Hoodwinked.(The Talk of the Town)(Eliot Spitzer)

Should we be surprised that the most prescient pre-hooker assessments of Eliot Spitzer may have come from Joe Bruno, whose tart appraisals were often thought, not without justification, to be distorted by desperation and self-interest? Bruno, the majority leader of the New York State Senate, often suggested to people that Spitzer was mentally unbalanced, and a bit of a con artist. "He hoodwinked me," Bruno told this magazine in November, referring to the Governor's broken promises to work with, rather than against, him. "And I'm embarrassed."

The greater hoodwinking, it turns out, was universal. Spitzer's secret life was a secret to all but those who were paid to participate in it. No one--not his best friends, his closest aides, or his most vindictive enemies--seems to have had a clue that he had a prostitute problem. Maybe even Spitzer himself didn't know it; the place in his brain where he stored this information was apparently walled off and airtight. Such a feat of compartmentalization bespeaks an efficient but troubled mind.

Outside the Spitzer household, at least, embarrassment ranked fairly low on the roster of reactions, beneath shock, dismay, grief, fury, titillation, and merriment. People by now should hardly be surprised to learn that a powerful man and/or righteous scold is a dirty bird, but, even allowing for worldliness, the news was staggering--as much for the stupidity as for the sex. Somehow, it was less suprising to read a tabloid report (possibly apocryphal) that the chief of police in Tehran had just been caught in the company of six naked prostitutes.

The best clue that Spitzer might not be what he seemed was a quotation he chose thirty years ago for his high-school-yearbook page, not the "anonymous" crack that made the rounds last week--"The worst thing about political jokes is that some of them get elected"--but a bit of semiotics from "Hamlet":

HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?, POLONIUS: By the mass. And 'tis like a camel indeed., HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel., POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel., HAMLET: Or like a whale?, POLONIUS: Very like a whale.

Weasel, whale. Fish, fowl. King, strumpet. Rise, fall. Pride, comeuppance. The story does have (to borrow from "The Wire," the HBO series that concluded the night before the Spitzer news broke, like a fresh season) that Shakespearean aspect, not to mention the ...