An odd confluence of events led to this post. I heard on the radio about the latest Congressional travesty (i.e., the House suing President Obama) while sorting through boxes and boxes of the things one accumulates over six and a half decades of life. While still fuming and trying to handle feelings of disbelief that this is what our paid and duly elected representatives do with their time, I came across an old journal from 1998. Most of it was personal ramblings, meaningless to anyone but myself, but then I came across this entry, which struck a chord that resounded through the intervening sixteen years. I cleaned it up a bit and clarified some things, but otherwise left it in its ranting rawness. Enjoy my little folly!

Journal entry

6 p.m. CDT

12 August 1998

Evanston, Illinois

I feel like a teenager. I draw my feet up under me, cover my face with my hands, and silently scream: Oh gosh, I’m sooooooo embarrassed!!! Maybe “teenager” is too generous. Maybe my reaction is actually more like that of a pre-adolescent child.

What am I reacting to? Why, President Clinton’s testimony before Ken Starr’s grand jury, which took place today—what else could it be? Why, you ask, am I so embarrassed by this, which has no direct bearing on me personally? Is it because the president has admitted to having some kind of stupid affair with a silly, star-struck (not Starr-struck) bimbo? Or is it because he lied about it under oath (forget the legalese hair-splitting and call a spade a spade), thus committing perjury?

No, I’m not embarrassed about that. If I were embarrassed about public figures having affairs with bimbos and lying about it I’d spend so much time being embarrassed that I’d never have time for anything else. No, I’m embarrassed to be living in the most powerful nation in the history of our planet at a time when that nation has nothing better to do with its time/money/power than to harass its own president, first about a trivial incident of private crudity that happened years  before anybody outside his home state ever heard of him*, next about a somewhat questionable real-estate deal that was concluded and forgotten, by anyone with a life, more than ten years before anybody outside his home state ever heard of him**, and now about the abovementioned silly, star-struck bimbo, who came to light in Mr. Starr’s tireless pursuit to unearth every sordid, uninteresting detail of the abovementioned incident of private crudity.

I didn’t always react to this kind of news in this way. Back around the time Gary Hart*** was cavorting on the Monkey Business with Donna Rice, I was living in Germany. At that time I was quite disappointed with Mr. Hart and his display of bad taste and stupidity. My Dutch and German friends, on the other hand, thought this incident was too trivial to take notice of, beyond a bemused shrugging of the shoulders. “Who cares?” they asked, in their worldly, continental sophistication.

“Well,” I huffed in reply, “it’s a sign of the advancement of women.” They looked at me as if I were crazy, so I smiled—a supercilious American, one-upping them in superiority—and explained. “It shows that we’re finally taking women seriously, and men’s dealings with women. It means that when a married man has a fling with another woman, it’s not just some weakness like smoking or over-eating. It means that women are finally true human beings, not vices to be dismissed in the same breath with gambling or drinking. It shows that when a man lies to and deceives his wife, it’s important, as important as if he lied to or deceived his constituents.”

Of course I’m giving the condensed version of the conversation, not that it ever made much sense. In the end my European friends nodded as if they understood but caught each other’s eyes and shrugged, once again bemusedly. Americans. Silly adolescents.

The strength of my haughtily expressed convictions was sorely tested in 1992, when I had returned home to the States, and was once again surrounded by people as naively idealistic as myself. That’s when I was confronted by the spectacle of Gennifer Flowers disclosing the shocking—simply SHOCKING!—news that she had been then-presidential-candidate Bill Clinton’s extramarital lover for years.

You might think, given my previous opinions, that I would have been disgusted with Mr. Clinton. But instead I defended him in conversations with others, and voted for him that November and again in 1996. What happened to women as human beings, not vices?

Maybe it was because the affair was, by Ms. Flowers’s own admission, over and done with years earlier, not an ongoing, in-your-face flagrancy such as the Hart/Rice/Monkey Business bit had been. Perhaps it was because my mother took the “he shouldn’t be president if he’s a philanderer” attitude, which triggered rebellion in me (yes, even at my age**** these things happen). Perhaps it’s because Ms. Flowers spelled her first name with a “G,” thereby disclosing a desire to be “different” and thus draw attention to herself, which made me instinctively dislike her. Perhaps it’s because I was so sick of Republicans in the White House that I would have supported any Democrat candidate who wasn’t a proven serial killer. 

All this, yes. But most important for me was the obvious facts of Mrs. Clinton’s knowledge and forgiveness of her husband’s behavior. Most important to me was that the Flowers affair was over, and there was no need whatsoever for Ms. Flowers to have come forward; her pathetic grab at the limelight told much more against her, in my view, than it did against Mr. Clinton. “It’s not our business,” I said to somebody who had the misfortune to be listening to me, “it’s a private matter between the two of them [i.e., the Clintons] and if Hillary can deal with it then who are we to judge?” The issue was closed, as far as I was concerned.

But then, through a chain of events too ridiculous and convoluted to enumerate here, Kenneth Starr entered the scene, intent on making mountains out of each of Mr. Clinton’s molehills, and in so doing brought to light the star-struck bimbo. Here Mr. Clinton showed himself to be a fool, a bigger fool even than Gary Hart, whose example should have shown Clinton that times had changed since the days of his (Clinton’s) idol, JFK, and that his (Clinton’s) private adventures in the White House would not go unnoticed or unreported. Yes, Mr. Clinton, that was dumb.

But now they want to impeach a president for lying about an affair? Oh please. Is there any point to this except to make Clinton look bad? Has any man caught in an affair ever admitted it? Who has the right to even ask about the matter except his wife? Who else’s business is it? They say it’s the American people’s business, even though it has been established that Mr. Clinton never murmured any state secrets into the bimbo’s ear while engaged in “not [having] sex.” At least he didn’t share a mistress with a mobster. What will this accomplish except to make Americans appear like a bunch of stupid, squabbling hypocrites to the rest of the world? How many members of Congress, the judiciary, the military, and so on down through the poorest and least powerful sections of American society, have such unblemished personal lives that they should feel entitled to pillory our president for his personal failings? Who can cast the first stone? While I do not subscribe to the notion so often—and so pompously—trumpeted as the reason behind Starr’s witch-hunt, that the president is our “moral” leader and therefore should be held to a higher standard (take moral direction from any career politician? Egad!), I do find it obvious that our president is our most visible and influential representative to the world. By allowing the actions of Ken Starr and his cronies to go unchecked and insufficiently challenged we show ourselves to be not the upholders of morality that some would have us be. Rather we show the worst of America: silly, immature, imbued with a puritanical refusal to understand the human failings that plague all of us in one way or another, with a money-grubbing propensity for finding our own fame and fortune by standing on the shoulders of a drowning man, and, perhaps worst of all, an all-too-great tendency to fabricate controversy where there is none. Pity Mr. Clinton, who was unfortunate enough to be elected during a time of peace and prosperity, without a war or even a nice, invigorating recession to bring Americans together and make us quit fighting amongst ourselves.

So it is that in recent weeks I have had less and less enthusiasm for the news and have been increasingly grateful that one of the local TV stations shows reruns of “The Simpsons” when the national news in running on most of the other stations. At least for a while I can sit back and wholeheartedly laugh at Homer et al. without being brought back to earth by the sickening realization that the grotesque comedy/tragedy unfolding on the screen is real. And oh gosh, I’m soooooooooo embarrassed!

**the Paula Jones scandal

**the Whitewater scandal

***former senator from Colorado

****49 at the time of writing

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