The story begins with a Hollywood promoter named Peter Paul, who has been indicted in a New York court for his role in a $25 million stock manipulation scam involving Stan Lee Media, the company of Spider Man creator Stan Lee. Paul, co-founder of the Stan Lee Media Group, is currently hiding out in Brazil, battling extradition and desperate to cut a deal with prosecutors to avoid spending time in the slammer.

Enter Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, the conservative group that made a name for itself waging war on the Clinton White House. Klayman says that Paul made over $2 million in direct and in-kind campaign contributions to stage a star-studded “Hollywood Tribute to Bill Clinton” last year, which was a soft money fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. The money was reported as coming from the Stan Lee Media Group.

Paul, who has a past record including convictions for cocaine possession and a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme involving the Cuban government, says those donations were personal contributions, but that Clinton wanted to hide Paul’s involvement because of his felony record. In August, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported “convicted felon Peter Paul — who served three years in prison two decades ago after pleading guilty to cocaine possession and trying to swindle $ 8.7 million out of the Cuban government — helped organize Saturday’s star-glutted $ 1 million fundraising gala for Clinton’s Senate race at businessman Ken Roberts’s Brentwood estate. Paul, co-founder of Stan Lee Media, told us in a statement … that he only produced the gala and hasn’t given or raised money for the first lady’s New York campaign.”

Now, Paul has changed his story. He claims the contribution was part of an effort to lure Bill Clinton to join the board of the Stan Lee Media Company. In addition to the $2 million worth of cash and services, which Paul now says came from him personally, Bill Clinton was reportedly promised an additional $15 million in Stan Lee stock to join the board.

“So eventually Peter Paul said, ‘In order to get Bill Clinton I’m willing to help get Hillary Rodham Clinton elected U.S. senator. And I’ll put up money to help elect her,’” Judicial Watch southwest regional director Russ Verney told WABC radio.

When asked about the case, Hillary Clinton’s spokeswoman Karen Dunn said, “we tend not to comment on the activities of Judicial Watch.”

But the folks at Judicial Watch are undoubtedly thrilled with the prospect of another media blockbuster. The headline on their press release boasts “Major Hollywood Stars Such As Brad Pitt and Barbra Streisand As Witnesses.”

And if that weren’t enough enticement for the media pack, Verney, the former Ross Perot henchman, added the prospect of deposing the former president and Chelsea Clinton in the case.

“According to a note Chelsea wrote,” Verney told WABC radio, “she and Bill Clinton stayed up all night one night playing Scrabble and they were talking about him joining Peter Paul’s company after he left the presidency and the fact that Peter Paul was putting on this big gala out in California.”

“I can’t see how they can avoid the depositions,” Verney said.

Records at the Center for Responsive Politics show Lee donated personally to Clinton’s campaign, and to the Democratic Party. They also show the Stan Lee Media Group had contributed $100,000 in soft money as of Sept. 9, 2000.

Paul also says then-DNC Chairman Ed Rendell said it would be “nice” if Paul gave $150,000 to the DNC after Paul sought a presidential pardon for his two prior convictions. “He is willing to return to the U.S. to testify in exchange for a deal with prosecutors,” Klayman told the New York Daily News.

Calls to Judicial Watch were not immediately returned.

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The battle in Seattle forced a welcome if brief international consciousness on the mass TV audience, which has been preoccupied with domestic issues and celebrity scandals throughout this decade, an obliviousness barely dented by President Clinton’s outrageous boutique bombings abroad. The protesters’ success in hamstringing the WTO, which adjourned without reaching key agreements, will surely inspire more young people to social activism for a wealth of causes. I hope it’s curtains for another style spawned in Seattle — the apathy and whining asexuality of passive-aggressive grunge.

The danger is that this nascent coalition of Democrat-led trade unions with environmental and labor equity groups will get stereotyped as left-loony. When post-adolescent anarchist goons pledge total destruction of the system or when dinosaur Marxists denounce capitalism as “evil” and call all property “crime” (caught on camera in Seattle), this promising movement doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of gaining popular support.

Capitalism, in my view, is the best vehicle of social change. Free enterprise and free thought are inextricably and creatively intertwined. Over the past 200 years, capitalism has enormously advanced global prosperity, even if an unacceptable economic gap remains between the first and third worlds. Though you’d never know it from the snide rhetoric of cloistered liberal academics, modern feminism owes everything to capitalism, which gave women financial independence for the first time in history.

On the other hand, capitalism is inherently Darwinian, and a just society must provide a safety net for the poor. While intrusion by government into the market should be as minimal as possible, it is ethically imperative to monitor working conditions, product safety and environmental integrity. My lifelong scriptural texts are William Blake’s radical poems “The Chimney Sweeper” and “London” (discussed in my first book), which heartbreakingly dramatize the disparity between the powerful and the powerless in newly industrial, polluted England.

Adjusting tariffs or formulating trade guidelines is a very difficult matter when emerging nations interpret U.S. demands as a usurpation of their sovereignty. We need a stronger “green” lobby that will fruitfully ally with its foreign counterparts. And we urgently need a broad-based, rigorously rational progressive party that will, without succumbing to outdated Marxist formulas, challenge the corruption of the major political parties by big money; critique the escalating power of multinational conglomerates; and condemn flagrant corporate greed (as in the looting of company profits through the inflated salaries of top executives).

There is no stopping the high-tech transformation of the world economy — except by Mother Nature, of course, with one of her standard cataclysms (a perennial Paglia prophecy). What is needed is massive educational reform — such as the development of trade schools and vocational programs serving students of every age. The social convulsion of job losses because of migration of industry abroad cannot be wholly prevented by artificial government manipulation. At present, American primary education is failing to provide either knowledge or skills for anyone but those already set on a professional track by their affluent, upper-middle-class families.

