So, the Clinton presidency is being defined by its phallic symbolism. A state employee from Arkansas is apparently qualified enough to write a doctoral thesis on the genital geography of William Jefferson Clinton. And now storms in a former White House intern, throwing Paula Jones out of the prime time pornography of American politics. What's happening? An unzipped president walking alone towards that famous "bridge to the twentieth century"? It's not that Monica Lewinsky is out there to play out her role as a battered belle of presidential priapism. It is quite accidental that she finds herself trapped in that familiar American web of sex, lies and videotapes. The Whitewater counsel says that he will investigate whether the president and one of his close friends had asked Lewinsky to lie about her affair with the first citizen.The president says he didn't have any improper relationship with the intern and never asked her to lie But the inquisition has already started, an all-American auto-da-fe in
the media, where images and verbiage of morality are creating a new value system that is closer to the Vatican than the White House.
This is the American edition of politics of morality which, in essence, is a pursuit of trivia. America is a nation where a star-studded general can lose the top job in the armed forces for an affair he had with a civilian years ago, where the first female pilot of the air force is the post-modern Hester Prynne with the scarlet letter engraved on her professional reputation, where a Kennedy cannot even sleep with a baby-sitter. In the supermarket of morality, inundated with curios like presidential underpants and the pubic hair discovered by Clarence Thomas in the black coffee he was sharing with Anita Hill, the limits of freedom are determined by the saleability of sins. For, the conservative senator and the Bible Belt evangelist are there, as preservers of family values and arbiters of libido. Add the reign of attorneys and the power of the media to the tyranny of the
morality police, and you get a frenzied spectacle in which the most powerful politician in the world stands alone among the cameras with his pants down.
Today America is in thrall of such a spectacle which may even end with the hero's martyrdom in a bedroom. The question is not whether President Clinton has lied. The question, once it is taken out of Washington's politics of voyeurism, is about the culture that demands a president to lie (or confess) about a very personal matter. No American president can afford to follow the example of Francois Mitterrand whose famous reply to the question about his illegitimate daughter was, so what? So, what about Clintonism? Where will its legacy be engraved? It seems only Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky can give an answer. This is not what Clinton the history-seeker has anticipated. It's the character, stupid.
And William Jefferson Clinton is likely to lie when he sees the next Paula beckoning him from the other end of the millennial bridge.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
