"Our Monica, Ourselves"

Eggheads probe some seldom-explored aspects of Clinton's impeachment -- class-hatred, anti-Semitism, fake prudery -- with insightful results.

By Charles Taylor

Oct. 8, 2001 | It's hard to remember that there was a time in the whole Clinton scandal when we hadn't seen Monica Lewinsky, those few hours between the announced suspicion that Bill Clinton had had an affair with an intern and Lewinsky's public identification. And then that government ID photo was released to the news agencies. Collectively, there were two simultaneous reactions: revulsion, and immediate certainty that the rumors were true.

The inseparability of those two reactions remains the untold story in this picked-over tale. People looked at that unflattering picture and said, to themselves or out loud, of course this is exactly the type of woman Bill Clinton would go for: a mallrat tart for a trailer trash president. And when the later pictures of Monica appeared, pictures of her looking at Clinton with hungry adoration in her eyes or embracing him wearing that famous raspberry beret (cue Prince), few asked, as a female friend of mine did, what man wouldn't fall for such coquettish voluptuousness directed at him?

But Clinton's critics and the media, who by and large acted as Kenneth Starr's lap dogs, left the logic of desire out of the public telling of the story in order to equate the irrationality of lust with reckless self-destruction. Sex, in a way it hadn't been in years, was the new national threat. Clinton's surrender to his impulses became grounds for an attempt to promulgate the myth that any sex that didn't fit the accepted standard (monogamous, heterosexual intercourse) was a threat to our moral fabric and national stability.

The public didn't buy the myth, and that gave the attack dogs license to lump it into the degenerate category. "The death of outrage," William Bennett said in disgust as he envisioned a populace that heard the music of Nero's fiddle (or, in this case, Elvis singing "I'm the king of the jungle, they call me Tiger Man"), and danced to the tune rather than getting their asses out of town.

But the public's support for Clinton, which surprised almost everyone, from his defenders to his most vehement opponents, is a far more complicated issue, and it's still nowhere near settled. That's the story that various writers get -- and miss -- in dribs and drabs in the new collection of essays "Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest." In their introduction, the editors, Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan, describe the book as a chance to present the view from the left. The book contains more than its share of smart writing. But because it was written by academics, it only sporadically resembles recognizable English.

We've had time to get used to the excesses of the scandal -- the near right-wing coup, Ken Starr's flagrant contempt for due process and the sanctity of the grand jury. After what's happened in the past few weeks, it all seems far away and trivial now, and that's as it should be. But the scandal was, nevertheless, an attempt to overthrow an election.

What's particularly troubling in "Our Monica, Ourselves," though, is that many of the contributors are actually teaching students how to read and write at a university level when they can barely put together a coherent sentence themselves. Take "The Symbolics of Presidentialism" (and what does that mean?), by Dana D. Nelson of the University of Kentucky and Tyler Curtain of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here's a typical sentence: "That identification is structured by what might be called, for lack of a better phrase, the allegorical force of presidential heterosexuality: the supposedly paradigmatic triangulation of personal and, consequentially, constitutional relations (or in this case, betrayals) among the president, the First Lady, and the Other Woman/the people." "For Lack of a Better Phrase," might have been a good title for the whole book.

Still, the book is useful, if only for bringing up what hasn't been credited about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton -- and even if some of that is hardly new. Much of what the contributors hit upon was already said, or at least intimated, in "Monica's Story," Monica's 1998 tell-all book written by Andrew Morton. Dismissed as her attempt to cash in on her 15 minutes, the book wasn't taken seriously by reviewers who zeroed on its self-pitying melodrama and missed that Morton had produced one of the few creditable pieces of journalism to come out of the whole affair (particularly on the machinations involving Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg and alleged journalist Michael Isikoff). But the imprimatur of academia can work wonders (even if it can also drain the life out of a subject), and now perhaps those hidden issues can be discussed.

Next page: "Jewish-American princess" and "white trash"