Eliot Spitzer, governor errant of New York, has been linked to a classy (expensive) prostitution ring, and solicited a prostitute not much older than his 18 year-old daughter. Spitzer, who according to the New York Post dropped more than $80 K on prostitutes, has resigned.

Spitzer apparently bought one too many packages of Ho Hos. And also according to NY Post (purveyor of Page Six), he likes them unwrapped. So much for his free NYC condom campaign, and so much for public health.

The New York Post, the Big Apple’s classiest paper of repute, hands down, has the title part of the equation down pat: “NY’s Naked Emperor,” “Steamroll This Lousy Bum, Silda,” (“Silda” being the unfortunate missus) “How Horndog Set the Mood,” “80 G ‘Addicted to Love’ Gov,” “Hooker Booker Had List Full of Bigwigs,” “Missus Should Have Disease Test,” “Traveling Tarts Put Gov in Infamous Company,” and my personal favorite,

“HO NO!” Ah, that it can all be so pithy.

So we’ve established that the New York Post writes scintillating titles,

Spitzer is a creep for: 1) sleeping with a woman barely older than his daughter, 2) being a hypocrite about any sort of public-health-safe-sex-campaign for reasons alluded to above, and 3) Ew.

And just to put it out there and gloss over issues of power hierarchies, buying the services of a prostitute is creepy in and of itself.

“Client 9” is the first governor of New York to resign since Nelson

Rockefeller’s 1973 resignation, and the first to be forced out of office since

William Sulzer’s 1913 impeachment. Really, I’m not hashing out anything new.

David Vitter, Larry Craig, Californian mayors Gavin Newsom and Antonio Villaraigosa – why so many sex scandals? Can’t they pick more creative vices? But really, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Oh, the unlimited double-entendre’d possibilities.

Spitzer’s resignation on Wednesday afternoon ended with apologies to his family and to his constituents for his activities leading up to and within the Emperor’s Club, which involved, according to one FBI-wiretapped conversation, “things that, like, you might not think were safe,” although no one apologized to the lady in question. Commodity fetishism indeed, although not quite in the sense that Frederick Engels and Karl Marx meant it.

One criticism of sappy movies is that they cheapen emotions, how our most intimate moments are vulgarized by “the culture industry.” Extend that to how vulnerability is vulgarized, and by the former governor of New York reified by the political machine.

The governor of New York, who stood under the flag of New York and by extension, under the flag of America, has resigned. A head of the structure that regulates life – government – has resigned. Under this category, life, falls houses where people watch TV, offices where people work.

Life is regulated in its totality by ordering and structuring it. A head of

the structure has bought into (no pun intended) something that our society is

supposed to be against. One of Spitzer’s nicknames, “Mr. Clean,” came from his clean-up of New York.

Besides Wall Street, he tackled prostitution. But as a representative of the state, he acted as the state; a state that, apparently, supports human commodification. A state under which people in houses watch TV

and read news online and snicker about prostitution rings: it’s not that it’s

wrong; it’s that it’s funny.

If prostitution isn’t really an issue, then why are people focusing on that over how Spitzer cheated on his wife? Most jokes are a little too close to home for someone, but it’s “too soon” for someone else than the “Guv of Luv” – the implications of human commodification remain unexamined, leading to a washed-out ideological consent without consent.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, then the unexamined life structure – of which the polity is a base – is not worth living in. Because if Spitzergate was so funny, and not so wrong, then why don’t you live the red-light lifestyle yourself? I mean, what a great job.

You get to hang out with some pretty important dudes, if you play your cards right, and by following Spitzer’s money trail, you can make

some sick cash. Who wouldn’t want that? In an age of recession, it pays to have someone relate to you as a cultural commodity. So no one apologized to “Kristen,” the second half of the “classy” equation.

Why should they, when people like me can make jokes about it?

C.A. Chase is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]