LA Weekly

Now that you know where you're hard-earned tax dollars are going -- to bust high-end prostitution rings serving high-end clients such as Client 9, aka New York Governor Eliot Spitzer -- don't you feel safer? Aren't you glad this is where federal resources are going while our ports are so porous a Chinese frigate could dock at Long Beach for a week before anybody would know. Isn't this exactly what we want our public money to be spent on while our public schools crumble and our populous becomes more and more idiotic -- exactly what the fear-mongering demagogues in office preying on your ignorance want.

Look, I get the inherent contradiction in Mr. Clean, who investigated a high-end prostitution ring or two in his day, getting busted for spending thousands of dollars for the company of well-appointed call girls. Worse, call girls whom he allegedly paid to cross state lines to provide their services, a violation of a 1910 law prohibiting transporting prostitutes across state lines. And now that he's probably finished, the robber-barons he went after while serving as state attorney general in Manhattan couldn't be happier. Nor could blowhards like New York state republican leader James Tedisco. One measure of basic intelligence is the ability to hold contrary ideas in your head without losing your mud. In this case, that would mean grasping that Spitzer could be a well-intended, well meaning anti-corruption reformer who believes in equality before the law no matter how rich you are, but could also be a flawed, fallible man, like you, capable of mistakes. Without being able to perform those mental gymnastics we tend to throw out the metaphorical baby with the bath water.

I'm not sure who Client 9 really is. Crusaders are always worthy of skepticism and Spitzer was a righteous, some would say self-righteous, crusader who didn't seem to have a lot of forgiveness in him, though some would say he had plenty of vindictiveness. He sure fucked himself and the weirdness of it all, getting nabbed by doing the things he used to nab people for doing, and by leaving the trails he used to catch people with, suggests some Shakespearean torment or at least Freudian psychology...Or, maybe a cigar was just a cigar in this case.

Why, as with drugs, prostitution is illegal, I have no idea (just look at the horrible state of anarchy, chaos and deprivation in Holland!). I'm not saying prostitution is a victimless crime -- the women employed in the industry are there for a variety of reasons that span the gamut from relatively benign to incredibly dark. But wouldn't decriminalization, as it would with drugs, take a lot of the criminality and worse-case scenarios out of the equation?

But it remains against the law and Spitzer definitely seems to have broken the law, and proved either hypocritical or truly impulse-control-deprived. But for Chrissakes, don't we have something better to do than devote federal resources to breaking up $4000-a-shot call girl rings? Maybe the lesson for Client 9 is that what comes around goes around. It's just a shame that in this country what goes around so much is a waste of time and talent.

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