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Dear Camille:
The figure who baffles me the most in the current Clinton comedy is
Chelsea Clinton. At first, I was deeply sympathetic to the girl. (I
accidentally discovered my father's letter to his mistress when I was
16, and was deeply hurt and humiliated.)
However, reading that Chelsea offered full support when her father called
to tell her that there was no improper behavior whatever, and seeing her fly
to Washington to give a photo-op of her father hugging her (which I
thought looked really gross), I am starting to get troubled by this
girl.
I mean, shouldn't she be at least angry at her parents for embarrassing
her? Is she really "sophisticated and grown-up," as the media praise her?
I think Clinton is doing to Chelsea what his parents did to him, that
is, forcing her to compartmentalize embarrassing or negative feelings for
the sake of
looking normal. This, to me, is cruel. Something is wrong with the
way the girl is taking this.
Can you analyze what is going on here?
Baffled in Virginia
Dear Baffled:
Before we deal with the post-adolescent traumas of an affluent, privileged,
white, upper-middle-class American girl, let's pause for a moment to imagine
the more concrete anxieties of young and old this week in Iraq, which is being
threatened by massive American air strikes.
While I fervently support most of President Clinton's domestic agenda, his
foreign
policy is a disaster. His administration's blundering inability to build
genuine international coalitions has constantly left us as the fat-wallet
principal player in questionable military forays abroad. Whatever our
legitimate commitment to our democratic ally, Israel (the real point of this
Iraqi expedition), our bullying arrogance toward and disrespect for the Arab
world, with its long, noble, cultured history, is unnecessarily intensifying
hatred of America. Future generations of Americans will reap a bitter harvest
from what is being sown now.
Meanwhile, back in the Clinton harem, at what price does the sultan rule?
Surely most observers deeply sympathize with the plight of Chelsea Clinton,
forced like a Mafia princess to hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil
in her father's Bacchanalian girl-go-round. In the ongoing sex scandal
swirling around ex-intern Monica Lewinsky, both Bill and Hillary, an
aggressive duo of hard-as-nails lawyers, have profited from public indulgence
won by widespread concern for their innocent daughter.
Even if Chelsea were privately angry with her father, it would be ethically
wrong for her to show it: The White House, like the Vatican or Buckingham
Palace, should present a united front. Many famous people and their immediate
families survive by not reading the newspapers or watching television -- a news
fast endorsed for everyone, in fact, by medical guru Andrew Weil as a route
to psychic health in our frantic world. (As I see it, a
detached, tranquil citizenry would set us up for another rise of fascism.)
I totally agree with your disgust with the way the embattled President
Clinton has
recently used his daughter for photo opportunities -- not just in his
excessive,
quasi-incestuous physical displays on the way to and from Camp David at the
height of the Monica Blitz, but in his Waltzing Hillary seashore farce, when he
blatantly pulled Chelsea into the telephoto pictorial frame, betraying just
how staged that tableau was.
Richard Nixon also notoriously used his long-suffering wife and daughters as
props. In retrospect, Ronald Reagan deserves a Dr. Pepper toast for never
giving a whit about this kind of family schmaltz: On the contrary, the
Reagans callously booted their kids out the door with nary a fistful of
jellybeans for the road.
Actually, Madonna, whose profound influence on late-20th century sex and
culture I still tirelessly praise, deserves the Joan Crawford Strappy Sandal
Mini-Trophy for slickly coordinating the first official photographs of her
daughter Lourdes (see the March Vanity Fair) with the release of her new CD.
It's all product, isn't it? The material girl's roots in assembly-line Motor
City are showing.
Speaking of Nixon, he was one of the first outsiders to observe at close hand
the young Chelsea's intimacy with her father and alienation from her mother
-- which were well-documented by news cameras on the Clintons' first
vacation on
Martha's Vineyard. That maternal breach has apparently been healed by the
enforced family togetherness of the barricaded White House years. Chelsea,
who looked shockingly like a war refugee (a spitting image of the awkward,
homely, reclusive Emily Dickinson) when we first saw her at the 1992
Democratic National Convention, had obviously taken the painful brunt of her
parents' unstable marriage in Little Rock.
In the days and weeks after Clinton's first presidential nomination, the
liberal major media (notably the newsmagazines) were guilty of partisan
sleight-of-hand in the ingenious ways they found to hide what Chelsea looked
like. Compassion it wasn't: You can imagine how bright the spotlight would
have shined on any walking train wreck discovered among Republican scions. At
the time, I wondered whether Chelsea, like a prisoner of war, was flipping the
passive-aggressive grunge bird to her brightly dolled-up mother.
The rude, ribald TV and radio talk shows couldn't be controlled, of course, so
Chelsea jokes popped up everywhere. When an interviewer from a Texas gay
newspaper told me that gay men were wearing T-shirts demanding, "Leave Chelsea
alone!" I snorted derisively about the PC decline of gay sensibility.
Before Stonewall, I retorted, gay men would have worn T-shirts that said,
"Slap Chelsea until she goes to a hairdresser!"
Sentimental lady journalists like to say that the strength and vitality of the
Clinton marriage are shown by how well Chelsea has turned out. I think it's
more accurate to say that Chelsea's innate character is best revealed by the
personality of her charming cat, Socks, who is a terrific model of spunky
composure. Dance lessons were probably Chelsea's salvation by giving her
control and expressiveness in the physical realm. Without the discipline of
dance, she might well have slid into whiny, drippy, early-Janis Ian self-pity.
I find particularly unnerving, and even heartbreaking, the photo in a current
tabloid, the Feb. 17 Star, of a radiant Chelsea out on a recent San
Francisco date with a wealthy, dishy, young Stanford spark, Matthew Wilsey.
Children of the rich and famous have a dreadful lifelong problem of assessing
the sincerity of friends and suitors. Does anyone seriously believe that a
freshman girl with Chelsea's looks could normally have snagged a campus
dreamboat of this rank?
Chelsea's desirability is unfortunately predicated on her proximity to the
alpha male of world politics. Her identity has been half-swamped by her
father's hierarchical status, which acts on other men like an alluring,
homoerotic perfume. She's a prisoner of the archetypal pattern (as in the
woe-filled sagas of Gloria Vanderbilt and Doris Duke) of the shy, vulnerable
heiress worth a king's ransom.
Ironically, her father's misfortune may prove a boon for Chelsea. If the king
goes to the guillotine, her market value will crash, so that for the rest of
her life, it will be easier for her to sort out the knights from the churls.
The tabloids have really scored recently: The shocking color cover photograph
on the Feb. 17 National Enquirer, "Wild White House Nights," showing a
bovine Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, side by side with blond actress Markie
Post, jumping up and down on the bed in the historic Lincoln Bedroom, should
appall Americans of every political persuasion. This kind of cavalier
backstage treatment of the White House by the Clintons and their obnoxious,
partying cronies has been disgraceful.
Hillary likes to pose as a crusading Eleanor Roosevelt, but she's looking more
and more like Belle Watling, madam of a bawdy house whose complacent revelers
don't realize that the burning of Atlanta is just one day away.
N E X T_P A G E | "USA! USA!" Camille on the Olympics
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