Spitzer's Fall - Comic, Rather Than Tragic

Bruce S. Thornton has a very fun article up at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal website, "Spitzer’s Comic Fall - To understand the disgraced governor, brush up your Aristophanes". Thornton posits that the pundits who have been constantly referring to Spitzer's self-created mess as a "tragedy" have it all wrong.

Like most scandals that bring down modern American politicians, however, Spitzer’s lacks the grandeur of tragedy. True, his talent and ambition, like Oedipus’s, led him to significant public achievements and fame. As the “sheriff of Wall Street,” he relentlessly pursued alleged financial evildoers, earning along the way a reputation for toughness and results that swept him into the governorship. And also like Oedipus, he overreached because of hubristic arrogance and self-righteousness—“Listen, I’m a fucking steamroller and I’ll roll over you or anybody else,” he once warned Republican Assemblyman James Tedisco. Even before his current troubles, he had been wounded by allegations that his staff ordered state police to track Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno’s travel records, in an effort to damage him politically.

Yet Spitzer’s downfall—sordid trysts with high-priced prostitutes, complete with grubby financial hijinks to cover up his deeds—is ultimately the stuff of low comedy and satire. For insight into the departing governor’s troubles, then, we’d be better off looking to the Greek comic poet Aristophanes, who uses sexual crimes and excesses to dramatize his characters’ inability to subordinate the body to the mind and do what is in the public interest. Like Aristotle, Aristophanes saw politics as “public virtue.” And the paramount virtue is self-control: the ability to resist one’s appetites for a higher good. The politician who gives in to appetite—especially sex—is unfit to rule, for his failure to control himself shows that he is a slave to his passions. Once such people obtain political power, like the Sausage-Seller in The Knights or Bdelykleon in The Wasps, they use it to indulge themselves at the expense of the community. How can we trust such people with political power and responsibility, Aristophanes asks, when they will sacrifice even their own honor and reputation for the sake of more immediate pleasures?

There was nothing even remotely noble about Spitzer's downfall, other than the basic fact that he's now off of the public stage, where (hopefully) he can no longer do any harm. I'd go further and say that there was nothing noble about his rise, as well...