think, especially about the part where she compared being a prostitute with being an opera singer (apparently, not so long ago, they weren't perceived as being very different). Being fairly Euro-trashy myself, I kinda agreed with her and her podium-bashing conclusion:
What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don't share the woman's values. ... What should trouble us are things like this: The working conditions for most women in sex work are extremely unhealthy. They are exploited by pimps, and they enjoy little control over which clients they will accept. Police harass them and extort sexual favors from them. Some of these bad features (unhealthiness, little control) sex work shares with other job options for low-income women, such as factory work of many kinds. Other bad features (police extortion) are the natural result of illegality itself.
In general we should be worried about poverty and lack of education. We should be worried that women have too few decent employment options and too little health and safety regulation in those that they do have. And we should be worried if men force women to do things sexually that they do not want to do. All these things are worth worrying about, and it is these things that sensible nations do worry about. But the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque, the unmistakable fruit of the all-too-American thought that women who choose to have sex with many men are tainted vile things who must be punished.
Eliot Spitzer's offense was an offense against his family. It was not an offense against the public. If he broke any laws, these are laws that never should have existed and that have been repudiated by sensible nations. The hue and cry that has ruined one of the nation's most committed political careers shows our country to itself in a very ugly light.