Near the end of the new film “Enemy of the State,” Jon Voight says, “Someday the only privacy left will be the one inside your head,” and then adds, “Maybe that will be enough.” “Enemy of the State” really doesn’t have as much on its mind as this sounds; while the blitzkrieg of Tony Scott’s direction is well-suited to the obsessive, technological vertigo of his subject, and while the film resolves itself more cleverly and with more wit than most comparable thrillers, it’s interesting how — given that Will Smith is one of our most likable actors and Gene Hackman one of our most reliable — the two have absolutely no chemistry at all. But for all its hyped-up electronic paranoia, there’s a visceral ring-of-truth about the movie’s portrayal of the assault on secret America presently waged on any number of fronts, President Clinton’s sex life being only the most tiresome.
As it happened, the night after I caught a matinee of “Enemy of the State,” “The McLaughlin Group” was taking up the matter of another presidential libido whose mysteries have been laid to rest by a recent, well-publicized DNA test — except for those who won’t let it lay to rest, including the boisterous Mr. McLaughlin. By now the rest of us have moved on from the question of whether Thomas Jefferson really slept with his slave Sally Hemings to what was always the more profound point anyway: why it matters so much to us. Over the decades the main argument Jefferson historians like Dumas Malone have made against the alleged Jefferson-Hemings liaison was that Jefferson simply wasn’t the sort of man who would do that sort of thing, even as he should also have been the sort of man who wouldn’t have owned slaves in the first place. But since this ownership was never something anyone could dispute, of course, it was long ago excused by the context of the time, while the idea that Jefferson might have actually had with an African-American woman a personal relationship that lasted many years remains, to use McLaughlin’s word, a “besmirchment.”
Since the recent DNA test that proved the relationship, Joseph Ellis, the author of a fine 1997 book on Jefferson called “American Sphinx,” has revised his earlier doubts, as only an intellectually honest historian could do. So it now seems rude to take to task the case he originally made, given that he’s taken it to task himself — but for the sake of making a larger point, we’ll do it anyway. Ellis’ original skepticism was a more convincing version of the Jefferson never would have done that sort of thing variety, made not on the basis that it was morally incomprehensible given Jefferson’s general wonderfulness, an argument Ellis tacitly acknowledged as absurd, but that it was psychologically incomprehensible — that Jefferson simply wasn’t wired to indulge the carnal appetites the Hemings relationship presumably entailed. In fact, a different reading of Jefferson could lead one to believe he was exactly so wired: a highly-repressed man bound by a deathbed promise to his departed wife not to remarry, torn between his obviously irreconcilable populist ideals and aristocratic life, constantly trying to idealize and refine his most basic yearnings. Almost invariably, such determinedly rarefied men harbor darker yearnings inside them somewhere, though whether they ever have the opportunity or nerve to act them out may be a different matter.
The point is that the man who created the open America is also the man who created the secret America, the America where everyone is a state unto himself or herself, absolutely sovereign on the terrain of his or her imagination, including the sexual imagination. Jefferson was the first great American with the first great American secret, a secret that went right to the heart of what America was supposed to be about, as opposed to what it was really about. Assuming the DNA test is conclusive, it’s telling that after the Hemings story broke in 1802, while Jefferson was president, he apparently continued the relationship, since a number of other children — virtually all of whom later insisted Jefferson was their father — were born to Sally. Even more telling, and the single thing that was always the most compelling evidence the story might be true, was the silence. “Jefferson denied the affair!” an increasingly distraught McLaughlin bellowed at his stupefied audience a week ago; in fact, over the 24 years that the story hounded him, Jefferson is on record as having denied it exactly once, very early on and then in a vaguely Clintonian fashion — a denial directed less at the rumor itself than at the political foe who spread it. After that, Jefferson said nothing. His daughters by his deceased wife said nothing. The years passed in which nothing was mentioned in all his voluminous papers, papers in which he wrote about anything and everything else under the sun — nothing in all the letters or correspondence among his family and friends. It became the Great Unmentionable of Jefferson’s life.
Part of me appreciates the DNA probe into Jefferson’s secret life because part of me relishes the result, believing as I do that it confronts America with certain things America is better off confronted with, and believing as well that, while it was his ownership of slaves that truly besmirched Jefferson’s legacy, a very human involvement with one of them may partially redeem that legacy. But another part of me finds the probe disturbing. It’s disturbing because the open America that we believe in exists only because the subterranean secret America exists too, an America in which one has the freedom of his secrets, the freedom of his dreams, the freedom to imagine his darkness. Before there was an America, and on many occasions since, people have had to swindle their own secrets from those in power, shuffling them from one room of the mind to the other always a step ahead of the authorities; their secrets officially belonged not to them but to the state or church or party, whose right-of-access justified any harassment, intimidation and torture.
