Mamet and Spitzer

About David Mamet's much-discussed essay on his acceptance of his right-wing thinking found in today's Village Voice, I thought I would isolate one thing and talk a bit about it. He quotes a line from Mark Twain saying that if you want to know about human nature, you should run a country paper. Having worked at small newspapers, I can say that I know what he is talking about, and I know that he is basically correct.

Take this week's hot political topic - the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal and his wife Silda Wall's reaction to it. So many people chimed in to express their sympathy for his wife. In such situations, I hold off that sympathetic impulse, until it is proven justified. Why? If you have ground-level experience with the power-hungry or the skulduggerous (or in other cases, the evil) you know that their mates are rarely complete angels in their own right. Generally, saints don't marry the lowliest sinners. Even if Mrs. Spitzer is a wonderful mom who's the first person you call to trade car-pooling days, it wouldn't surprise me if, as reported, she was the only advisor telling him to not to resign. People seem shocked by this report, but it didn't surprise me at all. People tend to assume and accept the victimized wife scenario in these stories, but I always assume that the wife is not that different from the husband, and at a minimum, the wife knows that the husband is capable of something like this.