What's in a Name?

BY BEN YASTER

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spitzer

AS A CHILD BORN to the ignominious fate of a silly-sounding last name, I can understand why New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is so vehement in his pursuit of justice. Just as I was tagged with all sorts of epithets beginning in middle school, ranginging from the tame rhyme Master Yaster to the hyphenated sexual innuendoes Yaster-Bater and Nasty-Yasty, I imagine that Spitzer must have been subject to a few malicious takes on the obvious ethnic origins and post-fellatio connotations his surname suggests. Spitzerberger. Spit-take. The Schpritzer. Spitz-or-swallows. The list of possibilites goes on. Spitzerellli's history, if anything close to my own, is most likely rife with injustices all on account of his last name. The corporate world littered with firms as phonetically vanilla and unobjectionable as Smith and Barney, will now pay the price.

In terms of nicknames, Maurice A. Greenberg probably had a much easier schooling experience than Spitzer. Greenberg, usually referred to as Hank, conjures the image of the onetime major leaguer Hank Greenberg, a Hercules who rained RBIs in the 1930s and '40s, and the only Jew besides Sandy Koufax to, well, mean much of anything to the game of baseball. Maurice Greenberg, dubbed Hank by some beneficent fellow, probably never faced the catcalls of "Mo' Greens" and "Green-turd-er" that would have followed a man of, say, Spitzer's status. Riding the myth of the homerun hitter that preceded him, Greenberg undoubtedly cruised to a position of wealth and power.

It is therefore no surprise to this one Benjamin Zev Yaster, a name that has yet to sound less rediculous with each passing day, that Spitzer has been so adamant about going after Greenberg, the former CEO of uber-insurer American International Group (AIG) Inc. Yes, Greenberg may be implicated in gross acounting frauds. And, yes, his stakes in the Bermuda-seated C.V. Starr companies-the same C.V. Starr responsible for a good chunk of Brown's donations-is questionable, to say the least. But the New York Attorney General's Office cannot only be after these crimes. There is something else lurking behind Spitzer's intent, something else stuck in his craw, something else burning him beneath that omnipresent five-o'clock shadow.

From this Yaster-Bater, I promise you, the Spitzer-Spatzer is taking it personally. He is defending his very name.

By Ben Yaster B'05

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