For all the indications throughout Jefferson’s personal documents concerning his deep ambivalence about slavery — and he was clearly more tormented about it than either defenders or critics, for reasons having to do with their own agendas, ever wanted to concede — there was never any ambivalence about the implicit right to a secret life. Obviously, by this we must mean a secret life that isn’t lived out at the expense of others — which unhappily can’t apply to the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, given the immorality not of what they intimately shared but of the chains that bound Hemings to Jefferson, at least in part against her will. (It must be noted that the affair began around 1790 in Paris, where in fact Sally was not a slave but a free woman; and that for whatever reason, given the option of remaining a free woman in France, she chose instead to return with Jefferson to America as a slave.) Nonetheless the right to “life” that Jefferson wrote of in the Declaration of Independence implicitly includes a right to secrecy because otherwise it’s only a right to survival. Presented as part of a ménage à trois with liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the “life” Jefferson valued was something more than just existence, it was a sensual creation, a thrilling work of authorship, a cumulative invention of ecstatic experience.
Today, in an age when so-called friends secretly tape their phone conversations with other friends and then stand on the courthouse steps asking America, “Who am I? I am you”; in an age when an untethered prosecutor can haul parents before grand juries and compel them to testify against their will about the sex lives of their children; in an age when a $40 million taxpayer-funded investigation can illegally disseminate secret unsubstantiated grand jury testimony for the purpose of public incrimination; in an age when the government can subpoena from book stores lists of what people are reading for the purpose of prosecution — the conflict between the media and political culture on the one hand and the rest of the country on the other is a war over the secret America.
Any doubts one may still have that the media establishment and political establishment are now two heads of an otherwise biologically unified Siamese twin vanish when viewed in the context of this conflict. Significantly but not surprisingly, it is sex that’s the final rampart; and because sexual repression is the grail of the conflict, it’s the right that’s taken the battle to heart. The extent to which the right’s social and political character over the last 25 years has been defined by sexual fury is now incontestable almost to the point of being empirical; as much as anything else, the political right in America today is an anti-sex movement, an outraged response to people’s insistence on a right to pleasure. This is a relatively recent development, traceable back to when the right abandoned the Goldwater libertarianism of the ’60s to embrace the moralism of Pat Robertson and William Bennett and Gary Bauer and Kenneth Starr in the ’80s and ’90s; and as an anti-sex movement, the modern right is therefore a movement that is, by definition, hostile to the individual right to have a secret.
Before the left gets too sanctimonious about it, however, it may wish to consider its own complicity. There was much about the ’60s that was lovely and exhilarating; having been a teenager at the time, I still have Proustian moments driving down the Sunset Strip when it all comes back to me, the feeling in the air that was unlike anything since. But like all ages, it had its excesses and stupidities, and to an extent the modern antipathy to secrecy was born in the ’60s out of a totalitarian notion of “truth” that suggested a secret was a lie, that something held in private was uptight inhibition at best and hypocritical repression at worst, that any impulse or utterance even momentarily checked by reflection or circumspection was necessarily dishonest and that everything harbored in the privacy of one’s mind had to be sentenced to the sunlight, which was another way of saying, by extension, that the deepest, darkest part of you wasn’t yours, but belonged to everyone.
The result was that personal sexuality became the province of the political, not unlike the way it once became the province of the religious, in part because of a women’s movement that set its sights beyond entirely valid social and economic goals and sought to transform every nuance of the sexual psyche into either a revolutionary or reactionary act. Seven years before Starr investigated what books Monica was buying, a congressional committee investigated what videos Clarence Thomas was renting.
Thus mass ritual confession. Thus encounter groups, thus the cruel ruthlessness that “outs” people’s sexuality, thus the tabloid Zeitgeist. Thus the current age of secret-as-commodity, when a secret’s value is measured in terms of how much time it gets you on television. Thus an age when the only identity we have anymore is to be found in our secrets, and once those are revealed, identity becomes as ephemeral as whatever signal broadcast them, whatever electronic command downloaded them, whatever ink committed them to type. Whatever dust from your grave was disinterred for a DNA test. Sally died for Jefferson’s secrets. And then he died for yours.
This past week, 13 and a half months early, the millennium came to TV, in case you weren’t paying attention — and if you weren’t, it’s to your credit. This assumes you believe the millennium will be not the Rapture, accompanied by celestial chimes, but an abysmal journey down the drain of time, accompanied by a Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey duet. Millennial-TV began as Kangaroo Court-TV last Thursday and ended as Snuff-TV Sunday night, all the imagination and integrity and courage sucked out of our age like oxygen, leaving only a vacuum occupied by an electronic nation of the undead or, thanks to “60 Minutes,” the dead, population of one.
