Salon.com > Richard Goldstein

The trickster president

Thu, 30 Dec 1999 20:00:00 +0000

Perplexed and not a little pissed off by the president's historically high ratings -- in the wake of an impeachment spurned by all but the rabid, the rotund, and the bedridden -- pundits and prophets of the right have taken to castigating the people. "The Founders were right to have a certain distrust of democracy," conservative commentator William Kristol recently asserted, echoing the James Dobson's more apocalyptic admonition: "Our people no longer recognize the nature of evil." This impulse to save the nation from itself brings to mind Bertolt Brecht's advice to East German Communists grousing about the lack of popular enthusiasm for socialism. If the people have betrayed the government, Brecht quipped, perhaps the government should "abolish the people and elect a new one."

Not even Bob Barr has broached such a solution. But the Republican "Superior Dance" would do the Church Lady proud. This rigid strut clearly reflects a painful recognition by the children of the Reagan revolution that they are out of step. For all their success at winning office, something more potent and less tangible than politics blocks the right when it comes to producing fundamental changes in American life. That baffling "something" is the culture, and in this retail realm, the dominant sensibility is every bit as resistant to salvation as it is to socialism.

Attack of the devil dolls

Wed, 30 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

America had barely recovered from the flap over Tinky Winky, the purse-carrying purple teletubby the Rev. Jerry Falwell outed as gay, when along came another doll controversy. You know the story: An Atlanta mother complained that her 11-year-old son was verbally deflowered by an Austin Powers action doll.

Young Marvin had already seen "The Spy Who Shagged Me" -- whisked past the PG police by his father -- and now he was drawn to the bushy-chested doll in Union Jack underwear who asks the saucy question "Would you fancy a shag?" But it was the query on the packaging -- "Do I make you horny, baby?" -- that pricked the boy's curiosity. When he asked his mom what "horny" meant, she was ready with an explanation: "It's sort of like goose bumps that make your hair stand up," said Tamatha Brannon, rather creatively. But she didn't stop there. She did what any good American parent faced with such a situation would do: She sued Toys 'R Us, which admitted it accidentally stocked a PG-rated version of the doll instead of the fully clothed, G-rated figure it had intended.

Sex and the single intern

Fri, 19 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000

Now that the slings and arrows of impeachment have been stilled, the discussion has shifted to a question -- "What's next for America?" -- calculated to keep the media in clover until the next scandal blooms. A thousand think pieces ponder the post-impeachment future, and panel after pundit-ridden panel is assembled to assure that we will never see the promised land of closure until we have wandered for 40 sweeps months in the desert of TV talk.

There is something apt about this lingering rumination. After all, the charges against President Clinton were never a proper catchment for his sins, which were, though not impeachable, fascinating and perplexing. Perjury and obstruction of justice are awfully hard to prove in a culture where lying is the leaven of life, and making a political crisis out of a sex scandal, in the age of Jerry Springer, strikes most people as beside the point, at best. If adultery is a private matter (though one we are eager to read about in graphic detail), then its moral significance can only be decided in the court of the culture. Jeff Greenfield is a better host of these proceedings than a judge in gold stripes, and the denizens of talk shows a more appropriate jury than any stentorian senator.

The trickster president

Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:37:00 +0000