T A B L E_.T A L K

What stories don't get reported by the mainstream media -- and why. Pontificate on the shortcomings of news coverage in the Media area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Liberté, Egalité, Versace!
By James Poniewozik
The new fashion media focuses on the frocks populi
(12/08/98)

Ahoy, mates!
By Susan Lehman
Warring contributors to the Nation magazine bravely set sail together on a Caribbean cruise
(12/04/98)

Game over
By James Poniewozik
Keith Olbermann is bemused as hell and he's not going to take it anymore
(12/01/98)

Democracy on life support
By Steve Erickson
The cynical Starr hearings were to their Watergate precursors as Jack Kevorkian is to Mother Teresa
(11/25/98)

What kind of woman reads Playboy?
By James Poniewozik
After 45 years, your grandfather's skin magazine is trying to be all things to all groins
(11/24/98)

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SECRET AMERICA | PAGE 1, 2
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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.