#Me(n)Too
By Martin H. Levinson
I don’t understand why Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito got grief over an upside-down American flag (a symbol of the stop-the-steal movement) that was flown over the front lawn of the Alito family home in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection. He said he didn’t fly the flag. His wife hoisted it in response to a dispute she was having with a neighbor. When he asked her to take the flag down, she told him to take a hike—which is what he did, over to the Supreme Court where he manned up and exhibited a little control over women by taking away female reproductive rights.
In a similar case of a wife getting in the way of her husband’s job, US Senator Bob Menendez, who is being prosecuted for bribery, claimed his spouse was the culprit, as she handled the family’s finances. He said he had no idea that the gold bars lying around his house in plastic bags, the cash stashed in boots, and the Mercedes Benz convertible that showed up unannounced one day on his driveway were the result of illegal chicanery.
History is replete with stories about wives jeopardizing their husband’s vocations. Adam, who arguably had the world’s greatest gig—lounging around naked all day, naming animals, and eating to his heart’s content—was tossed out of the Garden of Eden because his wife convinced him to consume forbidden fruit. Marie Antoinette did Louis XVI no favors when, in response to hearing France’s peasants were starving, she said, “Let them eat cake.” Warren Harding was perfectly happy to be a newspaperman in Ohio, but his wife Florence pushed him to seek the presidency, which he did and made a total hash of—Harding knew he was in over his head, which he admitted saying, “I am not fit for this office and should have never been here.”
The lesson to be drawn from these examples is that men who want to have agita-free careers had best be wary of their wives, as their partners can put their livelihoods in peril. This can be seen clearly in the poor behavior of various women married to US politicians. For example, in the 1990s, Hillary Clinton henpecked her husband into letting her spend time to devise a master plan for American health care rather than staying home, baking cookies, and wearing sexy outfits. This led to Bill getting into hot water through fooling around with an intern to attain some libidinal relief. Donald Trump, who has walked down the aisle three times in his life, was impeached because Melania, who it has been reported on the internet hated the Democratic Party and Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky, hypnotized him into trying to coerce Ukraine to provide damaging narratives about Joe Biden. George Santos would be in office today if he hadn’t allowed his wife Juanita—who a number of my Facebook friends say he secretly married twenty years ago in Rio de Janeiro—to run his congressional campaign. During the course of that effort, Juanita made up and submitted a phony resume detailing Santos’s accomplishments to election officials. Santos did not reveal what Juanita did because he is too much of a gentleman to let his wife, who was a newbie to politics, take the hit for falsifying his cv.
The #Me(n)Too Movement began in Colonial Williamsburg in the 18th. century as a response to the reputational harm men had been suffering from being accused of sexual abuse, harassment, and rape from women they have wronged. It never caught on and recently it has been eclipsed by the #MeToo Movement, which highlights indignities women have had to put up with. Perhaps now would be a good time to revive the #Me(n)Too Movement, and give specific attention to the shame and humiliation that men in public office have had to endure through the bad actions of their wives. If it’s good for the goose it should be good for the government gander, particularly if that gander is a government official who has been living a comfortable life and finds he needs a quick and easy justification to defend himself from accusations of mischief and misfeasance on the job. To paraphrase Socrates, whose big-mouth wife cost him his position, and his life, as an Athenian government gadfly, “Happiness exists in knowing how to shift the blame for your work-related mess-ups to your partner”