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Journalism of Courage
Having learned the news about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer8217;s expensive tastes, a friend e-mailed to ask what was the fancy word for taking malicious pleasure in the misfortune of others: 8220;Spitzer?8221; he suggested.
I have never liked Mr Spitzer and his intrusive, rogue-prosecutorial ways8230; I am already more than sated on the stories of the Emperor8217;s Club, whose experts earn nearly as much as a successful law firm partner. Still, there have been a few gems to emerge from the glee. My favourite so far: 8220;Prostitute admits link to Eliot Spitzer, resigns from escort service in disgrace.8221;8230; My own feeling is that there are so many reasons to dislike Eliot Spitzer that I would hate the issue of hypocrisy to obscure his many other, more heinous faults8230;
La Rochefoucauld8217;s observation that 8220;hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue8221; will doubtless be trotted out early and often in the case of Eliot Spitzer and the girls. The epigram has generally been presented as meaning 8212; in the words of one journalist 8212; that 8220;the loudest moralizers may be most suspect.8221; But I believe that La Rochefoucauld meant to suggest that hypocrisy was an implicit acknowledgment of the claims of virtue. Otherwise, why bother with dissimulation?
There are, as I say, many reasons to dislike Eliot Spitzer.The music critic Tim Page, referring to an unpleasant and pretentious college president, observed that he was the sort of chap that gave 8220;pseudo-intellectuality a bad name.8221; I feel similarly about Eliot Spitzer and hypocrisy. His behaviour gives that ambiguous vice a bad name. What8217;s wrong with Eliot Spitzer is not so much that he praised good things and did bad ones. Most of the items he championed in his various moral campaigns were, when you looked behind the rhetoric, of dubious value. Really, he was a power-hungry, regulation-crazed functionary whose chief sin was to harness the power of the state to destroy his enemies and aggrandise himself. Had he been a little more hypocritical he might have been less dangerous.
Excerpted from Roger Kimball8217;s 8216;Schadenfreude and Spitzer8217;s fraud8217; in the Guardian, March 11
