Three weeks ago, Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York and the model of an upstanding citizen. Two weeks ago, he became embroiled in scandal and admitted to hiring prostitutes. The media was all over the story: less dissecting it, than tearing it apart like a school of piranha. It boiled up and died down, the bones picked clean, all within a week.I spent the week of the Spitzer news frenzy busy with major events in my own household, and now that I finally have time to sit with the story, it's old news, gone from the collective consciousness. Eliot and Silda have now retired (one hopes) to their separate church basements to build something new and beautiful from the smoldering remains of their old lives. And the news media has moved on: first to the (gasp!) shocking idea that America has problems with racism and then to the (gasp!) surprising fact that soldiers continue to fight and die in Iraq.
Throughout every bit of coverage I heard of the Spitzer story, I wanted nothing more than to be the expert commentator on the news. I wanted to call in to every talk show and write to every newspaper. I wanted to chime in on discussions with acquaintances who don't know of my husband's addiction. I wanted to tell everyone how way, way, way off the mark they were in their analysis. I wanted to shake America and wake it up. My only comfort, if one could call it that, was the knowledge that there will always be other sex scandals. (And when the next one breaks, I'll just be able to change the names in this post and put it up again.)
Over and over again, I heard the same question I asked my husband when I (like the people in Eliot Spitzer's life) was knocked on my ass by revelations of his sexual exploits: Why? Why? Why?
Why would someone so smart do something so stupid? Why would someone who spent his life prosecuting just these kinds of criminals engage in criminal behavior himself? Why would he do something that would destroy his career and his marriage? Why was someone who seemed so doggedly true to his principles abandon them? Why?
Unfortunately for my husband, who hates this habit of mine, I'm going to use science as a metaphor yet again and coin my own term for the analysis of the Spitzer scandal: Ptolemaic. Thanks to a wonderful high school science teacher, I have a vivid (if limited) knowledge of the history of astronomy, which goes something like this: long ago, Ptolemy theorized that the Earth was the stationary center of the universe and that everything in the sky revolved around it in perfect circles. He, and others after him, observed the motion of the stars and found that some of the stars (planets) traveled in irregular paths across the sky, occasionally looping back on themselves. Unable to conceive of a universe in which the Earth was not the center or in which the planets traveled in anything other than perfect circles, Ptolemy created an incredibly complex model of celestial bodies traveling in circles within circles to explain their observed motion in the sky.
Later, Copernicus theorized that the Earth revolved around the Sun. His model explained the movements of the stars just as well as Ptolemy's but was much simpler. But Kepler perfected the model by proposing that planets travel in elliptical, rather than circular, orbits. Now with the Earth and the other planets in the solar system all traveling neatly around the Sun in elliptical orbits, all the complexities, all the circles within circles, disappeared: there was just one simple, elegant path for each object.
So as I watched all the speculation flying around Spitzer's behavior, I began feeling very much like Kepler to the news media's Ptolemy. There were countless convoluted attempts to answer the perpetual "why." There were the absurdly partisan (liberals are perverts); the stupidly misogynistic (Silda Spitzer is a frigid bitch); the simplistically moralistic (Eliot Spitzer is a corrupt hypocrite (read: bad person)); the underestimating excusers (all men do it -- or want to) who usually joined forces with the amateur philosophers (absolute power corrupts absolutely) to conclude, with Ptolemaic finesse, that Spitzer was just doing what all men want to do because he was powerful enough to think he could get away with it.
Admittedly, some of those folks (ahem, Liberals are Perverts, I'm talking to you!) seemed to be speculating about the stars without even glancing at the sky. Still, many of these theories, like Ptolemy's, did their job of explaining the observable data. Yet, also like Ptolemy's, they all had to keep adding circles to explain pieces here and there that didn't quite fit. Each theory would make sense until one considered some other bit of data. So that, in the end, they all ended up drawing circles within circles trying to explain the irregular movements of planet Spitzer.
Of course, there is a solution of Kepleresque elegance: Eliot Spitzer is a sex addict. He had sex with prostitutes, even though he knew it would destroy him, because he couldn't stop. Power didn't corrupt him, he was drawn to power to fill the same void he sought to fill with prostitutes. (I have no doubt that both compulsive sexual activity and a desire for power pre-dates his governorship -- and his marriage -- by decades.)
We've come a long way in the awareness of alcoholism. While it is still viewed at times as a moral failing or a failure of willpower, I don't think we'd be suffering the same sense of collective national confusion over Eliot Spitzer's actions if he'd given speeches drunk or passed out at a state dinner. We wouldn't ask the question, "Why would such a smart man do such a stupid thing? Why would he endanger his career by drinking so much?" New analysts wouldn't say, "Everyone wants to drink on the job, he was just powerful enough to think the rules didn't apply to him." We'd know he was an alcoholic, that his drinking was compulsive and and that he was unable to control it. And instead of endless analysis, we'd get education in the form of a token lecture on alcoholism by an Oprah-approved physician.
Yet we puzzle over Eliot Spitzer's sexual behavior, assuming that he could control it, but chose not to. We ask ourselves why he would choose not to and find we can't reconcile his private behavior with his public persona. We draw circles within circles to explain it, when the answer is much simpler, if only we give up the need for an Earth-centered universe filled with perfect circles or the image of Eliot Spitzer as a mentally healthy person making, and able to act on, rational choices.
I know this doesn't answer marta's question about how to identify an addict, but I promise I will get to that -- hopefully tomorrow!
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