October 21, 1998
Literati Genuflect Before
St. Bill the Puritan-Slayer
By ROGER KIMBALL
In what was perhaps his most memorable phrase, the art critic Harold
Rosenberg once spoke of the "herd of independent minds." There's no
secret about where that herd is grazing these days: it's in and around
Kenneth Starr's report about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
Dozens of newspapers may have called for Mr. Clinton's resignation or
impeachment; polls may indicate a public as disgusted with the president as
it is weary of the independent counsel. But the herd of independent
minds--the pampered darlings of elite liberal culture--is too full of
self-righteous fury to notice. For them, Mr. Starr's report is Joseph
McCarthy; it's Watergate; it's the Vietnam War; it's Ronald Reagan; in
short, it's a welcome excuse to indulge in a blinding ecstasy of
countercultural contempt.
It's hard to say which is more alarming, the conformism or the contempt.
Both have been on prominent display. The New Yorker magazine, for
example, gave over several pages for two weeks running to various literary
members of the herd. ("Experts on human folly" the editors called them, but
that only shows that belonging to the herd is bad for one's sense of irony.)
On Oct. 5 and 12, Toni Morrison, Janet Malcolm, James Salter, Lorrie
Moore, Louis Begley, Jane Smiley, Ethan Canin, E. L. Doctorow, Cynthia
Ozick, Bobbie Ann Mason, and William Styron eagerly agreed with one
another that Ken Starr was "a crazed zealot of the right wing" (Ms. Moore)
whose "zealous and chillingly unambiguous morality" (Mr. Canin) had
produced an "archetypal zealot" and a report of "invincible repulsiveness"
(Mr. Styron), all of which gave E. L Doctorow aural hallucinations: "In my
head I keep hearing the voice of the late Joseph Welch, the attorney who
said to Joe McCarthy. . . ."
And then there is Toni Morrison.
Whatever one thinks of the Nobel
laureate's novels, one has to admit that she
is a master of liberal contempt. In her now
famous
"Bill-Clinton-is-our-first-black-president"
contribution to the New Yorker's attack
on Mr. Starr, she spoke bitterly of "feral
Republicans, smelling blood and a shot at
the totalitarian power they believe is
rightfully theirs." ("This is Slaughtergate,"
she wrote. "A sustained, bloody, arrogant
coup d'etat.")
Of course, The New Yorker was not the only pasture open to the herd. On
Oct. 11, The New York Times Magazine ran as its cover story "Going
Down Screaming," a scorched-earth attack by the British journalist Andrew
Sullivan. Mr. Sullivan lambasted Republicans for "prurience" and
"puritanism" and the Starr report as "a case study in what has gone wrong
with American conservatism." On Oct. 15, the Times ran a long op-ed by
Arthur Miller in which the famous playwright once again wheeled out the
argument from his play "The Crucible": "witchcraft hysteria in Salem 300
years ago," "gut-shuddering hatred," "fury of the Salem ministers,"
"Congress . . . pawing through Kenneth Starr's fiercely exact report."
There was more. On Oct. 17, readers of the Times were treated to a profile
of Ann Douglas, a professor of literature at Columbia University. Ms.
Douglas has discovered that books made by Roman Catholic priests to
record the religious visions of peasants in the 13th century were part of the
long, disreputable process by which "the private becomes public." As the
Times reporter put it, "Kenneth W. Starr's investigation into President
Clinton's sex life is just the latest example. . . . Mr. Starr has picked up
where Senator Joseph R. McCarthy left off."
Nowhere has the herd of independent minds been chewing more noisily
than in Paris, where Jack Lang, France's former minister of culture,
co-wrote a manifesto condemning Mr. Starr as a "fanatical prosecutor with
unlimited power" engaged in a "profound intrusion of privacy" and an
"inquisitorial harassment" of President Clinton. Some 100 famous members
of the herd signed, including Oliver Stone, Art Garfunkel, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Vanessa Redgrave, Jessye Norman, Sofia Loren, Jeremy Irons,
and--my two favorites--the deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida
and the fond father Woody Allen.
This latest stampede by the herd raises a number of questions. Foremost,
perhaps, is why anyone cares what Art Garfunkel or Sofia Loren has to say
about political matters? A corollary question is why reputable publications
ask for their opinion in the first place? Granted that many of these people
are, in the New Yorker's apt phrase, "experts on human folly," why should
readers care that Toni Morrison cannot distinguish between a bloody coup
d'etat and the normal activity of a legally appointed independent counsel?
There are many other questions, too. Such as: Where are the feminists?
According to Arthur Miller, President Clinton "may be a bit kinky, but at
least he's not the usual suit for whom the woman is a vase, decorative and
unused." According to Jane Smiley, "maybe what Clinton did in the Oval
Office was love, or infatuation, or just sex," but at least it was "a desire to
make a connection with another person"-- "a habitual desire," she explains,
"for which Clinton is well known." Indeed.
And where are the PC-police? What allows Toni Morrison to dispense
vicious racial stereotypes with impunity? "Clinton," she wrote, "displays
almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor,
working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy
from Arkansas." Anyone else offering that observation would have been
branded a racist, and rightly.
Among the most curious aspects of this entire episode is the free ride that
Bill Clinton has gotten--not from the media, but from the anointed family of
intellectual and cultural stars. Just as so many of them feel themselves above
the law, so they expect that a president who embodies their self-infatuated
liberalism should be, too. The unspoken assumption is that they, the happy
few, are bravely battling a repressive culture still locked in "Puritan"
conformity. The truth is, of course, that the general culture has deeply
absorbed the freewheeling, liberationist message of the 1960s, which indeed
is one reason that Mr. Clinton was elected president in the first place. The
pose of an enlightened minority struggling against the straitlaced masses is
just that--a pose.
At the end of his contribution to The New Yorker, William Styron deplored
America's "absence of decency." Who can blame him? We have just been
treated to the spectacle of the president of the United States engaging in
furtive sexual gropings with a federal employee half his age and then lying
about it under oath. What would the Clinton Justice Department have to say
about this if someone else were involved? I agree, by the way, that the Starr
report and the subsequent video were repulsive and demeaning to the office
of the president. But I have difficulty understanding how Ken Starr is to
blame for Bill Clinton's transgressions.
When he ran for Congress in 1974, Bill Clinton declared that "if a president
of the United States ever lied to the American people he should resign." But
of course the president then was Richard Nixon, and the herd of
independent minds was certainly not foraging in his paddock.
Mr. Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion.
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