I spent half of Sunday in dread of the “60 Minutes” program, having gotten
it into my head that, for the purpose of writing this column, journalistic responsibility obligated me to watch Jack Kevorkian kill someone too pain-wracked and doomed to think clearly. Since “60 Minutes” happens to follow “Siskel and Ebert” in the TV market where I live, I figured this would surely put me in the appropriate thumbs-up/thumbs-down mood. But truth be told, by Sunday evening the idea of watching another minute of any sort of TV was almost unbearable, though to say I spent last Thursday watching the House Judiciary Committee perform a Kevorkian on my country would only be more cheap melodrama at a time when we hardly need another moment of it.
Our country didn’t die last Thursday, of course, because the people are
smarter than the Congress. But if you did happen to watch Ken Starr’s testimony before the House committee holding hearings on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and if you also happened to be around 25 years ago during the Watergate hearings, you couldn’t help discerning a difference or two. And if you weren’t around 25 years ago you may find it hard to believe that once there was a time when momentous matters concerning democracy and due process weren’t just seen by politicians as another opportunity to try to score politically, and when actually taking into account the best interests of the country wasn’t just for suckers.
The Democrats of the present committee have made clear by now their resolute unwillingness to come to grips with the fact that the chief executive of the land is probably guilty of a felony in the form of perjury before a grand jury, and thereby has betrayed his oath of office. The Republicans of the present committee have made clear by now their resolute unwillingness to come to grips with the fact that virtually all the charges currently facing the president have been borne out of an investigation that has been, at best, zealous and unjust, and at worst vaguely totalitarian. There. I just saved you 15 hours in case you were so unhinged as to have taped the fiasco and were planning to curl around the fire with it some wintry night.
In the next day’s newspaper, Bob Barr of Georgia, a member of the committee,
was quoted bemoaning the lack of objectivity on the part of his fellow Republicans who have indicated they won’t support impeachment. “It’s very frustrating to see my colleagues take such an irresponsible position,” Barr told the Los Angeles Times. “We haven’t even presented all the evidence.” This paragon of open-mindedness is the same congressman who called for the president’s impeachment before the Lewinsky scandal even broke. Presumably Barr originally believed impeachment was justified by the array of other scandals allegedly involving the president, including Whitewater and matters relating to the missing FBI files and the firings at the White House Travel Office. These were the matters that Starr was appointed to investigate in the first place, and that his testimony last Thursday mentioned just long enough to allow that the president in fact has been cleared of them, apparently at some mysterious, unspoken moment in the middle of some elusive, unspecified night that we can only guess happened a week ago or a month ago or a year ago or three.
To be fair to Barr, he may have slipped out to the men’s room around the
time Starr was muttering this particular aside, and therefore would have missed it. He would have missed it because Starr didn’t feel compelled to elaborate, at least not to the extent of a 445-page referral; and if Barr didn’t hear it from Starr himself, there was an excellent chance he wasn’t going to hear it at all, because the media said almost nothing about it. Now, I got my master’s degree in journalism at UCLA back in the waning years of the Industrial Age, so we must acknowledge my opinion is by now irrelevant in the matter of journalistic ethics and what used to be called “hard news.” But allow me to explain that this romantic notion of “hard news” had to do with information of a quaintly factual nature — “of or pertaining to facts,” as the dictionary defines it — either affecting people’s lives on a large scale or otherwise warranting their interest in an extraordinary way. Since there was only a single piece of hard news that came out of last Thursday’s marathon, in all my naiveté I honestly woke to Friday morning’s front page expecting to see at least one tiny little headline somewhere that read, “Starr clears Clinton of all other charges.”
There was no such headline. There was virtually nothing about the
exoneration to be found in anything but the fine print. In the delirium of words concerning Starr’s admirably becalmed demeanor, the only real news of the day was barely mentioned on the nightly news shows; and on this past Sunday morning’s talk shows it wasn’t mentioned at all, except by the president’s lawyer in conversation with Wolf Blitzer on CNN and, in a rare outburst of professionalism, Tim Russert on “Meet the Press.” The wise men and wise woman at the roundtable of ABC’s “This Week” didn’t speak a syllable of it. They did cluck-cluck a lot about the journalistic disgrace of CBS’s upcoming “60 Minutes” broadcast, and Sam Donaldson lectured the country yet again about how it was going to have to come to terms with the president’s wrongdoing sooner or later; like much of the rest of the media, Donaldson routinely wonders in bewilderment at the “disconnect” between what the president has done and how the nihilistic, selfish and shallow American public has responded to it, as though they haven’t been coming to terms with Bill Clinton for six years now. As though they haven’t processed all the information about Bill and Monica and reached the uneasy conclusion that — in a process where the only resolution offered is the constitutional equivalent of capital punishment — the president’s transgression is simply not the constitutional equivalent of a capital crime.
The Judiciary Committee show last Thursday was not without its redeeming
figures. As it happens, the two who most reminded me of those congressmen and congresswomen from the Watergate hearings 25 years ago were sitting at the far end of the lower row, so far to the side as to always be off-screen. Both were conservative Republicans. It remains to be seen what Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mary Bono of California decide on impeachment; they may very well vote for it. But whether one would agree with such a conclusion (I, for the most part, wouldn’t) or whether one agrees with their politics (I, for the most part, don’t), one got the feeling both were actually grappling with an anguished sense of duty as they construed it. As a citizen-politician who finds herself in the House by virtue of a tree, Bono seems to be trying to cast the case against the president in the context of Real Life as she’s lived it and as she knows others to live it, while Graham appears truly haunted by the single argument no liberal Democrat has yet refuted with any persuasiveness: that in the America of our dreams, no man is above the law.
Anyway, this is what it’s come down to: Fearing for America, my best hope
is the widow of the guy who sang “I Got You Babe.” But after all, as time went by, “I Got You Babe” turned out to be a better song than we thought it was 30 years ago, and as time goes by, Mary Bono may turn out to be a better congresswoman than we thought when she was elected; and at any rate, however she votes, the televised execution of the Clinton presidency will be somewhat less irresistible to the country than the televised execution of terminal patients now appears to be. Truth is, in the end I didn’t watch “60 Minutes” on Sunday night anyway. I shirked my journalistic obligation. Not only did I decide that watching the program out of a sense of journalistic obligation was to effectively endorse whatever sick horseshit about journalistic obligation was used to justify the show in the first place, I decided just writing about the show at any serious length, even in condemnation, was somehow an endorsement as well — further fueling the very controversy the program so cravenly and successfully pursued.
Maybe that’s just me letting myself off the hook. But if we all let
ourselves off the hook on this one, then no one would have watched Sunday night, and how bad would that be? The next time Jack Kevorkian talks about someone’s right to “die with dignity,” let’s not waste a single moment belaboring the obvious absurdity of a definition of dignified death that includes a whirring video camera a few feet away. This assumes it’s not too late anyway. This assumes that, in TV time, Dec. 31, 1999, isn’t already here, and that Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey duet you think you hear in the background, coming from someone else’s radio, isn’t really in your own head, and getting closer.
To even the most literal-minded, it has to be obvious now that a shift in the American political Zeitgeist is taking place — though what its final result will be remains to be seen. The soundtrack for this new Zeitgeist might be Mercury Rev’s weird and haunting new “Deserter’s Songs,” a CD I intend to play during Kenneth Starr’s testimony to Congress tomorrow; if Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” were pop music, it would sound like this. Though this shift became clear with the election a couple of weeks ago, in fact it began, in metaphorically appropriate fashion, on the last day of summer.
That was the Tuesday, Sept. 22, following Congress’ release of the
videotape of Clinton’s testimony to the grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky investigation. On that day, after wide anticipation by both the media and the political establishment that the tape would doom Clinton’s presidency for good, new polls showed that overnight the president’s ratings had risen six points and those of Congress had plummeted 12. Of course it’s easy in hindsight to say so, but in typical fashion both the politicians and the media had missed what was important about the tape: They assumed the public would be focusing on the president’s answers. Instead, what people heard were the questions.
The same smart money that predicted Clinton’s downfall after the videotape
release now predicts Starr will “exceed expectations” in his appearance before Congress, and to some extent vindicate himself before the public. The special prosecutor has become so demonized, the argument goes, he can’t help but look good. It’s a nitwitted argument. It might apply to Lewinsky if she winds up testifying, because the public opinion of her is based not so much on what she’s done but who she is, or who the public thinks she is. It’s exactly the opposite with Starr. Come this weekend, at best his poll numbers will remain unchanged and may even be worse, because what people despise is not who he is but what he’s done; and with every word of testimony he utters before Henry Hyde’s committee, he’ll remind people of the various decisions he’s made along the way to investigate matters that people believe are profoundly private and out of bounds to the state. If Starr’s testimony is calm and low-key, he’ll just seem that much colder and more bloodless. If it’s heated and indignant, he’ll just seem that much more judgmental and perverse.
In the testimony’s immediate aftermath, the more fascinating spectacle will
be how the TV media portrays it. If there were still some element of journalistic integrity involved, the answer to that question would obviously depend on Starr’s performance, and we’ll get a truer assessment of that from the print media, which throughout the scandal has done a better job of maintaining its bearings. Even the ever-snide Newsweek, for instance, is redeemed by Jonathan Alter, who on a week-in-week-out basis has kept a sense of perspective and brought insight to the general paroxysm of analysis. But by now the TV news media is so gun-shy about the whole matter that, like the pols in the White House or Republican Party, they’ll wait for the polls before rendering a verdict on the Sunday morning talk shows. Constantly jockeying for some satisfactory position vis-à-vis both public opinion and Clinton, while still trying to leave itself an out, the electronic media will impose a 24-hour blackout on Meaning before it says much about Starr at all.