Don’t look to Washington for help, since Congress is stalemated and the immediate political field seems bleak. Gov. Bush has yet to show presidential qualities, and his elementary communication skills are weak. Hillary Clinton’s senatorial fantasy is sapping the Gore campaign by stealing P.R. wattage and keeping 20 years of Clinton scandals on the front burner. Al Gore continues to lose credibility through his own foolish choices and grating hamster-wheel freneticism. After the devastating revelations in the Nov. 20 New York Times about the leading advisory role played by his shallow 26-year-old daughter Karenna (Naomi Wolf’s Ivy League pal), who can take Gore seriously?

Shame on the superstructure of the Democratic Party for its cowardly decision, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in early 1998, not to force President Clinton to resign: Gore would have been elevated to the presidency at his peak of strength and prestige and would have grown into the job, guaranteeing Democratic control of the White House well into the next decade. Instead, we Democrats must watch the gruesome spectacle of Gore whittling himself down day by day as dope-on-a-rope Clinton bounces from screw-up to screw-up.

Meanwhile, Bill Bradley, for whom I need a palpable reason to cast my Pennsylvania primary ballot, is still plodding along in a coma. Bradley’s obliqueness is starting to look like petulance. A president needs more dynamism. If Bradley doesn’t ratchet up soon, Bush will sweep to victory simply by reason of his raw, youthful, bulldog vitality. As for Sen. John McCain, whom the liberal media are busily over-promoting to sabotage Bush, I can’t believe anyone takes him seriously as a candidate for high office. He belongs in military operations, not the Oval Office.

Salon reader Zack Galler, a former naval officer, writes:

McCain’s claim to national attention is as our most prominent victim of bad luck. During his brief naval career, he had two aircraft destroyed beneath him, one by a Zuni rocket, another by a NVA missile. Granted he survived through unusual stoicism and discipline, but, bereft of these, his problem-solving cupboard is bare. Witness his pitiful response to the Kosovo fiasco, a call to persist and endure in whatever military horrors the commander in chief invents. His first principles are invariably to throw the weight of government regulation and law (as manifestations of discipline) against individual choice (tobacco, political speech [i.e. campaign finance reform], drug reform).

It’s not expansiveness and charisma that the man lacks; it’s the total absence of subtlety, creativity, and original thought which, hopefully, should sentence him to retirement as a minor politician from a minor state. He’s a Sherwood Anderson grotesque.

If the media think they’re atoning for their Vietnam-era sins or doing veterans a favor by giving this Strangelovian refugee a free ride, I wish they’d reconsider.

I couldn’t agree more. The myopic McCain apologists in the Northeastern media are destroying their own credibility as political analysts.

Hillary Clinton, whose “I intend to run” two weeks ago was clearly ambivalent in tone (her qualification was truncated mid-sentence by a mad rush of hysterical lady teachers toward her) is embarking on a trial campaign for which she has no record of concrete achievement and which seems to have no other aim than to snag a comfy post-White House residence and a face-saving reason not to live with bimbo-besotted Bill.

Salon reader Steve Story asks, “Is New York in such dire intellectual straits that it must panhandle for leadership?” The people of New York (including my scores of relatives) are merely pawns in Hillary’s game. Gail Sheehy’s gushy new book, “Hillary’s Choice,” which I skimmed at the store, contains enough negatives to prove why Hillary has no business meddling in electoral politics.

Sheehy confirms that Hillary was indeed the hard-liner who refused to settle with Paula Jones — thus putting the country through a divisive year of impeachment crisis (since Lewinsky’s name surfaced in depositions in the Jones case). And Sheehy claims it was Hillary who pushed the president into bombing Kosovo — in my view an abuse of American military power. If it is also true, as rumored, that Hillary leaned on Janet Reno to order the disastrous 1993 assault at Waco, then Hillary is beyond doubt one of the most destructive personalities in American politics in the last 25 years.

Sheehy’s sentimental formulas can’t conceal the bunkered mess of Hillary’s early family life — all of which was intuited, by the way, in my stormily controversial cover story for the March 4, 1996, New Republic, “Ice Queen, Drag Queen,” where I focused on Hillary’s eerie memory of a childhood snowman (her double, I argued) on her televised White House Christmas tour. Sheehy oddly fails to catch the killer competition that seems to have been going on between Hillary and her brothers and Hillary and her mother — a dynamic that may have been operating in the two weeks Hillary played hooky from her brand-new duties as health-care czarina to station herself like a Victorian angel at her failing father’s bedside.

Hillary has the kind of glib, sanctimonious mind that I loathe in the p.c. professoriat. She selectively memorizes facts and recites them without regard to context. She is devoid of psychological insight into herself or others. She simplistically externalizes conflicts onto demonic “enemies.” She claims compassion for the dispossessed but prefers to hobnob with the rich and famous. She’s a secret snob addicted to status, a true Machiavellian who reduces everyone, even her family, into instruments of her will.

The only thing that’s fueling this absurd campaign is the complicity of the liberal news media. While 80 percent of the leading journalists and columnists now seem to have defected from the noisy Hillary bandwagon of early last summer, the picture editors are keeping it going, choosing the most glamorous photos and news footage of Hillary and carefully concealing how staged her events are — how she comes and goes, for example, with bully-boy platoons of the taxpayer-funded Secret Service, who keep hecklers at bay.

Salon reader J. McCann writes from Johannesburg, South Africa, about another of our presidential candidates, Pat Buchanan, whose ambiguous Scottish-Irish heritage was addressed in an earlier column:

My Irish grandfathers inflicted on their descendants the bizarre experience of growing up Catholic in apartheid Calvinist South Africa, where for a time Catholic immigration was prohibited and clergy refused entry visas. Thus the eagerness of Americans to seek an Irish Catholic identity has always seemed incomprehensible seen from a country where we were long regarded with scorn.

The confusion around Irish names is forgivable because it is a very widespread ignorance. Modern Scottish identity is largely an invention of the Victorian era. The Scots originated in Ireland and settled Scotland in the fifth century, displacing the Picts. The bagpipes, whisky/whiskey and plaid cloth they promote as British inventions were brought from Ireland along with the similar names and the Gaelic language.

