T H E
Mommy leerest
Cokie and Sam go back to Washington. Discuss in the Media area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Penisgate
An ABC of ethical conflict
Under the Covers
Sam and Cokie trade deck chairs on ABC's Titanic
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BROWSE THE
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Bring me the head SPENDING 120 HOURS IN BLABBERSPACE AS THE BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK | Given that this is a publication with liberal humanist readers naturally inclined to high-mindedness, sexual tolerance, and sympathy for our president, I might as well get the question out of the way first: Doesn't TV news have something better to do than spend 24 hours a day salivating over a pile of tawdry, unproven allegations? No. TV news has never had anything better to do than this. Furthermore, you have never had anything better to do than this. Big hair, sting operations, Presidential DNA analysis? This is why miners risk lonely death by suffocation hauling ore for copper TV cables. This is why God made electromagnetic radiation. This, my friend, is why God made you. Wednesday, 21 January Unconfirmed reports aside, the only verifiably semen-stained garments in Washington today are covering the nethers of TV newsmen lucky enough to have been screwed out of those plum Cuba assignments. Their higher-ranking colleagues have begun a fall-of-Saigon evacuation of Havana and are still brushing up their pronunciations. I feel a stab of Slavic pride whenever someone burbles out a "Wewlinsky." The first order of show business: choosing the official Disembodied Head of Monica Lewinsky. Since no one's been able to track down video, we will come to know our newest celebrity only from the neck up -- which if we believe the tapes is pretty much the way our chief executive thought of her, anyway. The producers shuffle among curly-haired yearbook pix before settling on the now-famous pumpkin-headed ID photo. This picture has got the look: it's at once amiably clueless and slightly blowsy in a Clinton-friendly fashion. It will be stitched to porn stars' bodies in a thousand Photoshop windows by nightfall. It is a head that has no idea what is about to hit it. In the TV-as-self-improvement spirit of PBS, the News Hour has begun the national conversation with a lesson in verb tenses. "There is no sexual relationship," Clinton maintains to Jim Lehrer, a defense that at this point is unconvincing even on its present-tense terms -- hey, they're only shooting him from the chest up here! By the weekend, the same news anchors who have turned "effort" into a verb will have become amateur grammarians. The big loser of the first day of the end of the Clinton administration? David Letterman. While Jay Leno is gathering fresh yocks in his nightly monologue ("It takes a village to keep an eye on my husband!" "Al Gore is only an orgasm away from the presidency!"), Dave is in reruns. Thursday, 22 January Hope you've got plenty of Terra Chips -- for the next few days the staff of Newsweek will be spending more time in your living room than the family dog. Having scored exclusive access to 90 minutes of the Lewinsky-Tripp tapes, the weekly's shock troops are nyah-nyah-nyahing the coup across the cable spectrum, interpreting this gospel for the masses like the sole witnesses to the Virgin at Fatima. No doubt they see the exposure -- which amounts to a massive free ad -- as only fair, seeing as how they graciously delayed their investigation at the behest of Kenneth Starr's staff. MSNBC is covering the case nonstop, and so the usual carousel of mouthpieces are competing to out-Cassandra one another: a Washington Post staffer says she could easily see Clinton being forced to resign by the American people's sheer moral outrage; a fellow panelist tops her by declaring that a prolonged siege could make the president "dangerous" ("Ah said I've got the newclear codes in this bunker -- now y'all send in the Laker Girls and a sausage pizza or ah'll tahr this planet a new asshole!"). But the American people are being pretty stingy with the moral outrage, despite the networks' best efforts. The call-ins on MSNBC, the men-in-the-streets on Fox, even the small-town interviewees on CNN--we all sound like news analysts, discussing the political fallout, suggesting that Clinton would be "stupid" to have done the nasty in office. (Incidentally, what does it say about the American libido that nobody can understand a man choosing sex over power?) Asked whether having an affair or lying about it is the worse offense, MSNBC's "Internight" viewers are certain: the lie, of course -- it's actionable. Frustrated, host John Gibson berates a caller: well, yeah, but what about the moral aspect? The caller, of course, has no idea what Gibson is talking about. I feel suddenly, wrenchingly sad for Bob Dole. Meanwhile, the networks have reached a consensus: Monica Lewinsky is "unremarkable." Her intelligence, her resume, her college record, you name it. "She never stood out." "Too young for the Pentagon job." Could anyone blame her for wanting to deny everything? Overnight she's become America's most celebrated mediocrity. Everyone has cause to cast her as an idiot: the president's defenders, who want to undercut her credibility; his attackers, who charge him with "seducing" a doe-eyed naif; her attorney William Ginsburg, generating sympathy for the "24-year-old girl" (!) who may have perjured herself. Every