The Disconnect

Okay, my hometown paper, and probably yours, is full of stuff about Eliot Spitzer today. Understandably.

But a comment from Alan Dershowitz rather puts the whole thing in perspective:

“I always thought he was somebody who would come down on crimes with real victims,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “Prostitutes aren’t victims — they’re getting paid a thousand dollars an hour, and the johns aren’t victims. What upset me the most was that they wiretapped thousands of e-mails and phone calls. In an age when terrorism needs to be stopped, they’re devoting these kinds of resources to a prostitution ring?”

I'm in no way condoning Spitzer's behavior. But was this really a good use of taxpayer dollars?

* * * * * * * *

In a weird synchronicity of disconnect, yesterday's Times had an article on getting married with no one present, and another on making a baby with no one there.

In Montana, it's possible to have a double-proxy wedding. The groom is hither, the bride is thither, and random strangers say the vows for them in a Montana courtroom. It's one thing to have a wedding where one of the parties appears by proxy - it lets a soldier marry a hometown sweetheart while deployed. But two proxies? It boggles the imagination.

And in India, commercial surrogacy is legal and, because of the (low) costs involved, is attracting foreigners. So you get scenarios like this one:

Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.

There's no relationship, no connection, no contact, nothing but a contract and some consideration. I have no problem with surrogacy, but this too boggles the imagination.

I'm not condemning either of these practices; I find them fascinating examples of a lack of barriers engendered by the global economy, the internet and modern technology. And I read both of those articles word for word, reveling in the fact they were both in the same section of the same paper on the same day.

* * * * * * * *

Back to Spitzer: he is suffering from a disconnect. From his wife and family, from his own high-minded ethics, from his constituents, from common sense. What was he thinking?