These days the pundits’ rooting interest in impeachment has nowhere to go.
It was interesting how, last Friday and Saturday, opinion confabs like “The McLaughlin Group” were creaming Clinton for bombing Iraq before he had even done it, and then Sunday morning creamed him for not doing it. The media isn’t quite sure what to do about Clinton anymore: What do you say when, like Tim Russert, you’ve already referred to the president as “evil”? At that point credibility and objectivity have been rendered bankrupt; some of us remember when the Holocaust was evil, not two consenting adults playing around with a Corona. If Tim Russert really thought Clinton was evil, you could at least respect it. But conviction has nothing to do with it; what it has to do with is vivid and inflammatory TV, for which a sense of moral proportion isn’t very compelling.
Ten months ago on ABC’s “This Week,” on the weekend the Lewinsky scandal first
broke and the Clinton presidency was tottering on the edge, George Will forcefully made the argument that impeachment wasn’t a legal mechanism but a political one. He suggested that extraordinary political reasons, including unseemly if not illegal conduct, were enough to justify impeachment. For the most part over the years Will has been a rare bird — an intellectually honest ideologue — so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he made this argument because he believed it. But if one happened to disapprove of Clinton anyway and wouldn’t be so disappointed to see him go, then Will’s argument was also tactically shrewd, because at the time the legal case against the president was still sketchy but it could safely be assumed the bottom was about to fall out for him politically. On the way to the November election, of course, something else happened: The bottom did not fall out; public consensus formed not against Clinton but against his investigator; and with stupefying dispatch the Republicans in the House of Representatives transformed the question from one of the president’s fitness to one of Congress’ fairness.
Now Will doesn’t talk on TV anymore about the political nature of
impeachment. Rather his distaste for the president has apparently gotten the better of intellectual honesty, and now he makes wryly ironic asides as to how Congress must determine whether grounds for impeachment include “sustained criminality,” to quote him from just this past Sunday. Leave aside for the moment the fact that, as Will fully knows, there has been no proven “sustained criminality,” and that it was Starr’s failed effort to establish such criminality — as pertaining to Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and Vincefostergate — that led him, out of sheer frustration, into the Lewinsky morass to begin with. The point is that, because the political argument has evaporated and the legal one is the only one left, Will has stood his original argument on its head, now suggesting impeachment turns more on legal questions than political ones.
To be fair, sooner or later intellectual honesty discomforts almost
everyone. The brutal fact of the matter is that, if you’re remotely honest about it, you have to concede that the case for Clinton’s impeachment is not entirely without merit. While Starr’s abuse-of-power and obstruction-of- justice charges against the president transparently have more to do with partisan zealotry than a love of justice, the perjury charge — of which Clinton is almost certainly guilty — is rather different; it’s not so unreasonable to suggest one of the basic and perfunctory requirements of being the country’s chief executive might be telling the truth under oath. If this were President Dan Quayle we were talking about, those of us making excuses for Clinton would be howling for his head.
The best argument in Clinton’s defense is that, given the recent revelations
about the byzantine plotting between Starr and Paula Jones’ lawyers and the wonderfully malignant Linda Tripp, as well as the growing speciousness of the rationale by which Janet Reno green-lighted the investigation in the first place, the case against the president has at the least involved a kind of entrapment. At worst, an ends-justifies-the-means mind-set among Republicans has become so ruthlessly ferocious over the months it finally led Congress to actually release grand jury testimony — in ordinary instances a felony, and a transgression against democracy and due process arguably worse than what the president is most credibly charged with. As in regular legal cases where charges are thrown out of court because they’ve been brought against the defendant in a manner illegal or unconstitutional, this case has been thrown out of the court of public opinion.
In contrast to sanctimonious commentators grandstanding about the
president’s “evil,” the American people, who probably have one or two sexual secrets themselves, have grasped the larger question. Which is a greater threat to America — a president who can’t keep his pants zipped and can’t tell the truth about it, or a systematic effort by an obsessed prosecutor and rabid Congress to drive him out of office by whatever means possible, and thereby overturn two national elections in the process? The punditocracy’s astonished collective head-shaking notwithstanding, the answer isn’t complicated. It remains to be seen whether, on behalf of the public, someone asks the question Thursday of Judge Starr, in his race against his demons.
Twenty years from now, Newt Gingrich will be a mere blip on the radar screen
of history. That he is presently seen as a major historical figure, “the
most important speaker in a generation,” as the Los Angeles Times put
it when he announced his departure from Congress and the speakership Friday, speaks to the way our sense of history has been warped by more than just
technology’s acceleration of time. It’s been warped by a self-interested
pundit culture for whom someone or something is important simply because the
pundit culture bore witness to it.
