With apologies to the entire African Pygmy community for having done nothing wrong to deserve the honor, yet having their name used to denote shortness of stature in other realms, the first two nominees for our Moral Pygmy Award of 2008 are:
1. Pres. George W. Bush, for vetoing the Congressional anti-torture, anti-water-boarding bill; he has single-handedly turned us from the good-guy of the world to the bad. Thanks, W, we really needed that.
2. Gov. Elliot Spitzer, the scourge of Wall Street, the man who brought morality to moguls, the man who took no prisoners when it came to moral impurity, the man who anticipated the Vatican in regarding it a sin to acquire waay-too-much money for one's own good, for consorting with a high-priced call girl, if you believe the federal wiretap that made him Client 9 in Room 871 of the Mayflower Hotel in D.C. There's forgivable hypocrisy and unforgivable; Spitzer seems to have struck a nerve because his public posture before the fall lacked a certain humility that may have made a similar transgression in a less moralistic persona a bit more understandable in the French sense, quoted by Tolstoy in War and Peace, "to understand all is to forgive all."
We dunno what demons impelled Gov. Spitzer to blow his career to smithereens, somewhat along the lines, almost, of Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy. We don't say this about Franklin D. Roosevelt because he led us out of a great depression and to victory in a terrible war that, for once, we didn't start, so he can have all the mistresses he wanted with no complaint from us.
Earlier I'd proposed to the S.F. Chronicle that it support this new award, but events have overtaken their slow-footedness and we've got it going here instead.
Now we need a trophy, or at least a t-shirt to send to the recipients.
Oh, for a logo for the Moral Pygmy awards, what shall it consist of, I wonder...
The late U.S. Representative, Tom Lantos, from San Mateo and San Francisco, inspired the award by calling Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo, a moral pygmy for having provided the People's Republic of China with the means of identifying an anonymous dissident (from San Mateo) allowing him to be arrested and beaten. I suppose the Anne Frank Award people might have wanted to recognize Yang as well, as they might the people who turned the Frank family of Amsterdam in to the Nazi authorities, sending them to their death in the gas chambers. There is an Anne Frank Award that goes to squealers, isn't there, in the face of laws that beg to be violated?
Which ones are those, I wonder.
The year is early, yet, as we have over nine months to go. Think of all the opportunities to screw up that we still have coming, and so many people competing for the honor, usually without being conscious of it, which is even more remarkable. It's not like they were out there trying to be recognized.
Reminds me of Sen. Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award for the most wasteful government spending.
Let's see, what other interesting awards are there? The Darwin Award, that goes to people who succeed in killing themselves in new and ever stupider ways, hopefully before they have a chance to pass along their genes and contaminate the gene pool, Jean Poule, French, I believe.