Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Big D who wrote (7774)	10/5/1998 1:34:00 PM
From: Les H	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13994

BILL CLINTON MADE AMERICANS COMPLICITOUS IN HIS ACTIONS GEORGIE ANN GEYER uexpress.com WASHINGTON -- Not only are the problems of Bill Clinton's decadent presidency still out there, but so too are the questions: Why does he do these things? Where will his wanton habits lead this country? And, above all, why do so many Americans remain so tentative about making judgments about his admitted actions? Of the billions of words that have been written (none of them, I contest, very gratifying), I note that one key word has not been used. The word is "complicity." Where I come from, on the South Side of Chicago, complicity meant more than simply involving others -- or being involved oneself -- in an act, innocent, criminal or in-between. It denoted the old Mafia idea of having everybody "shoot at the corpse" so 1) nobody could talk about the real perpetrator of a crime and 2) guilt was dispensable. The case of this American president is reminiscent of dictators or autocratic leaders who are essentially demagogues, "charismatic" authorities and (perhaps above all) con men. They tie their malleable followers to them by making the folowers dependent upon them and by giving them the impression that they are inexorably involved in the decisions, so much so that, even when the leaders fail, the followers cannot easily divest themselves of responsibility. Above all, their tie to the people is emotional, not rational and not intellectual, and that truth lies at the heart of the complicitous bond. With emotions it is far more difficult to cut ties. You cannot just say, "I disagree and therefore I leave." You are tied forever, or you break away at the cost of substantial moral and physical trauma. You, after all, are the one who chose (or so you think!) to believe for so long. Bill Clinton's ability to make the people around him complicitous in his actions and fate is, of course, infinitely inferior to the real historical complicity-mongers such as Fidel Castro or Joseph Stalin. Castro tied people to him so tightly that many of those who did break with him spent years trying painfully to reconstruct themselves, while Stalin's emotional and ideological tyranny was of such power that his closest followers got up in Russian courts in the 1930s and, though innocent, condemned themselves to death. They could not admit, as some communists said even this past decade, that their lives had been lived in the service of a false idol. Admittedly, Bill Clinton is a poor man's charismatic leader, compared to those masters of the craft. Yet he has many of the same characteristics: the same dependence upon rhetoric over reality and the same quintessential con man's ability to make people want to believe, to cite two. How else can one explain the degree to which so many Americans still need to believe in him so much that they refuse to condemn him? How can anyone really understand the troubling reality that virtually none of his White House "team" have resigned in protest over his actions. They have all become his amoral accomplices. How, too, can one explain Hillary? If she didn't know about Monica, she is too dumb and unperceptive to be first lady. Of course she did. But she made a Faustian pact with the devil many years ago that Bill Clinton would give her the political charisma to fuel her own abundant ambitions. She made herself complicitous, and now there is no exit. What is troubling is that, as the great German sociologist Max Weber wrote in the last century, the charismatic con men come to power (Weimar Germany, czarist Russia, pre-Castro Cuba) when a people is weak and disheartened. What does that say about so many Americans' amoral need to believe in this obviously flawed man today? In their willingness to cede their judgment to him? What is troubling, too, is that so many Americans have accepted the Clintons' cynically distorted interpretation of life. They really believe there is no difference between one man's love affair and a leader's sexual predatoriness. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to defeat these leaders if people have enough will to overcome their feelings of guilt and of self-imposed complicity. All they need to do is withdraw. That is the death knell for the charismatic leader, who in the end is also totally dependent upon them. That hasn't happened yet, but as more of his disgraceful conduct is revealed, it very well may. Until then, those Americans who need so badly to believe in Bill Clinton are shooting at the corpse. COPYRIGHT 1998 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE