A FRIEND of mine recently came to me for some advice regarding some problems she has been having with regard to the exposure, granted within a small circle of people, of a particular habit that she has; one that might be considered by some, though not most, as ethically questionable.
The problem she had was not so much persons finding out about her little vice, but the reaction of persons she considered as colleagues virtually gloating over the issue.  What compounded the situation was that there seemed to be a concerted campaign to blow the issue up and tie it in to her job performance.
‘Schadenfreude’ is one of those big words you usually recall the first time you encounter them, particularly when the context overwhelmingly supports what they mean.  In this case, my encounter with this word goes back a few years ago during the Eliot Spitzer scandal.  For those who don’t recall the incident, Spitzer was the former Attorney-General for the State of New York, and later its Governor.  He was forced to resign a little over one year in office when it was disclosed that he used the services of a prostitution ring.
Spitzer was one of the Democrats whose careers I used to follow, particularly during his tenure as Attorney-General.  He was a hard-nosed politician who dedicated his public service career to cleaning up the excesses of Wall Street, something which made him a great many enemies, not only in the corporate community itself but on the political circuit which depended heavily on business support.
When the call-girl story broke, a new term was coined, called ‘Spitzenfreude’, to describe the gloating that many business executives and politicians felt at what would inevitably lead to the end of Spitzer’s political career.  But did Spitzer’s moral lapse somehow equate to incompetence on what had been the core mission of his legal and political career?
In an article published on the website, ‘Slate’, Daniel Gross writes:
“As a prosecutor, Spitzer had an incredible tool in the Martin Act, a state law that gives officials extraordinary powers when pursuing financial fraud. Spitzer’s willingness to wield this blunt instrument doubtlessly pushed many firms to settle cases, even if they believed they had a good chance of beating Spitzer in court.  But that doesn’t mean his targets were innocents. Spitzer’s real tools were shame, embarrassment, and concern for reputation… Spitzer showed that the nation’s biggest and most prestigious investment banks, the ones that spoke grandly of serving their clients with integrity, systematically pimped out investment recommendations for the sake of ginning up investment-banking business.”
Of course, everyone has their own weaknesses, and public servants are people, too.  In public life, however, any such Achilles’ heel is multiplied one hundred-fold, particularly when it serves some vested interest or the other.  And there is the automatic linking of public performance with Bill Clinton’s management of the US economy, for example, was for a good while overshadowed by his extra-marital affair with Monica Lewinsky.
I used sexual indiscretion as an example, but there are several other private vices that have the capacity of blowing up, often unjustifiably so, in the face of those with public careers or public personas — it could be gambling, some personality quirk, or it could a tendency towards politically incorrect speech.  Gordon Brown probably could have gotten more votes in the recently concluded election if he hadn’t referred to one Labour supporter as “bigoted,” not knowing that his microphone was still on.
The question that often gets lost in the whole debate of the private weaknesses of public people, however, has to do with whether this specific weakness impacts significantly on the job that they are assigned.  Many persons, for example, somehow equated Spitzer’s use of a prostitute to a flaw in his campaign to rein in the wild horses of Wall Street, even though one thing didn’t logically follow the other.
The problem with Guyana is that because there are few entities with clearly stated ethical guidelines, and associated rules of procedure, once those guidelines are breached, anything goes in the way of public comment.  And even if the comment is restricted to a closed circle – at the time – the capacity for damage can still be enormous.
The advice I gave to my friend was simple:  We are all human beings, all subject to some frailty or the other, and no one is infallible.  What has changed, in my view, was not her job performance, which I’m familiar with, which is in keeping with her contractual obligations and can withstand scrutiny; nor the worsening of what even she acknowledges as a problem. The only variable has been the discovery of her weakness and the exploitation of that discovery for the narrow ends of persons, many of whom might have greater concern if their own skeletons were exposed.
What she needs to keep doing, and anyone caught in a similar situation should, is to take steps to prevent her private vice from affecting what matters most in her own private life, ensure that her competence in her work is demonstrably above reproach, and to be wary of how she chooses her friends