Mesmerized as pundits and commentators are
by electronic grandstanding, the media has been seduced into making Gingrich important because that in turn makes the media important. I was
there when Newt was speaker, the pundits imagine intoning to their
journalistic grandchildren, like Edward R. Murrow’s reporting from the London
ruins of World War II.
It’s not to say, of course, that Gingrich has been entirely irrelevant or
utterly insignificant. But he’s been important to the history of American
politics in the same way Boy George is important to the history of rock ‘n’
roll — not for anything of substance he’s done, but for the way he’s embodied
changes that were always beyond his control and would have happened if
he had never existed. Any reasonable consideration of the 1994 election in
which Republicans took control of Congress — for which Gingrich is routinely
credited as architect, mastermind, Moses — that takes into account for a
single moment how people outside Washington see things must conclude that
Gingrich had almost nothing to do with it. To the extent Gingrich had an
impact on the 1994 election at all, it was as a tactician. But tactics are
only the math of history, not the meaning.
In terms of meaning, the 1994 election was about two things. The first was
a dismay — ranging from indifferent disappointment to indignant rage — with the president the country had just elected two years earlier. The second was a political movement out in the hinterlands reaching the apex of its power,
self-described as “Christian” but more accurately characterized by an ever-darkening suspicion that democracy is by nature morally degenerate and a
betrayal of God, who at the very least deserves an American theocracy, if not
something purer and more blood-stirring. In this sense, religious right pooh-bah
Gary Bauer is more important to American politics in the ’90s than Gingrich
ever was.
At best, Gingrich’s rise was the last absurd spasm of conservatism’s
exhaustion. Whether one likes it or not, when conservatives argue they have
won the war of political ideas over the last two decades, they’re right:
Their basic premise, that the less the government is involved in people’s lives
the better, has become accepted in principle by everyone from the majority of
the public to the moderate-liberal in the White House who balanced the budget
and “reformed” welfare. Gingrich had almost nothing to do with winning this
war. It was won in small part by Ronald Reagan, who sold the argument more by
force of personality than force of intellect and thereby was able to finesse
the things about conservatism that were harsh and unpalatable, and in larger
part by the assorted failures of liberalism, some perceived and some real.
Gingrich’s impact on America came not so much from his rise to the speakership but in his fall, when he quickly became the most loathed political figure of our time and in the process provided conservatism’s limits and meanest impulses with a name and face. The one thing the pundit culture has gotten right in the last few days is just how much President Clinton owes him.
The only people who have tacitly acknowledged how incidental Gingrich has
really been all along are the congressional Republicans. Like vultures
picking over some ripe dead heap in the Mojave, they squawked among themselves
about how perfectly delicious he was — what is it they kept calling him? A
“visionary”? But now, having had their fill, they’ve wasted no time taking
flight before his carcass bloats with the gas of death. After all of the
eulogies advanced on this past Sunday’s talkfests by all the prospective
speakers and majority leaders and whips and conference chairmen, after the
pontifications of Gingrich’s Monday night speech to GOPAC, before the current
Time and Newsweek covers have barely hit the garbage, you’ll be scratching
your head trying to remember who the hell he was, and recalling only that he
was something unpleasant enough to stick to the ceiling of your brain for a while. Gingrich isn’t just out-of-sight-out-of-mind, he’s out-of-sight-out-of-memory;
and because the true consequences of his political life amount more to a
confluence of ego and opportunity than to a historical moment that really
changed anything, soon he’ll be out-of-memory-out-of-history. With all due
respect to the Los Angeles Times, he was not the most important speaker in a
generation. In the way he constrained the rough passions of the Reagan
presidency 10 years ago, Tip O’Neill was more important, cartoon political
hack though the media portrayed him as and though he may have truly been.
Ensconced in Washington and New York, the political media is so famously
incapable of seeing the forest for the trees that its myopia has become a
part of its self-identity. The TV commentators in particular seem to take a certain pride in being completely clueless, in being completely
untouched by any experience outside politics — the movies people are seeing,
the books they’re reading, the music they’re listening to — or by anything
resembling American life beyond Washington. Ironically, it’s the same pundits
who sold us the nonsense that the 1994 election was a national ratification of
Gingrich’s Contract With America who also insisted all over the airwaves last
Tuesday night that the 1998 election was in no way a referendum on
impeachment. It’s breathtaking that an entire stratum of opinionmakers can
get it so backwards and be so sweepingly wrong.
In a strange and complicated way, the media’s collusion in the invention of
Newt Gingrich, Historical Figure, is not unlike its relationship with Clinton. It’s a relationship of seduction and self-loathing: Ever since his
election as president, the pundit culture has hated itself for the way it once
loved Clinton long, long ago, and therefore, still traumatized by 30 years
of charges of liberal bias, it elevated Gingrich as the Anti-Clinton to punish
itself for this seduction. It might have even fallen in love with Gingrich
too, if Gingrich hadn’t been so beyond all lovability. Because they don’t get
outside Washington, what the pundits never understood was how Gingrich failed
to become a truly national figure, in contrast to Clinton, who may or may not
be a good president but has learned, sometimes inelegantly, to be a national
figure if nothing else, whether as consoler-in-chief weeping at the caskets of
embassy workers that come rolling off the planes from Africa or defiler-in-chief debauching all our promising American nubiles with a cigar.
