Spitzer's Sidekick Feels Violated

According to the AP, the lawyer for the multi-named call girl who brought down the governor of New York has "lashed out at the media...for thrusting the 22-year-old woman into the 'public glare' without her consent and publishing revealing photos."

He is shocked, shocked that such images "have appeared on commercial web sites without her consent" and vowed to take legal steps to protect her from "any unwarranted exploitation of her name, picture, voice or likeness for purposes of profit."

After the news broke, insensitive outlets such as the New York Times published a story and pictures about Spitzer's petite ami based on "a series of telephone interviews" as "she told the tiniest tidbits of her story."

Now boors like Larry Flynt are besieging her with offers of $1 million to pose for "tastefully done" nudes for Hustler, after the "revealing photos" were taken down from the MySpace page hosted by the company she created in 2005 to further her singing career.

Is there no limit to media exploitation? In cases like these, even in the 21st century, as the old saying goes, it's always the woman who pays.

Strange Fruit of Social Networking

It’s the 1960s again in Jena, Louisiana with massive protests against racial injustice but with a few 21st century twists.

The crowds, the speeches and even the symbols--nooses from an oak tree--are the same, but the mood is somehow different. The protesters. drawn by Facebook and MySpace, are more convivial.

“At times,” one news account reports, “the town resembled a giant festival, with people setting up tables of food and drink and some dancing while a man beat on a drum.”

Martin Luther King III and Jesse Jackson are there, but no police with high-pressure hoses and attack dogs, more a replay of Woodstock than the March on Selma.

The remnants of racism are being discovered and denounced by a new generation, as well they should, but members of an older one can be grateful they won’t have to confront the lyrics of “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holliday’s immortal plaint:

“Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees/Pastoral scene of the gallant south/The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth/Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh/Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.”

What’s happening in Jena is so different that even President Bush feels safe in commenting on it: “The events in Louisiana have saddened me," he told White House reporters. "All of us in America want there to be, you know, fairness when it comes to justice."

Salad Dressing Secrets and Our Own

Sometimes American culture looks like one of those circus riders straddling two horses pulling in different directions.

Today’s equestrianism is about individuality. Under one foot is the report that a New York restaurateur is suing a former employee for theft of intellectual property by copying elements of her establishment from the décor to the menu.

Going in another direction is Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column titled “The Whole World Is Watching,” which says:

“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer--and each of us so much more transparent.”

There are echoes here of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “everybody belongs to everybody else,” and you don’t have to be Ayn Rand to find some of the implications troubling, even while cheering on the kind of open society that people like Dick Cheney hate.

Chef Rebecca Charles will likely not have much luck with legal remedies for claims about appropriation of her recipe for Caesar Salad dressing and touches like little packets of oyster crackers at each place setting, but her sense of feeling violated is understandable.

We may not live in a Brave New World--yet--but it makes sense to be thinking about where all this transparency is taking us while we can still rein in the horses.