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R E C E N T L Y

The world is ending -- let's get to know our neighbors!
By James Poniewozik
As Y2K approaches, the Utne Reader advocates the book group to end all book groups.
(01/05/99)

Out's liquid lunch, Lolita vs. Humbert and other marvels of media madness
By Susan Lehman
(12/23/98)

Mementos from the pre-millennium
By Steve Erickson
Dredging the 1998 archives of art, pop culture and politics reveals a private cultural canon
(12/23/98)

And a little scumbag shall lead them
By James Poniewozik
Did a sex-mad tabloid media hijack the public discourse in 1998? We should be so lucky
(12/22/98)

Cool on global warming
By Susan Lehman
Is it a conflict of interest for a Newsweek editor to rally anti-environmentalists?
(12/17/98)

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BROWSE THE
UNSPUN
ARCHIVE

LET THE CULTURE WAR RAGE | PAGE 1, 2
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The right simply can't get out of its mind the very image of Clinton leaning against a wall in the West Wing of the White House as there hovers before him, at a level somewhere down near the tip of one of those ties she gave him with such devotion, the bobbing raven tresses of the National Nubile, thankfully blocking from view the abominable act being performed. It's this image more than anything else that's driven the right's obsession with destroying a presidency it never believed was legitimate to begin with, and all the expressed consternation over perjury and "obstruction of justice" -- a charge absolutely no honest person can take seriously -- is as much legalistic obfuscation as the president at his most notoriously slick.

It's interesting that as the rhetoric of moral outrage against the president has escalated, the public has embraced him more. To have listened to some of the language used against Clinton not only by Republicans but by terrified Democrats, whose censure resolution in the House was in many ways more unforgiving than the impeachment articles drafted by the Republicans, one wonders what verbal nuggets of indignation could possibly be left for a Moammar Gadhafi who shoots down airliners over Scotland. Thus, a Senate trial would either force us to confront what William Bennett has suggested -- as recently as this past Sunday on CNN -- is our moral bankruptcy, or would implicitly ratify a national sense of morality that conforms to real life even if not to Bennett's more uncompromising tastes.

In a Senate trial we'll come face to face with the greatest secret of 1998, which is our secret self. As the sanctimony has been ratcheted higher and higher with ever greater fury, one hypocrite after another decrying the president as reprehensible, deplorable, disgusting and sick, a country full of good people with bad secrets has thought to itself: They're talking about me. And to a president who has politically survived one crisis after another by his sheer empathy with people, the people have returned the favor, empathizing in return: Clinton may be a rogue but he's their rogue. In retrospect it's not particularly mysterious that three months ago people watched the videotape of a president squirming his way through questions no one in a free country should have to answer and related to him in a way that they will never relate to Ken Starr, who makes their skin crawl.

In the last analysis then, there should be a Senate trial because if this scandal is really cultural, as has become the conventional wisdom, and if all things cultural in the 1990s are really about the 1960s, as George Will has been insisting ever since hippies beat him up on the way to school 30 years ago, then those of us who have been too long on the defensive should finally stop sniveling and man the barricades. It's time for the rest of us to finally define the national cultural conflict not as that between morality on the one hand and sex and drugs on the other, as the paragons would have it. It's time for those of us who are indeed children of the '60s -- for whom a war in Southeast Asia was not an extension of American ideals but a breach of them, for whom the basic institutional amends of a white society to the descendants of that society's black slaves was not liberal guilt but a reasonable attempt at justice and self-redemption, for whom "Otis Blue" and "Blonde on Blonde" were soundtracks not of hedonism and decadence but passion and liberation, and yet whose sex lives have been no more or less interesting than anyone else's and who can count their drug experiences on the fingers of one hand -- to start defining the conflict on our own terms, as between the values of justice and democracy and those of authoritarianism and theocracy.

To this end it would be well to call as witnesses every single last one of those who played a part in the psychodrama, from the president to Judge Starr to Linda Tripp to Lucianne Goldberg to Betty Currie to our sexual Joan of Arc, Monica Lewinsky herself. It would be well to see the thong in all its glory, preferably on Monica rather than dangled abstractly in midair, so we might best understand its narcotic effect on the president; to enter into the record the cigar as Exhibit B; to relive each moment of Oval Office rapture, and if it isn't realistic to expect an exact reenactment, it doesn't seem too much to ask of Monica a small ecstatic demonstration -- a sigh, maybe, a moan. It's likely to be the only true thing said in the United States Congress since Illinois Rep. Abraham Lincoln told the House, "There are few things wholly evil or wholly good," in 1848. Such a moan would be the Jeffersonian moan of happiness' pursuit, and once the trial is over and William Orb has slapped a technobeat on it, it should provide a national anthem for the new century to come, and in those pathetic midnight moments while clandestinely checking out my wife's Victoria's Secret catalog I can listen to it and feel, for the first time in years, like a real American.

The arguments by liberal Democrats that the Senate should brush all this aside for "more important business" is ludicrous. There is no business more important, or even remotely as important. A Senate trial should be not truncated but rather as long as possible; nothing could be more appropriate for America in 1999 than that it last all year, right up to the stroke of midnight Dec. 31 when the last senator casts the final vote. The impeachment of President Clinton should go to trial because this is the way, on Millennial Eve, we'll finally find out who we are, our national identity too long paralyzed somewhere between Tom Paine and Cotton Mather, as opposed to who those in power keep telling us we are. Their vision of us is what is really on trial here, and whether Clinton survives as president is of far less consequence than what we learn; it's time for us once and for all to decide whether we're really willing to go on relinquishing to others our vision of America or whether we're ready to stop acting like defendants and ready to start acting like plaintiffs, prosecutors, hanging judges.