“We all have our own private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anybody else’s.” — Home Depot founder and former New York Stock Exchange director Ken Langone speaking a few days ago about former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
People will be making cracks behind Spitzer’s back for the rest of his life because he’s an almost comical case of an unexamined life. A man brought down by a refusal to honestly examine himself and adjust his personal and political relationships accordingly. A man who was adamant about prosecuting and punishing a flawed world for the usual corruptions and lack of morality, not in spite of but precisely because he’d failed to come to terms with his own nature.
In the space of eight days the man has devolved into the status of a clown. If I were Spitzer I would agree to a divorce, move to Europe and and live alone in a small, sparely furnished apartment in a small town in Tuscany or Umbria, like Jeremy Irons‘ disgraced character does at the end of Damage.
Henry Miller addressed this very same trait or tendency in “romantic revolutionary” John Reed in Warren Beatty‘s Reds. Here’s the mp3.