Salon Books | "It's the Stupidity, Stupid"


	A L S O+.T O D A Y [ NEWSREAL ] Chasing Monica By Barbara Ehrenreich The House managers got their wish -- a chance to probe, examine and even "de-brief" the luscious Lewinsky [ NEWSREAL ] The trickster president By Richard Goldstein Clinton's enemies have made him a culture hero Tesseract Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek A jigsaw puzzle of a novel in which three interlocking stories lead to a violent climax T A B L E+T A L K Want to get a little dirty? Talk about the pleasures of gardening books in Table Talk's Books area B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers R E C E N T L Y Two nations under God By Carol Lloyd American spirituality is torn between hellfire fundamentalism and New Age navel-gazing -- and sometimes they're hard to tell apart (01/26/99) Give me that Prime Time religion By Mark Schone In his new born-again book, Deion Sanders asks not what he can do for Jesus, but what Jesus can do for him (01/26/99) Great American novelist By Jonathon Keats It's time to add Bret Easton Ellis to the canon (01/22/99) It keeps right on a-hurtin' By Charles Taylor Peter Guralnick's story of Elvis Presley's decline is an American tragedy with a rock 'n' roll beat (01/18/99) The making of an American historian By Carol Lloyd After 12 years, two children, three jobs and a decade in the Yankee limelight, British-born journalist Harold Evans unveils a tribute to his adopted country (01/13/99) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Books feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		-----------So should we hate the people ----------------who hate Clinton, or what? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY HARRY SHEARER \| Interesting question. Glad I thought of it. Look, I'm a child of the sixties. As is Bill Clinton. Which is, by the way, one final reason why people hate him. Who thought, in the heady days of Haight-Ashbury, when our idea of an innovative social program was free concerts in the park, that the first emblematic figure of our generation would be the most equivocal semi-dope smoker, semi-draft dodger, semi-free lover ever to be part of our age group? As Pat Buchanan tried to tell us at the 1992 Republican convention, America is involved in a culture war. Bill Clinton, who, had he been a woman of his generation, would have burned half his bra, is the de facto leader of whatever side of that war Robert Bork opposes -- even though, ultimately, he appears to have been drafted into that role. Linda Tripp, who has steadfastly insisted she had no political agenda in starting the avalanche with a trip to Radio Shack, may have been telling the truth. But she clearly had a cultural agenda. She was widely reported to have been disgusted when, after the propriety of the Bush White House, the Clinton gang came in with their jeans and their sneakers and, in the case of George Stephanopoulos, his "dirty hair." Hearing Linda Tripp talk about the Clinton White House is like hearing our parents talk about the Rolling Stones. To misquote von Clausewitz, politics is the generational war by other means. We are told by nostalgic conservatives (shouldn't nostalgia be the official emotion of conservatives?) that Ronald Reagan so respected the Oval Office that he never took his jacket off while he was within its confines. For some reason, that image seems to persist in their memories far better than the trading of arms for hostages. It's a cultural statement, pure and simple. The grown-ups knew how to behave in the executive mansion. The kids turned it into Animal House. Incidentally, I have a fairly vivid memory of one of those jackets, and I know why he didn't take it off: One of his aides might have attempted to put it back on the horse. Sure, it's ironic with cherries on top that Bill Clinton, whose kinship with his generation was always more chronological than ideological or behavioral, became the receptacle for all the pent-up I-told-you-so-ing of a generation he was so eager to ape (he said, in a seldom-remembered remark shortly after taking office, that he'd learned much from Reagan's presidency; little did we know that what he'd studied was the latter's flair for genially plausible mendacity). As in so many other ways, Clinton has fallen short. Reagan was America's best supporting man, the leading man's best friend; Clinton has become America's stand-in, his cheese ball draft evasion substituting for the draft-card burning lovers of Ho Chi Minh, his non-inhaling experiment on foreign shores standing in for the empty-eyed acidheads begging for spare change on our street corners, his furtive fumbling for hallway blow jobs standing in for John and Yoko naked in bed on the world's TV screens. But, as I said, I'm a child of the sixties. Just as the civil-rights veterans forgave the once-fearsome George Wallace (much easier to forgive when he was sitting in a wheelchair, shaking with Parkinson's, scary as a beetle on its back), I say we should love-bomb the Clinton haters. Stick a flower in the barrel of Richard Mellon Scaife's rifle. Flash a peace sign at Larry Klayman. Give Larry Nichols a state job, for God's sake. Buy some night crawlers from Parker Dozhier. Help Ken Starr get back his lost deanship in Malibu. Get Linda Tripp the name of Paula Jones's cosmetic surgeon. Their motives, as I've tried to discern them, may have been strikingly less than noble. But their efforts have helped us see more clearly a president whose brilliance and cunning could not keep him from lapses of judgment and acts of recklessness that, had they happened during the cold war, would have made for one very scary movie. A lifelong middler and diddler miscast as an avatar of radical globalism, who has arrayed against him a collection of cranks and bigots donning the raiment of moralists -- this masquerade, too frightening for Halloween, looks like a Mardi Gras float that veered off Canal Street and lumbered its way up to Pennsylvania Avenue. Even so, in the goofy way that life works, William Jefferson Clinton got the enemies he deserved. Many of us do. SALON \| Jan. 29, 1999 Harry Shearer is one of America's foremost humorists. He has performed in movies, television and radio. Excerpted from "It's the Stupidity, Stupid" by Harry Shearer. © 1999 by Harry Shearer. To be published February 1999. Published by arrangement with Ballantine Books, a Division of Random House Inc.