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Frankly I am getting tired of all the wiener jokes and double entendres in the news lately. It seems like everyone is fixated on male genitalia these days. At the moment, I guess we can point the finger (or whatever) at Anthony Weiner, the now disgraced former member of the House of Representatives from New York, who thought it might be clever to post explicit photographs of Big Jim and the twins on his Twitter account. And what is it about some New York politicians? Who can forget Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor whose own private parts and an affair with a big city grisette got him into hot water. At the same time it launched him into a new career as a CNN commentator which allowed him to offer his own cogent thoughts on Mr. Weiner’s wandering wiener. Does anyone else see the irony here?

And doesn’t the different spelling of the current culprit’s name and the phallic euphemism associated with it bother anyone else? They should not be pronounced the same, yet they are. Following rules of proper German pronunciation, “ei” = “ī” and “ie” = “ē” So not only does Mr. Weiner have a problem keeping his in his pants, he has been mispronouncing his last name for his entire life. Geez!

And what about this “wiener” expression? Do people still use that word today for anything other than a hot dog served at a picnic or the ballpark? I don’t think so. I know my buddies and I used it as kids in the Midwest, and novelist and poet Jim Harrison, who is from Michigan, still uses it occasionally in his writings. But really, I thought that one went out with “winky” and “peter.” I can think of so many more imaginative euphemisms used today, none of which, for the sake of decorum, I will share here. Let me leave this to your imagination, something the media is having trouble with these days.

This is not to say that there have not been a few entertaining items born of this rather sad episode. A columnist in one of our local papers here in Maine addressed the Weiner affair under the title “A Few Wieners short of a BBQ.” I thought that was pretty clever and worth a few chuckles. Probably the best to date, however, is Joel Stein’s “America’s Next Top Weiner,” his very humorous yet bawdy Time magazine exploration of the male’s apparent need to show his penis to everyone based on the results of Stein’s own attempt to follow in Mr. Weiner’s footsteps. He asks if we are “experiencing some kind of sexualized renaissance” or is this just another “pathetic manifestation of the male ego.” Perhaps it is a little of both? Is it the male who is really suffering from penis envy these days?

All in all, given the myriad problems we are facing, I just don’t get all the fuss and fury about a guy who is so cocksure the world would be a better place once it knew how endowed he is. Is this really news? Perhaps Mr. Weiner should have taken a lesson from Gustave Flaubert, the French writer who faced his own demons when it came to keeping it under wraps. In the autumn of 1850, while visiting Cairo, Jerusalem and Beirut, Flaubert availed himself of their many bordellos. Upon his eventual arrival in Istanbul he discovered he was suffering from a raging case of syphilis. He wrote of his “problème” in his journal, including meticulous descriptions of his penis as the disease advanced. When he arrived at a new (for him) brothel in Istanbul, a prostitute asked him to display his compromised phallus in order to prove he was not sick. Flaubert refused. “I acted the monsieur,” he wrote to a friend, “and jumped down from the bed, saying loudly that she was insulting me, that such behavior was revolting to a gentleman.” Now that is class, no? Mr. Weiner, while interested in the role his penis plays in current affairs, could have been just a little more circumspect. It just goes to show you that Mr. Weiner doesn’t know dick.