What an enormous, bipartisan satisfaction in witnessing the self-destruction of Elliot Spitzer. I have a personal vantage point on this as Elliott was a year ahead of me at Princeton. Reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly (actually it comes every two weeks or so) is my particular form of anti-therapy. Just in case I feel like things are kind of all right in my little life 25+ years after graduation, that I’m sort of on the right track in some ways, I leaf through the alumni notes and realize the true degree of my failure.
Here is William J. Williams IV head of thoracic surgery at super university hospital, there is Jane Jones retiring as chief of bond trading at Goldman Sachs and founding a chairty to cure some previously unherd of disease in Africa. And baddest, butchest of them all, Elliot Spitzer. “Elliot Spitzer ‘80 was elected governor of New York State,” the entry read, simply, after he was.
Now I voted for the guy and sincerely wished him well. But reading the coverage today — from the sheer stupidity of paying for whores by wire transfer to the sheer narcissistic arrogance of referring delicioulsy to himelf as “an f–ing steamroller” – you realize, undeniably, that the evil old Joseph Bruno was absolutely right: Elliott is simply a spoiled brat. Only someone who had never really failed at anything could behave in this way while blustering with such amazing conviction of his own moral perfection.
Which maybe gets to an important point for the rest of us. Failing, falling short, being kicked around and jeered at a little bit, does teach you necessary lessons about life, is a necessary process of forimgn the judgments that get us through life without (hopefully) being left in our humiliiating moments without a friend to stick up for us. So next time I see that Princeton Alumni Weekly, I am going to pick it up blithely and read without fear. Oh sure.