To complicate the issue, at least one old Scottish name begins with O’. In general Irish “mc” names start with Mc, and Scottish ones with Mac, but there are exceptions. There has also been a flow of Irish migrant labor to Scotland leaving names like Connery, and Ireland has had Norman and Viking invaders as well as immigration from northern Spain and even Italy. Coupled with the recent historical arrival of formalized spelling and literacy in Ireland there is no completely sure way of establishing certain identity from just a name.

Incidentally, the Gaelic language is split in two streams and is also spoken in Brittany (Little Britain), France. It has its origin in the same Indo-European language group as Latin, and the two languages have many words in common. Some sub-Alpine dialects such as Occitane are thought by some to be closer to the Latin/Gaelic proto language.

Many thanks, Mr. McCann, for this complex contribution to our ongoing ethnic symposium. Cultural and linguistic transmission via population migration is a basic principle of history that I find woefully missing or distorted in the Foucault-influenced theorizing that saturates American humanities departments.

Responding to my
remarks about the routine defamation of Italian-Americans by the entertainment industry, Mark Hall writes from Richmond, Va., about “libeled Southerners”:

If you are annoyed by the stereotyping of people of Italian descent here, try being a native Southerner for a while! I’m so fed up with Hollywood’s (and others’) pathetic and hateful smears on my culture and values that I rarely see movies or television anymore. I never thought that believing in honor, integrity, and equality (not the man-hating feminist or affirmative action quota kind of “equality”) would make me “racist” or a “misogynist,” but that’s what I am, according to the now decades-old barrage from Hollywood.

You’re absolutely right, Mr. Hall. Scriptwriters, directors and production companies based in New York and Los Angeles have a very blinkered view of the rest of America, which they see as a vast wasteland of rednecks and yokels. Even the Midwest is too much of a stretch for them, as witness the cringe-making way Kansas is always portrayed by my favorite soap, “The Young and the Restless,” as a drab, beige-hued flatiron peppered with very simple, slow-spoken folks who seem to be auditioning for the 1940 dustbowl film “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Extending our ethnic theme, Rob Williams of New York asks if Madonna is an “Anglophile”:

A recent news item in the gossip pages said that Madonna is looking for a house in England that would be near a prestigious school for her daughter Lourdes. The item was interesting because Madonna seems to be transforming herself into a Brit. Every time I see her on awards shows these days, she seems to speak with a more affected air, as if she never grew up in Michigan. (I was reminded of a line in a Tom Wolfe book where a character criticized an American for adopting a British manner to appear more cultured, as if his new accent had arrived in an airmailed box from England like a pair of dentures that he popped in his mouth.)

Is Madonna’s behavior an attempt to gain respectability by adopting the manners of the British middle class or royalty? Is she in the next stage of some evolutionary process from New Money upstart pop icon to Old Money aristocrat? Do you consider her behavior laughable or even hypocritical? Does Madonna demonstrate some kind self-loathing in the continual reinvention of her image? Is it an artistic impulse or are these reinventions a business necessity to thrive as an entertainer?

All of the above! Madonna’s application to a chic Manhattan preschool for Lourdes was apparently denied on the grounds that a pop star’s presence would be dangerous and disruptive. Rushing off to England in a snit without exploring other options doesn’t exactly sound like Madonna has all her maternal oars in the water.

On the other hand, should Madonna decide that Lourdes ought to be educated in England, I would applaud it. American prep schools may have a substantive curriculum, but their graduates, as evidenced by the examples funneling into the Ivy League, are increasingly mundane. A British or continental education would give Lourdes a smattering of knowledge (“Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit,” says Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. “Touch it and the bloom is gone.”), but more importantly it would make her a sophisticated woman of the world.

As for that bizarre in-and-out British accent, Madonna, like many artists, is a sponge. Just as she is a brilliant synthesizer of musical styles or fashion motifs, so she is highly susceptible to her last three-and-a-half experiences. Madonna talks like the queen mother when she’s been loafing around with any of her British dates and pals, like that overrated bore of an actor Rupert Everett. As someone who has deliberately retained the irritatingly flat tones of her native upstate New York, I agree with you that it would behoove Madonna to remember her gritty family past in lower-middle-class metropolitan Detroit.

Sticking with divas, I love this saga of a letter from Salon reader Audrey Mack, which is titled “Babs & politics; fluffy shawls ‘n’ quilty things” and had me in stitches:

I was flipping through the TV channels on Nov. 16 when I stopped to watch a few minutes of an interview between Rosie O’Donnell and Barbra Streisand. I thought it was going to be a Linda Richman-style love-fest, all about Barbra’s music, Rosie’s all-consuming love for it, whatever. Good for a few laughs, anyway.

But noooo. Babs was yammering away about politics, carefully explaining to Rosie that the Democratic Party is “the party of the people,” “the party that cares about the people;” and that the Republican Party is “ALL ABOUT [her words, not mine] supporting big business, insurance companies, the tobacco industry,” plus one other group I can’t recall. She went on in this vein for several minutes.

Well, where do I start? Has this woman been asleep for the past 20 years? Has she not seen that many working stiffs in this country support the Republican Party as a defense against (what they perceive as) the tax-and-spend Democrats? And has she missed all the moral/religious battles, in which Republicans are seen as the champions of “decent” American moral values, family values, and so forth — as opposed to (what Republicans perceive as) the anti-religion, liberal, secular humanist (gasp) Democrats?

Has she not seen that political party loyalties have changed greatly in the past 20 years, and are still changing, largely due to moral, religious and ethical issues? I’d thought that the days of the “have” Republicans battling “have-not” (mainly working-class) Democrats were over; that the political battles aren’t mainly drawn along economic lines anymore. That was my parents’ struggle, in the FDR and post-FDR eras.

Thank goodness I have Barbra Streisand to set me straight. I don’t mean to knock all liberals here, but really, there’s no liberal worse than a Hollywood liberal: ignorant, uninformed, clueless, just plain DUMB.

Babs’ blather made me laugh, but I wonder how many other viewers reacted the same way. If she’s an entertainment celebrity, she (and Warren Beatty, Cybill Shepherd, Ah-nuld, and Alec Baldwin), must know what she’s talking about when it comes to politics, right?

