Crime and punishment: March 2008 Archives

Be sure to read today's L.A Times account of the release of Willie Earl Green from San Quentin -- 24 years after a wrongful murder conviction. There are a few stunning things about this piece. The first is Green's fascination with all the trappings of modern life he's missed out on:

It was a day of firsts for Green. He drank his first cup of Starbucks coffee. He took it with cream and sugar -- two treats forbidden in state prison. His wife told Green that she would teach him to use her newfangled coffee maker and washing machine when they got home....

He asked a reporter to let him hold a cellphone, a contraption he had never touched before. He fingered the keypad a bit and carefully relinquished the phone. "Take it back before I drop it," he said....

An investigator for Green's legal team demonstrated a remote device to unlock the car. Green watched with delight as the investigator showed him how to open the doors and pop the trunk.

"That is something," Green said. "Teach me that someday."

More remarkable still is Green's under lack of bitterness, despite having so much of his life taken away:

"The system that put me in here was the same system that got me out," he said. "It's not perfect, but it's the best system in the world."

And finally, there's this chilling thought: What if Green had been executed? Wrongful imprisonment is terrible enough, but at least it can be corrected. The death penalty is irrevocable. Once applied, mistakes can never be undone.

Something to ponder on this, the commemoration of the day when Christ Himself was wrongly executed ...

Neither the fall of Oedipus nor Eliot is about sex. Their downfalls and humiliations are earned by their character (or lack there-of) and most importantly by their moral blindness.

When comparing these two disgraceful and disgraced figures, I remind you that the tragic hero is not necessarily heroic in our modern sense. They are great men only in the sense of the greatness of their power, not their virtue.

This certainly describes Spitzer—a man famous for ferocity, lack of compassion and a zealotry that seems based on exceptional, what the Greeks called, Hubris and we refer to as chutzpah.

Oedipus’ great sin was not so much that he married his mother and thus gave Freud a career and influence beyond the bounds of even death. It was his impetuosity, his single-mindedness. Raised in a royal house, he felt entitled. When upset by not getting the right of way for his chariot, he slew the man who had refused to yield. In this first recorded incident of road rage, he slew his biological father and then married the widow, his mother.

When he learned that his kingdom was being punished by the gods for some great sin, he set out with fierce passion to find the culprit, not knowing that he was looking for himself. With eyes wide open, yet blind to his moral culpability, he sought to find the scoundrel responsible for the city’s suffering. Only the physically blind seer Tiresius could see deeply enough to know that Oedipus was headed for disaster. Throughout the play light and dark are constantly contrasted. Secrets are brought to light after being hidden in darkness. As Oedipus closed in on himself and began to see where he was headed, he cried out in an attempt to mitigate his guilt and responsibility that he was “caught in the web of the gods.” Tiresius said, “No, Oedipus, you weave your own doom.”

At the moment that Oedipus truly sees what he has done, when his moral blindness is cured, he plucks out his physical eyes thus trading one blindness for another.

Spitzer, also born to a high station in life, was relentless in the pursuit of evil. We, and probably he, thought to punish it, but it turns out to perpetrate it. He wanted to punish the bad guys and was willing to do anything to find criminals, and punish them. He bragged about living in a Manichean world of black and white, good and bad, virtue and evil. As zealots do, he pursued evildoers without pity or remorse. He hated lies. He hated cheats. He hated prostitution. That his swift fall followed from the world finding out that he was everything he seemed to hate may seem at first blush to be hypocrisy. I suspect that this is too easy an analysis. I suspect that what he hated derived from what he feared that he was. He chased the bad guys, the cheats, the hookers, the Johns to slay his own demons.

We know the sad narrative by now—the double cliché of the fallen icon weeping in contrition for his sin—the anti-gay crusader caught in a men’s room, the preacher found in a motel, the justice department anti-crime crusader charged with perjury. We know too the second cliché of bringing the wife, teary and humiliated, in front of the cameras. For what? To show solidarity? To indicate that someone still stands with him? Why is she being punished for his sins?

I understand the perp walk—parading some fallen executive from home to car in cuffs. This is meant to embarrass and humiliate. It is a cautionary gesture warning other malefactors to be aware of the costs of being caught. But for the most part the FBI doesn’t cuff the innocent spouse. Oedipus’ wife/mother, when all was revealed got to die off-stage. A good example of compassion.

Oedipus and Eliot have their public falls from grace, power and privilege. What was dark and hidden is brought to light by zealous and ironic acts of self-immolation. Two men with great power and potential destroy themselves with pitiousless moral blindness—and in the end, those who were physically sighted prove to be blind and two physically blind men remain: Tiresius the Seer and David Paterson the new governor of New York.

Generally I'm not one to sneer at the pages of sex ads in alternative publications like the L.A. Weekly, possibly because they seem somewhat sad. Those ladies, and some men, are just trying to make a buck in a city that sells sex in any way people will buy it. Besides, it seems marginally safer to ply your trade through the want ads than working the mean streets of Sunset or Sepulveda.

