While explaining why novels lie -- they can do nothing else -- Mario Vargas Llosa writes: "Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve."Welcome to the Great American Fiction. The unzipped tragic hero, William Jefferson Clinton, cries out in presidential overstatement (oral statement?) that I didn't do it, no, I didn't do it. It is the truth, he declares under oath. But X-ray images of truth are being flung at him by the furies. And semen-stained dresses will not be washed in public; they will be preserved in the secret chamber of presidential libido. What is truth? asks the persecutor, and he is waiting for an answer.
Well, assume that Clinton has lied. Then he liedabout something which most men would not admit in public. Unfortunately, he happens to be the First Citizen in the Republic of Truth, where the lie of the individual is a threat to the national capital of fairness and morality. Remember Joe Klein, that brilliant columnist of Newsweek, currently with New Yorker. He was Mr Anonymous, author of Primary Colours. It was pure moral fanaticism when he was terrorised to disown anonymity. "Anonymous" is a lie. Joe Klein is the truth.
The irony is accidental: the thinly disguised subject of that novel has no freedom to be anonymous for a few minutes of sexual urge. Because truth demands that you lie. To establish truth, you change the angle of the camera, unleash the attorneys, "wire" the conspiring friend, seek more puns for the headlines, and forcibly unzip the presidential fly. Bill Clinton is a sexually harassed president. Perhaps not sexually alone: morally, too. The sexual predator, the moral predator, is the system. It's the character, stupid! True, but it isthe character of the United States.
For, the unlimited freedom to seek the truth is inversely proportional to the freedom of the individual, especially so if he happens to be the President of America. It is the system -- such a celebration of freedom -- that makes the president a liar. If you really believe that it is the sexual organ of Bill Clinton that impedes the governance of a superpower and wrecks the Middle East peace process, then there is something seriously trivial about this definition of freedom. A public Bobbitisation of the presidency only underscores this trivial pursuit of the moral state.
And it is always the (moral, federal or industrial) state that is at the centre of the clash between truth and lies. At the individual level, Clinton is only one of the examples of this clash. At varying degrees, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma bomber) and Kelly Flinn (the adulteress in uniform) have contributed to the great American fiction of truth. The Unabomber maileddeadly messages to the industrial lie. His Luddite truth clashed with the silicon lie of the modern age. McVeigh bombed the lie of the federal state. Flinn was thrown out of a B-52 cockpit because her carnal passions challenged the truth of the moral state. Truth is in the mind of the prosecutor, not in the conscience of the liar.
The prosecutor is not always known as Kenneth Starr. The Bible-thumping evangelist and the family-swearing Conservative are self-chosen social cleansers. And they are only tapping the rich vein of conservatism that runs through America. The rules of social sanitation are Christian and political. This social indoctrination can have bizarre manifestations. As Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine, writes: "...sooner or later the country must come to resemble a well-disciplined boarding school (very clean, very Christian) governed by a headmaster (very hearty, very fit) who can be counted on to expel (to Dakar or Guatemala City) any careless pupil seen in the company of a filthyhabit."
What about expelling Clinton to Baghdad, or maybe Havana? Or invite the pope to the White House. The politics of truth can very well consider these options. After all, the lie of the state is an overwhelming motif in the American obsession with truth. Communism was a lie. Yes, we know that. The Soviet Union was an evil empire. We know that too, and thank you, Mr Reagan. Evil has to be a lie. Baghdad? Lying dictatorship; hidden chemical arms. And thank you, Mr Richard Butler. Havana? It's lie or death, this false Fidelismo. Even the pope knows that. Taken together, these chapters from the American book of truth constitute a value system which, in political terms, is not at all a negation of freedom. It is the history of the truth-seeking superpower. In this history, the lie is always the other state.
And this history cannot altogether repudiate the lie of the United States. Did America lie in Vietnam? Did the Bush administration lie in the Iran-Contra affair? So, the lie of the state cannot foreverremain an extra-territorial burden. It has to be balanced by the conscience of the truth-seeker. The public inquisition of President Clinton only exposes the balance of power in a society governed by the politics of truth, a divided truth. This is perhaps the most vulgar expression of idealism. In his defence, the president can still afford to borrow the words of Woodrow Wilson: "Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America, my fellow citizens -- I do not say it in disparagement of any other great people -- America is the only idealistic nation in the world".
So, please impeach me, he may add. For he has disturbed the idyll of the moral state. But hang on. Isn't his crime -- penetration or no penetration, it doesn't matter -- a manifestation of industrialised idealism? Perhaps, almost like the idealism of Ted Kaczynski -- the difference is only in the narration. And, as a Clinton aide suggests, "drag a hundred dollars through a trailor park, and there's notelling what you will find." You will certainly find Paula Jones. And more. You will find unzipped morality emerging from the smog of truth, threatening your own inherited truth.
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent", wrote George Orwell. So let us toast the priapic innocence of William Jefferson Clinton. It is not he, or Monica Lewinsky, who stands as the embodiment of lie. The saintly state is guilty of a nervous obsession with truth. It takes a genital rebellion by the First Citizen to magnify the saintly guilt.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