(Oh, and Warren Beatty gets invited to speak at the Kennedy School of Government. The gargoyles have finally taken over the cathedral.)

Maybe any garbage can get sold nowadays if it’s wrapped up in an attractive package. The set for the Rosie-Barbra interview was some room in one of Barbra’s many houses: very country cottage, with flea-markety distressed furniture, and shawls and patchwork quilts draped over every surface: the sofas, the tables, even a piano. Very Shabby Chic. Barbra herself was dressed in a chenille-looking halter top with a matching shawl draped over her shoulders: very soft, very texture-y, very “woman-friendly.”

It reminded me of the day Oprah turned herself into a New Age priestess, crammed full of opinions and feelings, with no disciplined thought. Suddenly she was wearing warm earth tones, sitting in brown leather or warm earth-toned chairs, on warm earth-toned sets, shot in soft-focus (Indian blankets on the camera lenses?), with gold and cinnabar (not a TRUE RED, no, that would be too strong) pillar candles twinkling in the background. If you can craft the image, you don’t have to work on the substance.

Maybe Al Gore should hire Barbra’s or Oprah’s image engineers to work their magic, and hand Naomi Wolf her walking papers. So my question is, how much longer do we have to listen to these Hollywood idiots blather away about politics?

Someone should give you a column, Ms. Mack! Thanks for that surgical dissection of the flakes of Hollywood. And I suspect that a thousand gay men from Montreal to Montevideo will applaud your deft evocation of Oprah’s “gold and cinnabar pillar candles.”

The problem is not actors expressing their political opinions, since they have a perfect right to do so in a democracy. What is repellent is the lack of balance: Alternate viewpoints are rarely given equal weight or respect. This is in no one’s best interests, since as you correctly observe, liberal politics in Hollywood (or on campus) have gotten retchingly sophomoric because of over-preaching to the choir. Upper-middle-class Democratic liberalism now has the arrogant imperialism of any establishment, lazy, slack and inert.

Your dart at Naomi Wolf, by the way, reminded me of a gibe made about her by a professional driver on the West Coast when I was being ferried around on my first book tour for Vintage Books in 1991. He had driven Wolf to several interviews on her tour for “The Beauty Myth” a few months earlier. Her constant primping and obsession with cosmetics seemed hypocritical, he thought, for someone who was claiming that looks don’t matter. His snorting judgment: “She never passed a plate-glass window she didn’t like!”

Salon reader Rich Berger sends a blast from the past from that very period, when I was under heavy fire from the feminist establishment:

While cleaning up our Tropical Storm Floyd (??)-soaked basement, I found a tape of your “60 Minutes” profile from 1992. The tape was sent to me by some friends — he finds you interesting but his wife treats you like you were radioactive. I still get a charge out of watching it, especially the end piece where Steve Kroft discussed you with that condescending second-rater from Connecticut College. Although she was so pleased with her comparison of you with Marilyn Quayle, I thought she just seemed like a boob.

Yes, that “condescending” tone is exactly how the entrenched feminist theorists and high-muckety-mucks of NOW and Ms. tried to dismiss all dissidents during the p.c. era of the 1970s and ’80s. Unfortunately, that tactic didn’t work very well in the 1990s on a resurgent 1960s rock ‘n’ roll prankster and Joan Rivers-style stand-up comedian with a 700-page Yale University Press book on the whole history of culture. Up your nose with a rubber hose, gals! You missed the train of a new kind of pro-sex, pro-pop, pro-beauty feminism and have been chasing my caboose ever since.

On the feminist angle, I must mention Virginia Postrel’s splendid review of Susan Faludi’s “Stiffed” in the December issue of the libertarian magazine Reason. Its title — “Reactionary Running Mates: Susan Faludi sounds like Pat Buchanan” — gives you a hint of its originality and ingenuity.

This article will certainly enhance Postrel’s ever-growing reputation as one of the smartest women in America. For years, she has demonstrated her daunting gift for cutting-edge social and economic analysis as well as her admirable command of lean, lucid prose. As a contemporary thinker, Virginia Postrel is vastly superior to derivative, overpaid affirmative action queens like the turgid Judith Butler or the windy Martha Nussbaum, who have manipulated the academic system and cowed the gullible with their manufactured importance.

The ongoing controversy over the “Sensation” show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art has been further inflamed by a lengthy report in the Dec. 6 New York Times showing how British collector Charles Saatchi played “a central role in determining the artistic content” of the exhibit and effectively “usurped control” of it. Even the claim by museum director Arnold Lehman in interviews and “sworn court papers” that he had seen the “Sensation” show at the Royal Academy in London turns out to be false. When will Lehman be fired?

I was delighted to hear that Matt Drudge is leaving his Fox News Channel talk show (reportedly over a flap about a fetal photo), since I’ve longed for him to focus full attention on his historic creation, the Drudge Report, which at its best is an effervescent mix of politics, science news, crime stories, Hollywood gossip and plain old-fashioned scandal.

Where else could one have seen, the moment it flashed across the wires nearly a year ago, a color photo of Hillary Clinton (who had claimed a back injury days earlier) galumphing on humpy camelback down a sand dune with her daughter Chelsea clinging to her like a papoose?

Last week there was a classic Drudge moment: Into the humdrum monotony of midday came blazing onto the Drudge site a just-posted Reuters article titled “Daredevil jumps off Rio Christ in Bond-style stunt.” In the magnificent color photo of the 98-foot-tall colossus of Cristo Redentor on Corcovado Mountain overlooking the misty green slopes of Rio de Janeiro, an Austrian parachutist who had fired a cable from a crossbow over the statue’s arm at dawn could be seen about to jump from its outstretched hand. (He had left flowers on the shoulder of the Christ “as a mark of respect.”)

Thank you, Matt Drudge, for a sublime moment of beauty and awe. Art has migrated from the museums to the Web.

This is my last column of the year and in fact my last article of the decade — and a hell of a decade it’s been! But this millennial brouhaha is getting on my nerves. When will it end?

