T H E
C L I N T O N
C R I S I S

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Several months ago I had an experience that offered one possible answer. An old friend (let's call him Robert) accused me of being a gossip -- the-old-fashioned, whisper-over-the-fence kind. Hurt and guilty, I swore off my loose-lipped ways. I spent weeks in a state of self-conscious vigilance. My conversations became scrupulously polite; I steered clear of tantalizing trivia, psychological speculation and whisper campaigns. I was very mature.

Then a strange thing began to happen. I found myself watching "Rikki Lake" smack in the middle of the day. I gasped and tsk-tsked as a man threw a chair at his girlfriend upon hearing she was a transsexual. Soon I was not only furtively reading deep-dish profiles of anorexic supermodels at the checkout counter, but buying the magazines and bringing them home.

When Diana died, my new tabloid appetite went into overdrive. I stayed up all night to watch millions of sobbing strangers mourn a woman none of us had ever met. At the local Diana shrine I lingered over the expensive bouquets, gold necklaces and tear-stained poems propped beneath her grinning visage. An old college friend -- who has grown into a careful, rather conventional woman -- saw me and began confessing her deep grief over Diana's death. I hadn't seen her so vulnerable in years. Although I was happy to connect with her, the idea of bonding over a bulimic princess disturbed me.

That night I broke my gossip fast -- during a phone call with my friend Paul, a prodigious talker in the small-town Southern tradition. We mongered rumors, indulged in psychological analysis and chattered idly about all matters of an illicit nature. Maybe it was just the natural thrill of sin, but I got off the phone feeling more alive than I had in weeks. I felt an undeniable sense of community -- not a Kumbayah, bumper-sticker community but the real reactive mixture of tender affection and conflict. It was not simply about letting off steam, but about creating stories that made sense of our friends and ourselves. That night I felt no urges to channel-surf for hyperbolic news stories. The television sat shrouded in silence.

My euphoric reaction to this brief hit of dish made me think about the difference between private and public gossip. They were both attempts to feed the same urge, but their effect on my psyche was infinitely different. Private gossip connected me to my immediate surroundings, my own behavior and the lives of the people I knew; the other distracted me, filled me with amorphous feelings and a constant hunger for more. I turned to my Oxford English Dictionary, searching for clues to this age-old human enterprise.

The origin of the word surprised me. In the 14th century, a "godsibb" described an intimate obligation. When a godmother or godfather helped give a child its name at a baptism, he or she became the parent's "God-sybling." When a person vowed to be someone's gossip, they pledged to be another's spiritual relation. On the one hand, the baptismal gossip was a stabilizing link between a family and its community; on the other hand, such insider access could subvert the sanctity of family privacy. Somewhere in the 19th century, as the industrial revolution was rendering village life economically obsolete, the word deteriorated into its current meaning: idle talk or rumor.

Like the medieval women and men who watched their godchildren's baptism, I'm lucky enough to still have people to gossip with. I live embedded in a group of old friends, in a city with old-fashioned neighborhoods, amid fellow citizens who, though they tend to overuse the word "community," actually strive to attain it. But for many Americans the world of private gossip is no longer so easily attainable.

According to recent surveys, never before have so many Americans lived alone. In the '50s, the phenomenon of the lonely housewife gave rise to daytime soap operas -- a form of surrogate intimacy if ever there was one. Is it any wonder that the boom in the gossip industry mirrors a broader demography of solitude? The Futurist reported that the numbers of solo households will continue to grow astronomically: from 24 million to 32 million by 2010. With the rise in telecommuting, freelancing and home businesses, even more people will spend their work days by themselves. E-communities like Internet user groups, bulletin boards and chat rooms offer the promise of "electronic friends" -- but, according to a recent article analyzing online talk in Sociology Quarterly, the great majority of what happens in chat rooms is gossip without intimacy. The interlocutors remain anonymous -- reveling in the mere sensation of revelation.

Today when people do choose to tell their secrets to a real, live person, they often engage the services of a professional listener: a therapist or counselor. Confined to a few hundred practitioners at the turn of the century, practicing psychologists and psychological counselors in America now number close to 1 million. These listeners guarantee that secrets are "safe"; intimate information will not seep into the population that knows you, loves you, hates you. Unlike priests, who are part of the parish, therapists are supposed to be utterly cut off from the patient's social network. This is meant to elevate the process of talking about others, but I think it can also contribute to an individual's sense of isolation. Yes, psychologists offer a neutral environment in which to explore our secrets. But if we lived in more tightly knit communities, would we need these careful keepers of our private lives?

The fixation on privacy, security systems, online anonymity and therapy paints a portrait of a population going to excruciating efforts to shield itself from neighbors, friends and family. In the absence of real, flesh-and blood communities, we have begun to feed our need for intimacy with the faux intimacy of public revelation. That's where media-driven gossip comes in. Talk shows, tabloids and national scandals satisfy our hunger for narrative interdependence but preclude the inconvenience of being entangled with real people. If celebrity gossip encourages us to consume the miseries, triumphs and trivia of famous people as fodder for pure entertainment, it also teaches us to treat the people we do know with a little less involvement. But old-fashioned private gossip, on the other hand, weaves tales about real individuals into a community of real (not mass-represented) people. Precisely because private gossip can hurt, it makes us more responsible to one another. We must think about what we say, do and feel. (And bear the consequences if we don't.)

A few weeks after our earlier conversation, Robert and I made up and met for dinner. I was obsessively trying to avoid any subject he might consider gossip. Is information about my marriage gossip? Is commenting on the waiter's personality gossip? When he asks if I like the new boyfriend of a friend of ours, isn't he leading me on? Inevitably, the conversation fell to career talk. That's when he told me about wanting to start a newspaper about the idiosyncratic leaders in his fast-lane profession.

"I don't want it to be serious news, but more ..." He searched for the right word: "Gossip."

I raised my eyebrows. "I thought you didn't like gossip."

"Professional gossip," he explained, "not private."

Like most people, Robert thinks that gossip about public figures is basically "harmless" -- in contrast to the personal, "dangerous" kind that can turn your best friends against you. But our demand that public figures provide us with prurient tales may finally be coming home to roost. If Diana's death was a parable of the damage tabloid culture can do to celebrities, Clinton's scandal may stand for the damage it can do to the world. The outcome of this crisis may be a good deal more serious than a fatal car accident. Clinton may have some seminal issues to work out, but his issue is not really the issue here. Whether Clinton resigns, is impeached or simply survives as the humiliated shell of his former self, are we really prepared to accept the consequences of our national gossip addiction? Do we really want to threaten America's current golden age? Do we want negotiators in Ireland, leaders in Israel and Palestine, military officials in Iraq and financial officers in Asia to look at the U.S. and see a steaming wad of moral and political instability?

I don't think we'll ever stem the tide of the gossip industry by simply "showing restraint" or being "mature." Intimate storytelling is an important and inescapable part of our human nature. My solution is more private gossip among friends and family -- more micro-dramas that spark moral debate, humor and intimacy. Then maybe we can let politicians be what they are elected to be: public servants, not private farces.
SALON | Jan. 28, 1998

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