But the ads of the Emperor Club VIP that are floating around on the Internet chill me in a way that my libertarian sympathies can't dismiss. It's not such much the Playboy centerfold type spreads of women's bodies with their measurements that bothers me. It's not the seven-diamonds ratings system, though it seems better suited to a movie or hotel. It's the marketing language that advertisers use for any other product for sale on the free market.

The online intro to the club (recently taken down, not surprisingly) boasts top-notch product:

"Our meticulous standards of beauty, intelligence and charm ensure that you always encounter the quality you've come to expect in a woman."

Ugh. The crass commodification of the "escorts" doesn't even try to dress up the prostitution. We got your quality piece of ass right here.

I know the whole world is dumping on New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer lately, but I think his resignation speech today was pure class. He's owned up to his faults, assumed responsibility, accepted the consequences -- and now tries to pick up the pieces.

Some notable lines:

• "From those to whom much is given, much is expected. I have been given much - the love of my family, the faith and trust of the people of New York, and the chance to lead this state. I am deeply sorry I did not live up to what was expected of me."


• "Over the course of my public life I have insisted, I believe correctly, that people, regardless of their position or power, take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself."


• "I go forward with the belief, as others have said, that as human beings our greatest glory consists not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."

Amen to that. One hates to see our leaders ever embroiled in this kind of scandal, but much to his credit, Spitzer has shown exactly how to respond to one's failings with grace. Godspeed to him and his family.

As the sad news of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's adultery and involvement with prostitution breaks, expect to hear some talk of "hypocrisy." After all, he was an anti-corruption crusader who prosecuted a couple prostitution rings in his days as New York's attorney general. But expect nothing of the sort of hypocrisy-hyperbole you might hear if Spitzer were a Republican, a conservative, or, worse yet, an opponent of "gay marriage."

Whenever anyone who has said a word in support of traditional families gets caught in one of these sex scandals, all hell breaks loose. Think of Newt Gingrich. Or Larry Craig. Or Robert Livingston -- to cite just a few names from a very long list. Among the chattering classes, these conservatives' marital sins are considered to be somehow worse than progressives' like Gavin Newsom's because right-wingers have the nerve to prattle on about "family values" from the campaign stump.

But as a candidate and as a governor, Spitzer has also been know to prattle on about family values -- he just does so in support of "gay marriage." Consider some of the phrases he has used to describe marriage, words which could have come straight from James Dobson or Pope Benedict XVI.

• Spitzer has called the bonds of matrimony a "solemn commitment."
• He has said that "the institution of marriage produces incalculable benefits for society, by fostering stable familial relationships."
• He's called marriage a "crucial social institution."
• He's even said, "Strong, stable families are the cornerstones of our society. The responsibilities inherent in the institution of marriage benefit those individuals and society as a whole."

Both opponents and proponents of "gay marriage" claim that matrimony is important -- the former argue it's so important it cannot be altered; the latter argue it's so important that it must. Either way, both pay lip service to the institution and its role in society.

So how is a married supporter of "gay marriage" any less of a "hypocrite" when caught soliciting $5,000 call girls from the Emperors Club VIP? He, too, has violated the very moral code he claims to uphold, the one he's cited to advance a political agenda as well as a political career. He, too, has fallen far short of his own rhetoric and his own publicly held ideals.

Here we get to the rub: "Hypocrisy" is an overrated vice. The only ones among us who aren't hypocrites are the shameless, those who don't fall short of their own ethical standards because they have none in the first place. (No one will ever call Larry Flynt a hypocrite, but is this really a statement in his favor?) The rest of, struggling to live morally in a fallen world, are all hypocrites and will be until the day we die. We no doubt try to do better, to live better, to be better -- but in the meantime, we'll fall short.

Which is why the great cudgel of "hypocrisy" that progressives like to wield against fallen conservatives is nothing more than that.

Eliot Spitzer may be a hypocrite, but that hardly discredits any of the positions he's taken in the past, on marriage or anything else. Indeed, the fact that he's willing to acknowledge his failings -- rather than to deny they are failings at all -- shows that he's just one more soul struggling for the grace to live up to his ideals.

May he find it. May we all.

Perhaps it's just me, but I find a curious, though clearly quite coincidental, connection in NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal (watch the video of his press conference here a few minutes ago which he apologizes for something, but never says what). Spitzer reportedly met with his high-priced prostitute (no crack 'hos, for Eliot!) at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington according to a federal probe. (He had her flown there. She must have been one special hooker! The kind you can't find in Washington.) And Spitzer worked for the former NYC district attorney's office, which in 1984 busted the Mayflower Madam -- Sydney Biddle Barrows.
Ok, it's a thin connection. But fun!