Amid the many demands for millennial retrospectives this year (most of which were too mushy to respond to), my favorites were a request from the Sunday Times of London to analyze the “masterwork” of the millennium (I chose Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”; the piece appeared April 18) and a recent one from the BBC to address a major figure in religious history, a segment recorded last week by transatlantic hook-up from a Philadelphia studio.

Hence at 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in the U.K., in the final broadcast of the year by BBC Radio 4, I will be celebrating my heroine and role model, St. Teresa of Avila. Mediterranean Catholicism, with its lurid pagan residue, has all the fireworks we need for the new millennium.

Happy New Year to Salon readers around the world! I’ll see you again in January.

The major media were guilty of their usual elitist provincialism as they paid enormous attention to Floyd when it was a Category 4 storm threatening the vacation resorts of the Caribbean or the Florida coast, where so many affluent New Yorkers or their retired parents own property. As the storm weakened slightly and turned north toward the Carolinas, however, the Manhattan media lost interest — as if rural Southerners don’t have the same claim to national attention and concern. Hence it was poetic justice when Floyd ended up smacking metropolitan New York with record rains that turned the streets into rivers, snarled traffic and emptied the skyscrapers. By early this week, the media woke up from their trance and headlined North Carolina’s terrible suffering with its floods of “almost biblical proportions,” as a local official put it.

Television pictures have been unable to capture the full extent of Hurricane Floyd’s destruction, since it was both scattered and widespread. As a resident of one of the southeastern Pennsylvania counties declared a disaster zone last week by the federal government, I feel lucky to have escaped the worst effects of Floyd, which pelted us with torrential rain and knocked out power to a quarter million customers, including me. Many homes and businesses in the area were gutted by dangerously overflowing streams, and hundreds of people who lost everything have had to seek shelter elsewhere.

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs. Hence my disdain for the prissy social constructionism of poststructuralism and postmodernism, which are blind to nature and which produce such shallow, jaded minds in faculty as well as students. High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

On the political front, I’m relieved that Hillary Clinton and her tag-along hubby and cub have gotten the hell out of my old neck of the woods in central New York, where I grew up and where my family is still centered. Pristine Skaneateles Lake, for example, where the Clintons briefly “vacationed” (those people can’t draw a tranquil breath since it entails self-examination), looms large in my personal history. I cheered when I heard that the irascible owner of Doug’s Fish Fry in Skaneateles satirically vowed he would not serve the interlopers (despite civil rights laws about public accommodation) on the grounds that the Clintons are “intoxicated with power.” As I picked up my fish platter and steamed clams at Doug’s wildly popular East Syracuse branch on a visit in August, I enthused to the bemused cashier, “Please tell Doug that we’re behind him!”

Salon reader Bob Carlson writes to ask about the “sympathetic” article on Hillary in the October Esquire where Tom Junod calls her “the most interesting sexual persona of our time.” While I naturally approve of all invocations of my own terminology, I must say that this piece is one of the gushiest pots of creamed tripe since Wayne Koestenbaum did his affected pirouettes around the hapless Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Psychological analysis requires deep cultural immersion as well as acute powers of observation, little of which is apparent here. Esquire, once a showcase for masculine sophistication, should be embarrassed by this syrupy exercise in sycophancy, which is studded with fake sexual plums that would choke a starving goat.

Carlson also asks why Hillary “inspires an unprecedented, visceral hatred.” Liberal Democrats like to claim that dislike of Hillary is simply reactionary fear of strong women. But it’s Hillary’s own record of hypocrisy, pretension, manipulation and deceit that repels. When feminist superwonk Susan Faludi and I went head to head on the Phil Donahue show in 1992, the one thing we beatifically agreed about was our warm support of Hillary Clinton, fresh video footage of whom Donahue ran for our comment: It was the very day that Hillary’s smiling mask slipped and she made her immortal, head-tossing quip, “Well, I could have stayed home and baked cookies!” — a sardonicism that nearly cost the Clintons mainstream support.

If such “visceral hatred” exists, it should be directed against the major media, who have wrapped Hillary in a glamorous partisan fog since she arrived on the national scene. Into her have been projected the frustrated dreams of aging women journalists, those who fell for the first brave promises of feminist ideology and have slowly, decade by decade, hit the big chill of careerist melancholy, as their value has fallen on the sexual marketplace and as their husbands escape to younger, more nubile women. Militant, mechanistic, calculating Hillary is the standard-bearer of a demoralized white, upper-middle-class feminism that left many women with high status but little personal happiness. Hence Hillary’s ultimate triumph must be assured, by hook or by crook.

I view Hillary at this point as a parasite on the Democratic Party, draining its energies and locking it to the past at a time when it should be remaking itself for the millennium. With her practical experience as a mayor and U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein is a far more worthy candidate for high public office than the cloistered Hillary Clinton, a backroom pol like the cigar-reeking ward-heelers of the bad old days. While I probably should have some pity for the progeny of our imperial White House duo, I couldn’t help but laugh uproariously at the wacky Web site, “Is Webster Hubbell Chelsea Clinton’s Real Father?”

Further political news is the burgeoning candidacy of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, being touted as a quick sub for Gov. George W. Bush should the latter stumble in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. My reaction: You’ve got to be kidding! McCain’s snobbish removal from the Iowa straw poll in August should have been a warning sign that he is not in fact the “all-around good guy” that certain inside-the-Beltway reporters have been claiming.

The TV camera does not lie: Just as it showed from the get-go that ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a nervous, shifty, sweaty, petulant mental adolescent, so has it exposed McCain over time as a seething nest of proto-fascist impulses. Despite his recent flurry of radiant, P.R.-coached grins, McCain has the weirdly wary and over-intense eyes of Howard Hughes and the clenched, humorless jaw line of Nurse Diesel (from Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock parody, “High Anxiety”). Alert, all good Republicans! Please produce a strong, credible nominee for president. Until you do, my own Democratic Party will go on spiraling downward in its accelerating ethical vertigo.

