Neo: What follows is Andrew Sullivan's unique explanation of recent vintage, "explaining" Slick Willie's behavior as a psychological disfunction.
That being the current all purpose rationale for destigmatizing all forms of immoral conduct, it seems inevitable that this will become the accepted conviction among all credulous liberals in the years to come. Especially, since this "blameless" pyschorationale serves to discharge any moral culpability that they may have each had individually for following someone whose conduct was both criminal and purposeful.
American Psycho
What Lies Beneath Pardonscam.
There is still something missing in the narrative of Bill Clinton. The story line shifts so quickly that this is easy to forget. But Pardonscam helps us get a grip on it. After all is said and done, I can find no adequate, rational explanation for why the president did what he did. It makes no sense. It adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. And what's missing is the key to who he is.
Think about it. What was the rational motive for the pardons? Money? But Clinton has plenty of opportunities to make money in the next few years--gobs of it. The scandal, in fact, reduces his long-term financial gains, because it tarnishes his reputation in the eyes of nervous corporations who pay the speech fees. Unless we find out he has some Swiss bank account with a few hundred million in it, the pardons weren't worth the blowback--as any intelligent politician would have known. Sex? Always a possibility, but unproved. Prestige? Au contraire. Repentance? Always a chance. I actually buy the notion that some small part of Clinton's psyche wanted to bail out a few minor drug dealers to atone for his draconian war on drugs. But repentance for the injustice done to Marc Rich or Carlos Vignali? Please.
The rational answer is that there is no rational answer. In Bill Clinton we had for eight years a truly irrational person in the White House, someone who, I think, lived on the edge of serious mental illness. He was and is a psychologically sick man. This is not to absolve him of responsibility for ceaseless lying, perjury, administrative chaos, human bullying, cruelty, lawlessness, self-destruction, and on and on. But it is to say that many of Clinton's actions as president can be fully understood only if one understands him to be a deeply disturbed person--not fully in control of himself or his actions.
The pardons are a classic example. Issuing pardons is a reasonably simple executive function. But Clinton made them--as he makes anything he touches--more complex. Clinton abhors simplicity almost as much as he abhors silence. Both terrify him because they require him to think and act rationally. This, he fears, he cannot do. So he starts the noise machine and the activity machine until rationality is drummed out of the room by sheer work and words. So the simple question of reviewing Justice Department recommendations turns into a months-long, rolling teach-in involving hundreds of people, envelopes, letters, personal requests, familial favors, and a homing signal to every sleazebag in the country that justice is for sale. This being Clinton, he also couldn't make up his mind. So his last few days in the White House appear to have been positively surreal--a president who barely slept, a process so chaotic only one man could keep a handle on it, combined with manic activity on innumerable fronts: the Middle East, a negotiation with the independent counsel, countless press interviews, a radio address on the morning of his departure, and on and on. The chaos was almost a mirror image of his first days in office, when he tried to do everything and hire everyone and ended up with chaos.
What can we call this kind of behavior? Clinton is not stupid. He is not functionally incompetent. He has had eight years to get his act together. The behavior illustrated by his pardons is, I think, simply pathological. Psychologists can quibble over what exactly was awry with our ex-president's mind and soul. But no one can explain the sheer irrationality, the reckless, oblivious, careening narcissism of the last eight years without concluding that, at some level, Clinton was not psychologically healthy enough to have been president of the United States.
I'm serious. I don't regard psychological illness as a taint or a foible. It's real, and it shouldn't be stigmatized. We should be just as aware of our president's mental health as of his physical health, inasmuch as they both directly affect his ability to do his job. Among recent presidents, both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy walked up to the edge of true pathology. But neither was as masterful as Clinton in disguising and manipulating it. What kind of pathology did Clinton have? Edith Efron pointed out eight years ago that the American Psychiatric Association cites the following as signs of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: perfectionism, workaholism, rage, chronic indecisiveness, and lack of intellectual focus. Anyone come to mind? The APA list of symptoms for an anti-social personality disorder (popularly known as a sociopath) includes:
(1) failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest; (2) deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure; (3) impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; (4) irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults; (5) reckless disregard for safety of self or others; (6) consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations; (7) lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
I'm not a psychiatrist, but if I had a friend who was constantly getting in trouble with the law, who was taking reckless financial and sexual risks, who was an insomniac, who could never show up for anything less than an hour late, who had bouts of overeating, who was unable to confess to a genuine mistake, and who thought he could lie his way out of anything, I would suggest he see a shrink.
Instead, he's had us. We asked for it. We elected him. And truly gifted sociopaths have ways of inveigling those around them to participate actively in the sickness, to maintain denial, to keep up appearances. In the tragic figures of Hillary Rodham Clinton and the American electorate, we have two such enablers. Clinton seduced many of us with prosperity and the rest because the emptiness of his own soul was so ravenous for love that it seemed churlish to deny him his need. But then we were complicit--forced either to defend him until we looked ridiculous or to vent our rage at a man we grew to hate because he was too dangerous to love and nothing in between was emotionally possible. In this respect, the countless mea culpas by Clintonistas in the last few weeks have been nothing if not poignant. Out of his range, beyond his seductive powers, they suddenly see reality. And those of us who have long loathed him, who were truly angered and frustrated by him, can now perhaps also see that his vices were enmeshed in his sickness and that pity as well as anger is an appropriate response.
But we should keep Chaucer's caveat in mind. As he put it in "The Pardoner's Tale":
The more exalted such a man may be
So much the more contemptible is he.
A gambling prince would be incompetent
To frame a policy of government,
And he will sink in general opinion
As one unfit to exercise dominion.
Let the sinking continue. |
