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T A B L E+T A L K Have we learned anything at all? Discuss the lessons of Impeachment '99 in the Politics area of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y A new racial era for San Francisco schools Fear of fluoride Bull's-eye Mommie dearest I'm sorry, Tinky Winky - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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Sex and the single intern
BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN | 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. But because most Republicans regard the culture as a sinkhole of depravity (except for such hallowed events as halftime at the Super Bowl), they can't take it seriously, let alone make sense of it. As a result, they persisted in the face of growing evidence that most folks were rooting for Clinton to beat the rap. As befits a nation of promiscuous Puritans, Americans will condemn the sinner but punch the air in private whenever a sly sensualist prevails. We can thank the Republicans for conferring victim status on the world's most powerful person, thereby transforming him into the pariah we love to hate. No one is more forgiving of this president's transgressions than the boomer masses. Something about him makes every former hippie with a hedge fund feel the old sap rising. Never mind that Clinton is to the counterculture what Barry Manilow was to acid rock; he embodies that Grateful Dead lyric: "I will survive." Yet anyone who takes the '60s seriously ought to find Clinton's behavior troubling, though not for the reasons the Republicans have trumpeted. I'm not talking about lying, or urging one's lover to lie low. If these were high crimes, the jails would be full of errant presidents. I'm talking here about the heart of Clinton's darkness: the fact that his lover was, to use the moralist's phrase, "a woman half his age" -- and an intern to boot. Why is it so hard for our side to admit that these are problematic acts? The answer lies not just in the vagaries of "special interest" politics, as the right likes to think, but in the contradictions produced by the '60s colliding against the present. N E X T+P A G E+| Intimacy is supposed to be a model of equity |
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