Items from the culture desk: In preparation for this fall’s Shakespeare course, which I teach in rotation at the University of the Arts, I’ve been reading and tremendously enjoying Park Honan’s “Shakespeare: A Life” (published in 1998 by Oxford University Press). Unlike the ham-handed New Historicists, Honan weaves literary and sociological issues with great deftness and precision. His portrait of Shakespeare as a reserved, cautious, rather conservative countryman feels exactly right and is a welcome corrective to Joseph Fiennes’ appallingly vulgar depiction of the poet as a silly goose in “Shakespeare in Love.”

I also heartily recommend Joy Behar’s hilarious new book, “Joy Shtick: or What Is the Existential Vacuum and Does It Come With Attachments?” (Hyperion). There’s a fiendish invented dialogue between me and Gloria Steinem (“Listen, you pillar of weltschmerz,” I tell Steinem, “Hugh Hefner is a saint”), but my favorite chapters are the imaginary interview with director Leni Riefenstahl (“Does the word Treblinka ring a bell?” Joy asks) and the illustrated travelogue, “Picnics in the Cemetery,” which accurately details the morbid Italian fondness for family outings in cemeteries.

The book also prints Joy’s now-classic flight on Catherine Deneuve’s Chanel No. 5 commercials (“Je Ne Regrette Rien”). It’s in the hip-intellectual style of the Mike Nichols-Elaine May sketches of nearly 40 years ago, a brilliantly ambitious mode of comedy that unfortunately passed from the scene after Steve Martin began to make rabbit ears out of sausage balloons.

Like me, Joy is an Italian-American attracted to the great tradition of Jewish comic discourse, which contains infinitely more truth about modern life than does foggy, froggy poststructuralism. Stand-up comedy after Lenny Bruce is a major art form, improvisatory at its best. On ABC’s “The View,” Joy has been pushing the limits of daytime TV, her deadpan voice cutting through the often chaotic hen party with exquisite timing and zinging one-liners that bring down the house. The perspicacious Joy has been doing genuinely radical work in what is still a stubbornly middlebrow medium. I’m a huge fan.

On the pop front, I’ve been reveling in the sensational photographs of Michael Douglas’ mercurial fiancee, Catherine Zeta-Jones, which have been featured for months in Hello magazine (the glossy British bible of “Absolutely Fabulous”). American magazines, with their stilted portrait shots, have not done Zeta-Jones justice. The luminous color printing of Hello (whose parent publication is Spain’s !Hola!) gives the stylish Welsh actress an Ingres-like amplitude and Mediterranean lushness. What a treat for tired eyes she is, after the endless images of armadillo-jawed Gwyneth Paltrow and her pedestrian army of fellow ingenues, like margarine-browed, ox-hoofed Renie Zellweger.

Finally, the recent repeat TV airings of “Titanic” have enraged me anew about the injustice done to Kate Winslet, who deserved the Oscar for her emotional bravura and physical fortitude in that film. The tense footage of Winslet carrying an ax as she fights her way through the cold flood of seawater in a dusky corridor will be one of the few canonical moments of 1990s cinema, equal to cigarette-flaunting, leg-crossing Sharon Stone’s flouting of the police from her interrogation throne in “Basic Instinct.”

Retchingly vanilla Helen Hunt, who walked off with Winslet’s Oscar, goes on piling up undeserved awards, as at last week’s Emmys. But a quarter century from now, when people are still admiring Winslet in “Titanic,” no one will remember who the hell Helen Hunt was. Hollywood, get your priorities straight: Please reward artistic merit, not popularity in your chummy entertainment elite.

“God, I hope Chelsea has a good therapist” is a refrain heard
countless times since the Lewinsky crisis began. Domestic crisis — whether it’s alcoholism, infidelity or divorce — often spurs families
to get professional help. In interviews conducted during the past few days with therapists across the nation,
many of whom specialize in sexual disorders, a familiar theme emerged: The first family will only be able to survive if the thick layers of anger and shame are chipped away.

“Sometimes a trauma like this can actually bond people, but the family must work together and be willing to forgive the person who has brought the trauma
into the family,” says Sandra Davis, a psychotherapist and sex
therapist in Pittsburgh. “First they must get through the anger that goes
with the exposure of it.” Davis believes that the first lady is displaying a lot of anger
and hurt. “I see it in her body language, even though she’s sticking by him,” she says.

According to some White House sources, the Clintons seem shell-shocked and out of touch with the public. They had scheduled a rally in Philadelphia for Friday, believing it would give them the chance to appear defiant before a big, enthusiastic crowd, and top-echelon White House staffers reportedly had to make a series of strident phone calls to convince them to call it off. Sources report that out of the public eye, both Clintons are visibly depressed, rather than the resilient, determined figures they present to the world. Aides have told the first couple to keep up appearances or their private depression could start to infuse their public personas. While such a split-personality strategy may be good politically, however, it could make it especially difficult for the Clintons to face up to their problems honestly.

One can only speculate how the first family would have faced this trauma had it not been played out on an international stage, where their every gesture and
statement is dissected by a hungry public. Some wonder whether the first
lady would have stood by her husband this long if she wasn’t part of a public
partnership and speculate that perhaps she will leave the president once
they leave office.

“Sometimes, of course, there is divorce after something like this happens
because a basic trust has been violated and there is the added dimension of
embarrassment,” says Sam Alibrando, a Pasadena, Calif., therapist who
specializes in sexual issues. “For couples who rely on each other,
something like this really shakes their foundation. But can a family put
the pieces back together after something like this? Yes.”

This relies largely on the ability of the “shamed” person to trust his or her partner enough to allow for another chance. “Usually, if it’s a shock, the first thing the spouse wants is
to understand what happened and then they want a guarantee that it
won’t happen again,” says Sharon Nathan, a clinical psychologist and sex
therapist in New York City. “Sometimes a compromise can be worked out if the
partner will promise to work on their problem and promise that it will never
happen again.”

- – - – - – - – - -

But if recent press accounts are accurate, the president might be
continuing his clandestine relationship with Monica Lewinsky through subtle — almost subversive — forms of
communication. Wednesday’s New York Times reported that the president wore
a gold and blue Zegna tie, given to him by Lewinsky, on the day she
began her grand jury testimony, perhaps as a sly “I’m thinking of
you” message — or a plea for her not to give damaging testimony. If it was purely coincidental, as the president contended when questioned about it during his testimony, could his gesture be a sort of Freudian slip?

