THE BIGGER THEY ARE THE HARDER THEY FALL (and vice versa)
When I was four or five, my daddy took me to the Golden Gloves amateur boxing finals in our small hometown of Temple, Texas. The crowd let out a mighty roar as the two boxers came out into the ring and raised their arms in that cocky “I’m the man” stance. One contestant, dressed in white trunks and shirt looked significantly larger than the other more muscular man who was wearing red and black if my memory serves.
As both men surveyed the crowd while doing their pre-bout strut around the ring, I pointed to the man in white and said to Daddy, “That big one is going to win.”
My father stopped cheering, looked me square in the eyes, and said to me, “Dodie (his pet name for me), the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Daddy’s admonition has come back to me so many times over, none more so than watching Eliot Spitzer resign from his post as governor of New York today in the whorl of a sex and illegal prostitution-procurement scandal.
That a man with such outsized privilege, intelligence, drive, and yes I do believe true passion for public service that advances the public good can make it to the top only to plummet in such a steep fall is a morality tale of equally outsized proportions.
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That big guy did indeed lose the boxing match–in fact he was knocked out flat in the first round by the smaller boxer who was faster on his feet. Since children tend to think literally, I puzzled over the illogic of it for a long time afterward. As I grew in years and experience, I began to understand the wisdom of the aphorism my father had shared with me. It’s not so much about the assets you bring into the ring of life, but what you do with them that counts. And no one is above the rules of the game.
Here, today. the tragic truth that the bigger you are the harder you fall is once again evident.
And in regard to alpha men like Eliot Spitzer, this is equally true when you reverse the position of the adjectives.
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I am so tired of the male politicians legislating one way and acting another. They get to make the rules, and then they also think they can get away with it when they break them. I am also deeply troubled by the idea that men’s indiscretion around sex is expected and accepted. It should not be. Silda deserves better. Women deserve better.
Two issues stand out for me (past the obvious of amazing stupidity).
First, sexual issues should be a private issue
Second, it appears that lots of money and advance planning, such as the stakeout at the Mayflower was spent on this operation, and its “leak”, suggesting political motives. I certainly do not .trust this Justice Department.
Thus I think significant the issue is not Spitzer, but about our social issues with sex (there probably was no crime) and Justice (which was not fairly handled.)
Doug, I’m sorry, I have to disagree with you about sexual issues being private when they involve breaking laws. And in fact, for me it’s never been about the sex as much as the deception. Wouldn’t you want to know if a person in public office had lied on their resume? Cheated on their income tax? Lied to their neighbors or others? The bottom line is that when he violated the law, he had no problem lying to the people who elected him and to his wife — the person who probably trusted him more than anyone else. I’m not sure I want someone in public office who is that good at lying. I think Ralph Keyes work on deception really shows how insidious the whole notion of “harmless” lying is.
As for what causes it, for years we have known that people with status in a group are given more leeway to violate group norms. But there are boundaries and as Camus so aptly put it: “Limits are first discerned in their transgression.”
As a society we’re going to be finding these failures of character more and more expensive. Because if we condone deception in one area, we allow it to spring up in others. Enron comes to mind.
And of course, Harlan Cleveland has the most sage advice with regard to all of this: “Never do or say anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times the next day.”
Thank you three for your comments.
The more I think about this, the more complex it gets.
I wish it were only about sex, in which case, I’d agree with Doug 100%. But this is a man running amuck on the high wire without a net and taking many other people down with him–family, political allies and supporters, etc. The whole episode strikes me as less about sex than about a guy who has a pathological need to push himself to ever higher levels of adrenalin and testosterone, regardless of the consequences, and an almost sociopathic notion that he is no mere mortal so the laws that control mere mortals don’t apply to him.
I think Americans showed with Bill Clinton that they don’t care that much about other people’s sex lives, but they do care a lot about hypocrisy, dishonesty and breech of trust.
And any leader who doesn’t know he or she is always under scrutiny by his enemies, especially in this day and age of the internet readily available information, is either a fool or has a death wish.
Because of our attitudes about sex, when an Eliot Spitzer or Bill Clinton misbehaves the victims include all of us who are damaged by losing them and by the loss of respect from others their office requires. It’s a bit unfair, but that’s the price of holding high office in America. When the president is incapacitated in any way thousands if not millions are endangered. There is an unavoidable double standard.
But should sex be such a big deal here when it isn’t in other advanced nations? Of course not. I can’t help but want to excuse anyone for indulging in sexual experiences. Wasn’t it Sartre who said that, looking back, he realized that everything he did was to improve his chances of getting girls? It’s difficult to overestimate the risks we will take and the trouble we will go through to have that special erotic moment. These days women commit adultery as often as men–about 50% of the time. But we single out for colossal punishment (end of a possible presidential career) those leaders who get caught.
I’m with Doug. I think the IRS may have had a political motive. Bill Clinton’s skewering was certainly political.
I am reminded of a great line in “Prizzi’s Honor” where Jack Nicholson’s character asks “If he’s so f**ing smart, how come he’s so f**ing dead?”
So…if Spitzers so smart, why did he put himself,his career, and his family at such great risk? I don’t care about who he has sex with either, but how stupid can a man be when he knows that in this age, he’ll be caught and life as has has known it will be dead.
I agree that this particular scandal with Spitzer is less about sex than it is about the flagrant stupidity, abuse of power and illegality aspect of it. And then there is the whole hypocrisy angle- it’s tough for some people to reconcile Spitzer’s ‘tough on crime’ past (he broke up a prostitution ring as an ADA) and his much-touted liberal credentials and how that comports with utilizing prostitutes for upwards of 6 years [allegedly].
I do think that the media angle has relied very heavily on the sex aspect of it, just as with the Lewinsky scandal, despite the whole thing being about perjury and obstruction, at least according to Ken Starr. But does anyone honestly think the media (or Henry Hyde, Ken Starr and the GOP members of Congress) would have gotten as much mileage out of the Clinton scandal had it not involved sex? Do you think people would be riveted by the black and white letter law regarding obstruction and what is and isn’t a “materially false statement” and what isn’t? And I think that is also behind much of the media coverage- sex scandals seem to generate a lot of reader/viewership, for better or worse- probably worse.
Luckily with the Spitzer story, there are people willing to see past just the sex aspect and look at the abuse of power issue- this blog and the comments being a perfect example of such willingness. And like it or not, there are clearly gender implications here- the fact is, for most of history it has been men who have held positions of great power and thus the narrative of publicly risking it all [and losing it all] for some stupid sexual conquest (legal or not) has been a largely male endeavor. This, however, is not to be confused with saying that women aren’t sexual, competitive and driven, or that they aren’t capable of abusing power. But one question is, when women equal or outnumber men in Congress and attain the Oval Office with regularity, will the same type of fatal flaws that brought down the likes of Spitzer, bring them [us] down too? Or will our experience of being on the down-side of the power equation for so long make us more likely to think with our brains [and hearts?] and not be so willing to stupidly drag down everyone and everything simply for the sake of ego and pride?
Does that make any sense?