The Outrage That Wasn't cnn.com.
Then, we have Michael Kinsley, also reflective on the tin ears of the moral reformationinsts versus The Rest of Us. Funny, my first introduction to the wit and debating style of the Clinton haters was on Slate, before BJgate was a gleam in Starr's eye. At that point, the whole thing seemed insubstantial enough that I didn't feel like hanging around for the abuse. Don't much feel like it here anymore, either, as things wind down one way or the other. This little bit comes out of the middle of Kinsley's piece.
"What ever happened to the scarlet letter?" has become a major despairing theme of conservative political commentary. (Or, "Values, shmalues," as America's leading value peddler, William Bennett, summarized the apparent new culture consensus to the New York Times recently.) Social conservatives used to be smug populists who tarred their critics as out-of-touch elitists. Now they shoot furious thunderbolts at the formerly all-wise American people. Although the dismay of the sanctimony set is enjoyable to watch, their despair may be somewhat misplaced.
Americans don't necessarily think adultery and perjury are perfectly O.K. What they may think--what they certainly know, from personal experience--is that life is complicated and people often make a mess of it. It's complicated and messy in ways the language of politics can't describe or even acknowledge. They may think Hillary doesn't love him, or they may think all men have their brains in their crotch, or they may think Monica made it too easy, or they may have no theory at all. But while Washington boils the narrative down to issues--adultery, lies under oath--Americans who come to the story out of human interest rather than professional obligation are more likely to fill it out with details derived from their own life and the lives around them.
Most people don't want to live in a society that actually tries to make life as normal as we pretend. Or a society that stops us from pretending to more normality than we achieve. Not that everybody is an adulterer or a perjurer. Perhaps there are people who have nothing to be ashamed of. Even they have messes and complications. Is there anybody with no secrets he or she would be tempted to commit perjury for? That's not a blanket excuse for perjury. But when the perjury was a your-secrets-or-your-life stickup staged by a prosecutor who couldn't nail his target on anything else, anyone with an ounce of imagination is tempted to excuse it. People who flesh out the Bill-and-Monica story rather than stripping it down do not imagine that Bill Clinton will go unpunished unless Congress takes him to the woodshed. He'll suffer plenty.
This is not a morally bankrupt notion. In fact, there are obvious biblical resonances: original sin, the flesh is weak and so on. The anti-Clinton vengeance seekers claim to hate the sin while loving the sinner, but their hatred of the sinner is so obvious and so extreme that it even casts doubt on how much they actually hate the sin. Most people don't even pretend to love this particular sinner. But they see how a guy can go from succumbing to momentary temptation to lying about it to a grand jury, and they see it as a seamless human story, not as a series of discrete actions. That's why the Starr report's prurient narrative backfired so badly: by putting flesh on the bones, it made the story plausible. And that is the fatal first step toward empathy. Comic details like gifts of poetry and the semen-stained dress make it harder, not easier, for reasonable people to remain solemn enough for an impeachment.
Personally, I'd have a very hard time remaining solemn for an impeachment where cigars kept coming up. I'm sure the moral reformationists here and elsewhere will keep harranging us all till the cows come home, but who cares? The Republicans can think they're making hay out of this if they want, but it sure looks like they're making hay of themselves. Or maybe a little more preaching, a little more bleating is all we need to turn the masses around. Keep trying, guys. |