“I don’t think it’s Freudian,” insists Nathan. “Believe me, I think [wearing it] was an overt statement, another subtle manipulation, an implicit message about how much she means to him, a way
for him to say, ‘Don’t tell the truth about us.’”

Shirley Glass, a sex therapist in Baltimore, agrees: “It seems to be a
deliberate attempt to send a message of some kind, the basic meaning being that
there was some type of emotional attachment: ‘I haven’t forgotten you.’ It’s a signal of not repudiating [the relationship]. When
somebody has an extramarital relationship and it includes an emotional
attachment, gifts are often a symbol of that. Even when the relationship
ends, people hold on to the gift as a memorial of that romance.”

Many of those interviewed were skeptical of reports that Hillary Clinton had believed her husband’s lie all along. “People always say, ‘How come the wife is always the last to know?’ Well,
often she does know, but the idea of the betrayal is so painful, she pushes
it away,” says Barbara Okun, the training director of the doctoral program
in psychology at Northeastern University and a clinical professor at Harvard
University. “Someone who says the right words and is charming the way
[Clinton is] often has someone in their family who allows them to get away with it.”

Complicating this is the fact that the president
was unfaithful in the home that he shares with his wife. The first lady must reside at the scene of the crime, so to speak — a fact that could
clearly hinder the healing process. “Often the spouse wants to know about all the details about the affair — every person, place and gesture,” says Nathan. “But I try to discourage that. I find that those images become burned into the spouse’s mind and are then hard to get around.”

Many therapists said they believed that Clinton’s indiscretions constitute an even greater psychological
nightmare for his daughter, despite her unruffled demeanor. Chelsea “might be so tied to her parents, so loyal to them, that her
loyalty might be taking precedence over anger,” says Okun. “She might have
a nice set of defenses up right now, but she will have to deal with this at some point.” Dealing with the private knowledge would be difficult enough. But Chelsea has been blitzed with an endless stream of photos and videos of her father embracing the woman with whom he had an adulterous relationship — a woman not much older than she is.

Coming at an age when his daughter is developing her
sexual identity and exploring her relationship to men, the psychological
damage incurred by a sexually reckless father can be
manifold, therapists say. “This can overload a young woman, bringing sex and shame and
guilt together at a crucial time in her sexual development,” says Nathan. “I am only
speculating, but this could make her cynical of relationships and
untrusting of future partners. The flip side could be promiscuity.”

Still, how children weather something like this hinges on their overall psychological health. “If Chelsea called me up and said, ‘What should I do?’ I would say, ‘You
could drop out of college but I recommend going back, getting back in the
saddle so to speak,’” says Alibrando. “I would suggest that she set up strict
boundaries at school whereby she refuses to discuss this matter with anyone
but her closest friends. Should she go into therapy? Perhaps. If this incident is a symptom of family dysfunction, it would be as good a time as any for her to go.”

Many of the therapists interviewed surmise that the psychological impetus for President
Clinton’s reckless sexual behavior stems from a condition known in
therapeutic circles as “sexual compulsion.” According to Cooper, the fastest growing category of sexually compulsive individuals is very successful men, who often have high-profile jobs. (Think Dick Morris, Magic Johnson.)
“Men tend to sexualize their needs — they use sex as a way to
‘self-soothe,’” says Cooper.

Several therapists observed that Clinton’s childhood traumas (a father who died before his
birth; an abusive, alcoholic stepfather) and sexual history would
suggest that he suffers from at least some symptoms of this
condition. Some sexual compulsives are obsessed with
pornography or masturbation or have sex with prostitutes; others have “serial affairs” with many partners, as the president may have. All
therapists interviewed agree that all sexual compulsives share one trait: When it comes
to intimacy, they are emotionally impotent.

“I’ve had people tell me they’d rather be alcoholic than sexually
compulsive because it’s less embarrassing,” says Helen Friedman, a sex
therapist and radio talk show host in St. Louis. “Sexual compulsivity is
about disconnecting from one’s inner pain. The bottom line is that it’s an
intimacy disorder — not a sexual one.”

Al Cooper, the clinical director of the San Jose (Calif.) Marital and Sexuality
Center, says that the president appears to possess a number of traits that are among the criteria used to diagnose sexual compulsion, including a tendency toward denial and engagement in high-risk sexual behavior to the point of interfering with his professional duties. But people who are sexually compulsive “are not the ones who knock on
my door — they do not get help of their own volition,” he adds. “They only come when
they are told they have to.” Cooper says that families of those who are sexually compulsive must often stage interventions, in which they confront the loved one and offer them “tough love.”

Therapists insist a sexually compulsive person may have countless
partners and engage in reckless sex while still adoring and
cherishing their spouses. “There are two parts to sexuality,” explains
Okun, “intentional sport-fucking and making love. Sexual
compulsives who get caught often don’t understand why their spouse is
upset, because to them, it doesn’t mean anything, it is purely sport.”

Would Okun recommend family therapy for the Clintons? “I’m not sure that I
would,” she says. “This family feels like they’ve been victimized, they
have a conspiracy theory, they think they’ve been set up. I don’t think
they really want to hear what other people say or think. Often high-profile couples will come to see me only because a child has dragged them there, because the child is suffering, but the Clintons truly don’t think they have a problem. In therapy, high-profile people often just go through the motions.”

Clinton’s relationship with language is not unlike his relationship with sex. He is a tease. He sort of communicates. “I had a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was inappropriate,” Clinton said last night. News commentators announced that he apologized. They announced that he admitted to an inappropriate physical relationship. But he didn’t really apologize. He didn’t really admit to any physical relationship. Clinton has perfected the art of double talk, of admitting and not admitting, and holding two contradictory truths in the silvery web of his words. He has from the beginning been artfully ambiguous, creating a kind of Rorschach inkblot of meaning for the public — like the famous “60 Minutes” interview in 1992, when he and Hillary talked about Gennifer Flowers and some Americans thought he admitted to an adulterous relationship and others thought he didn’t. He allows us to see what we want to see, to believe what we want to believe.

