Weiner's Wiener

I didn’t want to write about the Anthony Weiner sexting and texting scandal. Over the past couple of years I’ve respected Weiner’s positions on issues and especially his impassioned harangues against the ideological idiocy of the Republican right (is that redundant?). But his sending semi-nude photos of himself via the Internet to women he’d never met face-to-face was unseemly at best, tasteless, improper, inappropriate, all of that. And it certainly demonstrated a base ignorance of web technology; as I learned long ago, and instruct my students regularly: assume that any and everything you throw out into cyberspace stays there forever and is available to anyone anytime, no matter how “private” you may think your platform might be. But what he did wasn’t illegal. (At least as far as we know at this time.) He never even explicitly propositioned any of the women for sex, at least beyond the virtual kind (which I’ve read about for three decades and still can’t wrap my mind or any other part of me around). And none of the women came forward charging abuse, threat, or offense, and certainly no crime. Just slime. And just how many politicians do we still have in office who are slithering through their own slime?

I don’t want to defend Weiner (there is no defense for what he’s done), and I don’t want to argue with those who demanded his resignation, most agreeing with President Obama that his actions were “inappropriate” and “a distraction.” What I do what to point out is something I haven’t seen in all the coverage of the scandal: How much did Weiner’s name play in the inappropriateness and distraction? From the beginning, even Weiner himself acknowledged the humor-laden possibilities in his name (hell, he’s probably lived with it since he was in junior high). It could only be worse if his first name was Richard (though he goes informally by Rich). I don’t recall hearing any of the late-night comedy show jokes that didn’t play in some way on his name (though I only heard a few hundred from what I understand were several thousand).

I remember the first media political sex scandal, Gary Hart’s 1987 dalliance with Donna Rice on the boat Monkey Business. But what brought Hart down wasn’t the dalliance per se, but his challenge to the media in the wake of rumors about his extra-marital affair to “Follow me around. I don’t care.” So they did. And they found him with her on (of all places) the Monkey Business. It’s hard to sift through the mess to see how much the extra-marital affair had to do with Hart’s downfall and how much had to do with his challenge to the media (not to mention the sweet frosting of the boat’s name). And in much the same way, I can’t sift through the Weiner mess (at least the “distraction”) without wondering how much had to do with the confluence of his surname and his unfortunately homonymic organ (or “member,” if we want to move on to another pun that was front and center, so to speak, in this whole package, so to speak, etc.).