few minutes, the Disembodied Head floats toward the camera like some sorority-house ghost. No one seems to know precisely where she is yet, which must be why no one has her on video, head down, dashing into a taxi. You know they want it: that body they say the President had sex with. Once they get it, it'll be everywhere; I hope she has a good wardrobe, wherever she is. Friday, 23 January Lewinsky's deposition has been postponed, and there's palpable disappointment in the anchors' chairs: If she was this much of a tease in the White House, Clinton has plausible deniability nailed. With Lewinsky mum indefinitely -- though her attorney is taking advantage of the news lull to mine sympathy for her everywhere but the Cartoon Network -- the media are pinning their hopes on a Super Sunday televised apologia from Clinton. MSNBC's chat question of the day suggests the President has a moral duty to feed the news cycle: "The President: Time to Talk or Business as Usual?" On "Internight," Gibson is still dutifully banging panelists together like so many chunks of flint. When Eric Alterman argues it's disrespectful to call a grown woman a "victim" of her own choices, Niger Innis of CORE fires back that Alterman wasn't singing that tune during the Anita Hill case. Of course Hill wasn't claiming to have had consensual -- sorry, gotta go to commercials! (Which, by the way, on this hip, info-age network, are for Metamucil, acid-control pills, decaf coffee, and an antifungal.) A Hotbot search turns up the first Web sites promising nude photos featuring the Disembodied Head. "Please click here for Monica Lewinsky sex Monica Lewinsky sex ok dildos Monica Lewinsky sex hot for you." Meanwhile, the Crisis at Ed Sullivan Theater continues: Letterman airs another archive episode. I begin to wonder whether this isn't a conscious strategy to boost the national morale. Here in our dark hour, isn't it a tonic to hearken back to the innocent screwball antics of the Menendez brothers? Saturday, 24 January Barry Levinson is the luckiest man in America. The New York Times includes an ad for "Wag the Dog" with the banner Dave Kehr quote, "The action starts with a crisis in the White House!" -- not exactly a rave in ordinary times. But then the language has changed these past four days. This morning, we no longer have "sex" in America: we have "sexual relationships." We no longer "elected" Bill Clinton in 1992. We "made an unspoken deal with him." (And didja notice that this story involves "sex, lies, and audiotape"? I can only hope someone is keeping Steven Soderbergh away from sharp objects.) Ironically, after a decade of bellyaching over the media poking into the private lives of public officials, it took a bunch of lawyers to dig up this dish. As a result, this has become a story about semantic nuance: the leadership of the free world may hang on question of whether a blow job equals a "relationship." If no side has put Courtney Weaver on retainer, she needs better representation. The day's big news: the Disembodied Head is challenged! CNN unearths a curly-haired, overexposed photo of Lewinsky, apparently snapped at some kegger of yore. It doesn't stand a chance. By 4 p.m., the Head is back alone in the rotation. At 7, the network finds the long-awaited video, a doozy -- Clinton hugging Lewinsky the day after the 1996 election. We see it once, twice, in slow motion. But it's too late. This flesh-and-blood person, this stranger in a black beret -- this is not our Monica. Sunday, 25 January Bill Clinton is being grilled in effigy on the morning talk shows. James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala. They say, "No improper . . ." They say, "The President has said . . ." This is damage control? Instead of one person delivering squirmy canned answers that destroy Clinton's credibility, you have a legion -- Begala, in particular, should be chained to a radiator in the name of national security. Perhaps the most assured performance is from Matt Drudge on "Meet the Press"; it's just a shame he couldn't have been opposite ABC's George Stephanopoulos, who last Sunday on "This Week" smugly dismissed the base foolishness Drudge was peddling on that Interweb thing. But I don't need to see any more. I've heard from Mark Shields, Bill Kristol, John Ehrlichman, Susan Estrich, P. J. O'Rourke, Michael Beschloss, and Candace Bushnell. I've heard from somebody called "Political Scientist Andrew Polsky, Ph. D." There's only one Head we need to hear from now, and she's not talking. Like every paid babbler on the coast, I chat with Mom on the phone, which will allow me to claim simpatico with Real America. I feel visually and mentally whipped. It's not that I can't believe anything. It's that I believe everything. I believe they had sex, and I believe she made it up. I believe the charges are grave, and I believe they're irrelevant. I believe the Kid will Come Back, and I believe we'll have a new president by Friday. I hope Dave's in reruns next week too. I want to see Al Gore smashing an
ashtray as a nerdy vice president in goggles. I want to see an America
where football heroes beat their wives, TV stars bit women on the back,
brothers conspired to off their parents, and everything was right with the
world.
James Poniewozik's review of current magazines, "Under the Covers," appears in Media Circus every other Wednesday. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E+T A L K
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