The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times referred to Clinton’s speech as “the most painfully personal public confession of his life,” but it wasn’t particularly personal, nor was it much of a confession, nor did much of the pain come across. Through a studied lack of vividness, a refusal to supply even the sketchiest account of his relationship with the ex-intern, Clinton has maintained his legendary elusiveness. He did not even use the word “sexual.”

There is no doubt that Clinton handled his speech gracefully. In fact, it may be that he handled it too gracefully, that we wanted to see him falter a little. Reading stiffly from a teleprompter — his words clipped, his face pale, his back straight, his blue eyes not exactly windows to his soul — the president may have been too composed for his own good. If his four-minute speech left us feeling slightly unsatisfied, left even supporters like George Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Meyers feeling unsatisfied, it is because it offered no heart or substance. The speech contained all of the elements it was supposed to contain — an apology, an attack, a vague statement of fact, an admission of having misled people — but it was like the skeleton of a speech, the bare bones, without the living spirit that would tell us in some meaningful way what happened.

Though most of the nation has a great deal of affection for Clinton and hostility toward Starr, Clinton has a delicate relationship with his public, as he must have with the wife and child who greeted him after his testimony. The public does not want to feel duped. Or manipulated. We want to feel appealed to. We want to feel as if President Clinton sat down over a cup of coffee and confessed his weakness. If he had truly apologized, then we could have forgiven him. If he had shown us some glimpse of vulnerability, we could have sympathized. As it is, the public is left after this long national drama without a role.

One of the most extraordinary things about the spectacle of President Clinton’s testimony is that we are watching America’s standards about lying change before our eyes. According to the Drudge Report, in 1974 Clinton himself said, “If a president of the United States ever lied to the American people, he should resign.” But now we have developed a more sophisticated and evolved attitude toward lying. Of course, Clinton did not say that he lied. He said that his public comments and silence on the matter “gave a false impression.” What was particularly brilliant and extraordinary about Clinton’s tone last night was its self-righteousness: “I was very concerned about protecting my family.” By lying, he was protecting his child. He was protecting all of our children. He was protecting the right to privacy itself. There is, his tone implied, a kind of honor in lying.

Clinton has thus far in his political career displayed an Indiana Jones-like capacity to evade certain destruction, to come out of the flames remarkably intact, and it is no surprise, judging from overnight polls, that he seems to have done it again. But the spectacle of his redemption engenders a peculiar psychological response; when people watch Houdini twist free of his chains, there is in his audience the slightest ripple of disappointment. On some unpleasant but deeply human layer of our psyches, we want to see the escape artist caught. We are waiting for the situation difficult and arduous enough to hold him. And there may be something of the same phenomenon with Clinton, even for his supporters. We breathe easier now that the speech is over, the economy can go back to normal, the government can govern. But last night, after being treated to replayed videos of Clinton slipping out of the net a number of times in the past, isn’t there just the faintest trace of disappointment that he was not caught, stuck without “wiggle room” at least for a moment? That he did not struggle for the cameras? That he did not show some sort of pain or guilt or distress? Perhaps the slow-burning, stubborn energy Clinton displayed last night did not quite satisfy our need for resolution.

When Clinton talked about his privacy being invaded, he was not taking one crucial thing into account: Over these long months, he has certainly invaded ours. While we were sitting innocently over our Cheerios and bananas, reading our morning newspaper, Clinton was right there in our kitchen, with his stains and finger-shaking denials and hugs of plump and ecstatic girls; even people who didn’t want to hear about Monica Lewinsky were confronted with it on cab radios and bar television sets, at dinner conversations and newsstands. (He may call her “Miss Lewinsky,” but most Americans feel intimately enough involved with her to be on a first-name basis.) There was something reciprocal about this invasion of privacy: He couldn’t hide from us and we couldn’t hide from him. And for him to say, at this point, “Even presidents have private lives” is somewhat like a couple who has just had sex by an open window suddenly and indignantly pulling a shade.

There is no privacy left to preserve. Clinton said optimistically, “This matter is between … me and my wife and our daughter and our God,” when in reality it is a matter between him and the readers of tabloids and watchers of news broadcasts in Australia and Pakistan and everywhere in between. Our involvement in the president’s private life was partly and unfairly imposed by the pathological prying of the Starr investigation, but it was definitely prolonged by the president’s “false impressions.” And as a result, many of us feel that, after following this long saga, we deserve to hear the details in all their splendid squalor. It is not the physical details we want because we already have enough of those, but the emotional details, or at least some of them. Some hint of real feeling. “It constituted a lack of judgment” does not have the confessional heat and urgency we might have hoped for. The reader and consumer of news is put in a very difficult position; even though we feel very strongly that Clinton’s privacy should not have been invaded, we also think to ourselves, “Well, now that it has been …” Since the whole unfortunate investigation dragged on, since the president lied and admitted he lied, and we decided to forgive him for lying, many of us felt almost as if we were owed something we could think of as the truth.

In his eagerness to be done with the whole sordid thing in four minutes, the president has forgotten one of the principles of closure: This is a story, and the story needs tension, it needs conflict, it needs resolution. And if columnists are going to stop hypothesizing about how Hillary Clinton feels and whether Chelsea Clinton will ever be normal, they need to be given some human reality to report. To take the story out of the hands of Ken Starr and out of the hands of the media, the clucking columnists and pyschologizing newscasters, Clinton would have to give us some version of his own, which he thus far has declined to do. Ironically, I think, the quickest route to privacy, and to closure, would have been through some sort of openness or even the illusion of openness. If Clinton had shown any strong feeling; if he had offered any shred of explanation, however thin; if he had said that he had struggled with this problem his whole life and he regretted his weakness; if he had said that he loved his wife and daughter and that he felt terrible betraying their trust and for his part in dragging the country through this ordeal, he would have given us the catharsis, the emotional climax, the magnificent speech that we needed to justify months and months of frustrating involvement in his private life.

And then, finally, as far as the public is concerned, it would have been over.