At least there was no meth, and the prostitute's name was Kristen instead of Mike. But otherwise, there are not many degrees of separation between Client 9 and the Rev. Ted Haggard.
Why do certain personalities strike positions of extreme moral authority? It only looks like they are trying to impose rules on others. The real struggle for control is within.
There will be enough people working the sex, politics, hubris and hypocrisy angles. (This morning's New York Times story on Gov. Spitzer listed 26 contributing reporters.) I want to wander in another direction.
Just last week a different story of deceptive rectitude was playing out. A newly released memoir by Margaret B. Jones was exposed as a fake.
"Jones" had presented herself as a troubled child cum redeemed gang member who had lived in the foster home of a black woman in South Los Angeles. In fact, she was Margaret Seltzer, a former creative writing
student at the University of Oregon who grew up in Sherman Oaks and attended an
exclusive private school.
Jones/Seltzer's book was praised in a review that must now make the writer cringe.
Ms. Jones’s portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and
unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough-minded that it’s clear to
the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not
impair her capacity for caring. Instead it heightened her powers of
observation, enabling her to write with a novelist’s eye for the
psychological detail and an anthropologist’s eye for social rituals and
routines.
Her current life was profiled in a photo feature that allowed her to continue to embellish her fictional persona.
Unlike several other recent gang memoirs, all written by men, Ms.
Jones’s story is told from a nurturer’s point of view. Along with grit
and blood, every chapter describes tenderness and love between people
as well as the rites and details of domestic life.
[...]
I guess people get their ideas from TV, which is so one-dimensional and gives you no back story,” she said.
“The reason
I wanted to write the book is that all the time, people would say to
me, you’re not what I imagine someone from South L.A. would be like.”
No, she wasn't. And yet no one could tell.
Not her writing professors, who introduced her to a magazine writer, who put her in touch with her agent, who got her a book deal from a well-connected New York publisher. None detected inauthentic notes in passages that shifted from writing class-consciousness...
eager to earn my own money toward the flame-red Nike Cortez with fat laces that everyone else wore, but even more excited to
prove myself worthy of wearing the affiliated color and moving up the
ranks.
to a cop-show-cliche brother who said he didn't want her to visit him in prison because it
“was killin me,” and he’d decided he wasn’t going to “even
find out what was up wit y’all.” He had to do his “time solo” or he
“ain gonna make it.”
Forget due diligence and fact checking. All were lulled into seeing the great American myth of the kid who makes it despite the odds. And no one in this entire chain of promotion had real life experience close enough to what was being portrayed that any alarms went off.
It sounded right because it sounded like what we've been fed in movies and television. Seltzer's innovation was changing the point of view.
LA Times columnist Tim Rutten, citing historian Patricia Limerick's observation that our literary judgments remain hostage to the ideology of
authenticity, saw another wrinkle:
[T]he only unchallenged moral
authority has become that of victims. This should not be read as an
expression of sympathy toward the injured; instead, it's really an
extension of the culture of narcissism's influence into the world of
letters. It's a view that asserts that only those who have experienced
pain or torment have a right speak of it, though others may participate
vicariously through their eyes. Hence our insatiable desire for
tell-all memoirs of every savage and degrading form of abuse — as long
as the account comes directly from those who suffered it.
[...]
How many talk shows would have booked Seltzer/Jones if
she had forthrightly admitted she was a white writer of imaginative
fiction with a social conscience that impelled her to write about gang
life in South Los Angeles?
From what I've read, Seltzer may have already adopted the Jones life story in college, before she began the book. And, as with the fraudulent James Frey, she reportedly had kernels of experience from which to fabricate... I mean, write.
"I just felt there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it," she said.
The connections between Spitzer's authenticity, his secret life and his desire to do good are quite a bit more convoluted.
Last week I also heard from the chronicler of crime and punishment, David Simon, creator of The Wire. He told Fresh Air's Terri Gross that, while some of the characters may have been based on real Baltimore figures, the plot lines came from the ancient Greeks.
The story of Client 9 may have come as a shock to Elliot Spitzer's family and friends, but not to Aeschylus.
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