Gingrich’s speech Monday night was carried live by CNN, all 45
minutes of it. It was followed by 45 minutes of “analysis” on “Larry
King Live”; this was a speech not to Congress, mind you, but to a political
action committee, in which not a single remarkable thing was said. Rather,
waving his little laminated Contract With America that brought the crowd to
its feet as though it was the original Bill of Rights, the most important
speaker of the last four years quoted de Tocqueville as though de Tocqueville
stole everything from Gingrich rather than the other way around. To anyone
with the ears to hear it, it was both one last desperate stature-grab and the
first campaign speech of the presidential election of 2000. He’ll run just to
make us unforget him.
In the Real America, outside Washington and beyond the borders of whatever sovereignty of meaning the legal and political and media establishment likes to believe it rules, the Monica Lewinsky scandal lives a secret life. In the collective thinking of real people who live real lives, lives that involve daily decisions about sex and love and right and wrong, in the collective consideration of real people who must routinely and instinctively prioritize morality in terms of the momentous and mundane, in a collective American psyche that has an unspeakable understanding of transgression and forgiveness, the Monica Lewinsky scandal has a secret past, a secret present, a secret future.
In this secret life, secret assessments of cause and effect have already been made. Secret decisions about event and culpability have already been reached, secret conclusions concerning ramification and import have already been drawn. For some months now, beginning as what seemed a reasonable observation that slowly but inexorably evolved into an absurd mantra, commentators of all stripe have said over and over that this scandal is not about sex, it’s about lying. The legal establishment says this because, in the strictest terms, which are the only terms the legal establishment understands, it’s true. The political establishment says this because by ripping the scandal free of sex, the scandal may then be transformed from a personal matter into a matter of state and also, on an increasingly ideological political landscape, be bleached of human ambiguity, which is the enemy of ideologues everywhere. The media establishment says this because it’s torn between its roiling tabloid instincts, which exploit sex to sell the product, and its desperate and increasingly quaint pretensions of credibility and legitimacy.
The result has been an unwitting collusion among lawyers and politicians and reporters to convince the public of what they may have even convinced themselves: that sex distorts the meaning and significance of whatever happened between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton. The public knows differently. It has known differently for months. For months it has known that sex is not what distorts this scandal; rather it’s the establishment’s effort to take the sex out of the scandal that distorts it. The public already knows that this scandal is not about sex and it’s not about lying. It’s about Lying About Sex.
Though the public may not say so, and though it may offend moral philosophers, Lying About Sex is secretly considered by most people a different moral species of lying. It’s a lie by which marriages are sometimes preserved, by which friendships sometimes continue, by which children sometimes are spared a premature loss of innocence. It’s certainly not a “good” lie. But it is a lie that is sometimes, in some circumstances, marginally better than a harsh and irrevocable truth, which is to say it sometimes causes people less pain than the truth and has less terrible consequences. It’s a lie that many, maybe even most, people have told at least once in their lives. It’s even — and this is the biggest secret of all, that all the lawyers and politicians and reporters either fail to grasp or darkly suspect but recoil from expressing — a lie many consider justified in telling, and would consider others justified in telling, even under oath, even if the other was the president of the United States.
They would consider it justified because, one’s wife or husband aside, the truth about a person’s sex life is something they believe no one, particularly the government, has the right to ask. In the case of President Clinton, commentators contend that the public wants the president to “level with them.” They argue that until the public hears his explanation, it will “suspect the president of wrongdoing.” They insist that the public “wants to know the answer” to whether something happened between the president and his White House intern. Of course this is nonsense. Of course the public already knows the answer. The public already knows something happened. The public, in fact, has no interest in the least in hearing the president address the subject; to the contrary, the public adamantly wishes he would not. They have already forgiven Clinton not only for his dalliance but for lying about it, and they have forgiven him not because they are indifferent to it, not because they don’t care, not because “the economy is good,” not because they find the behavior admirable, but because what they cannot forgive is Kenneth Starr’s asking about it in the first place.
Since these days every viewpoint about this scandal is accompanied by an agenda of some sort, this is probably a good point to address what some may perceive as the agenda of this article. So first let’s acknowledge that the nature of the scandal would change dramatically should the president’s sexual behavior prove to be compulsive or, worse, predatory, as a number of thus-far-unfounded rumors and charges about him over the years have suggested. Second and more important, since the Pandora’s box of this scandal has already been opened, let’s acknowledge that if one were a member of the United States Senate sitting in judgment of the president during an impeachment trial, and it was demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that he had indeed conspired to obstruct justice, which is to say he suborned perjury in others, any conscientious juror who took seriously either the law or the Constitution would have to vote for his conviction. Such a senator would be so obligated because one salient principle would demand it — and this principle is absolutely the only thing the Monica Lewinsky scandal shares with the Watergate scandal of 25 years ago — and that is the principle that no man is above the law. In a free nation of laws, the betrayal of this particular principle is simply impossible. Its preservation is worth the betrayal of any number of lesser principles, including freedom of privacy.
But casting such a vote wouldn’t contradict the disgust that attended such a vote, the disgust that the matter had ever been allowed to come to this. Forty-five years ago, during the McCarthy era, this country decided there was something fundamentally unjust, even undemocratic, about the state compelling an individual to account for political associations that were not criminal, no matter how unpopular or unsavory. It also decided there was something fundamentally unjust, even undemocratic, about criminalizing the disinclination to answer questions about those associations that the state never had the moral right to pose. It’s stupefying that something the public understands intuitively seems to completely elude those now investigating and reporting this scandal: that if the state cannot and should not compel one to account for his political associations, then compelling one to account for his sexual associations is an outrage even more personal and profound, quite literally out of the last 50 pages of Orwell’s “1984.”
Thus, long ago the investigation of this scandal ceased to be about justice, or even truth. Instead it became about obsession — to a lesser extent the obsession of those involved in the scandal’s exploding cottage industry (including the writer of this piece), but mainly the obsession of a special prosecutor whose professional conduct must now appear to almost any objective person to verge on a kind of institutional dementia.
At this point it’s clear that whatever Clinton’s obsession with women may be, it has been entirely superseded by Starr’s obsession with Clinton. One nearly hopes that Starr’s obsession is indeed ideological, because that’s the only way it almost makes sense, the only way it’s almost rational. Because if in fact Starr’s defenders are right, that this isn’t about ideology, then it is at best an obsession with law that’s become completely disconnected from any true interest in justice. It’s the obsession of a man of so little human empathy and so removed from the needs and compulsions that drive and dictate daily life as most people live it — needs of the human heart and compulsions of the human body — that he can actually stand before television cameras and say about a sex act between two consenting adults that “there’s no room for white lies, there’s no room for shading the truth.” And if he can say this only because in the eyes of the law he’s correct, then it’s only as a cyborg of litigation that such a man is capable of existing at all.
Justice, on the other hand, is more complicated. Justice isn’t the mere execution of law but the commingling of law with reason, fairness, compassion and most of all a sense of moral proportion. When moral proportion is lost, morality itself is lost. The smallest wrong becomes tantamount to the greatest, and the very process of making moral evaluations and distinctions is rendered moot. Four years ago, the investigation of Clinton began chiefly as a story about an allegedly corrupt real estate deal. Today all the original reasons for that investigation have vanished, either overturned by judges or thrown out of courts altogether or, in some instances, dropped as silently and inconspicuously as possible by the special prosecutor himself when he found no facts to bear out his suspicions. The Whitewater story is gone, the Travelgate story is gone, the Vince Foster story is gone, the Paula Jones story is gone, the Webster Hubbell story is gone. Four years and $30 million later, the only story left, if some of the most recent reports are true, is whether a young woman touched a middle-aged man in a naughty place on his body and had phone sex with him.
As local prosecutors around the country have pointed out, a sense of moral proportion would have led almost anyone else except Starr to question, upon first being presented the case of Monica Lewinsky, whether this was something that warranted legal pursuit. Almost anyone else would have questioned whether the nation or the workings of its government were really served by such a pursuit. “These are very serious charges,” one guest after another intones on one talk show after another on one Sunday morning after another. But the public, whose collective sense of values is shrewder and harder-won and more grown-up than the elite that aspires to speak for it, doesn’t think this is serious. The public thinks this is silly.
The secret life of the Monica Lewinsky scandal is a secret because the legal, political and media cultures consumed by the scandal have completely relinquished to the public all responsibility of moral proportion. Given the choice, the public almost surely wishes Clinton had left Lewinsky alone, or vice versa, or whatever. Given the situation, the public almost surely finds the president’s conduct adolescent at best, and probably tawdry. But given the vast scheme of the moral universe, which has at one time or another in the past included concerted efforts by presidents to subvert the Constitution by using the government’s various agencies to harass political opponents or by selling weapons to terrorist nations for the purpose of illegally supporting counterrevolutions in Central America, not to even mention prosecutors’ entrapping suspects, reneging on immunity deals, secretly taping the telephone conversations of private citizens and forcing parents to testify against their children, the public suspects that two people having some kind of illicit moment and lying about it perhaps does not occupy the darkest corner of human behavior.
