Joan Didion - Vintage Didion

“I approach this as a mother,” Cokie Roberts said on This Week . “We have a right to say to this president, ‘What you have done is an example to our children that’s a disgrace,’” William J. Bennett said on Meet the Press . The apparent inability of the public to grasp this Kinder-Kirche point (perhaps because not all Americans could afford the luxury of idealizing their own children) had itself become an occasion for outrage and scorn: the public was too “complacent,” or too “prosperous,” or too “fixed on the Dow Jones.” The public in fact became the unindicted co-conspirator: “This ought to be something that outrages us, makes us ashamed of him,” Mona Charen complained on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer . “This casts shame on the entire country because he behaved that way and all of the nation seems to be complicit now because they aren’t rising up in righteous indignation.”

This was the impasse (or, as it turned out, the box canyon) that led many into a scenario destined to prove wishful at best: “The American people,” we heard repeatedly, would cast off their complicity when they were actually forced by the report of the independent counsel to turn their attention from the Dow and face what Thomas L. Friedman, in the Times , called “the sordid details that will come out from Ken Starr’s investigation.” “People are not as sophisticated as this appears to be,” William Kristol had said hopefully the day before the president’s televised address. “We all know, inside the Beltway, what’s in that report,” Republican strategist Mary Matalin said. “And I don’t think … the country needs to hear any more about tissue, dresses, cigars, ties, anything else.” George Will, on This Week , assured his co-panelists that support for the president would evaporate in the face of the Referral . “Because Ken Starr must — the president has forced his hand — must detail graphically the sexual activity that demonstrates his perjury. Once that report is written and published, Congress will be dragged along in the wake of the public…. Once the dress comes in, and some of the details come in from the Ken Starr report, people — there’s going to be a critical mass, the yuck factor — where people say, ‘I don’t want him in my living room anymore.’”

The person most people seemed not to want in their living rooms any more was “Ken” (as he was now called by those with an interest in protecting his story), but this itself was construed as evidence of satanic spin on the part of the White House. “The president’s men,” William J. Bennett cautioned in The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals , “… attempt relentlessly to portray their opposition as bigoted and intolerant fanatics who have no respect for privacy.” He continued:

At the same time they offer a temptation to their supporters: the temptation to see themselves as realists, worldly-wise, sophisticated: in a word, European. This temptation should be resisted by the rest of us. In America, morality is central to our politics and attitudes in a way that is not the case in Europe, and precisely this moral streak is what is best about us…. Europeans may have something to teach us about, say, wine or haute couture. But on the matter of morality in politics, America has much to teach Europe.

American innocence itself, then, was now seen to hang on the revealed word of the Referral . The report, Fox News promised, would detail “activities that most Americans would describe as unusual.” These details, Newsweek promised, would make Americans “want to throw up.” “Specifics about a half-dozen sex acts,” Newsday promised, had been provided “during an unusual two-hour session August 26 in which Lewinsky gave sworn testimony in Starr’s downtown office, not before the grand jury.”

This is arresting, and not to be brushed over. On August 6, Monica Lewinsky had told the grand jury that sexual acts had occurred. On August 17, the president had tacitly confirmed this in both his testimony to the grand jury and his televised address to the nation. Given this sequence, the “unusual two-hour session August 26” might have seemed, to some, unnecessary, even excessive, not least because of the way in which, despite the full knowledge of the prosecutors that the details elicited in this session would be disseminated to the world in two weeks under the Referral headings “November 15 Sexual Encounter,” “November 17 Sexual Encounter,” “December 31 Sexual Encounter,” “January 7 Sexual Encounter,” “January 21 Sexual Encounter,” “February 4 Sexual Encounter and Subsequent Phone Calls,” “March 31 Sexual Encounter,” “Easter Telephone Conversations and Sexual Encounter,” “February 28 Sexual Encounter,” and “March 29 Sexual Encounter,” certain peculiar and warped proprieties had been so pruriently observed. “In deference to Lewinsky and the explicit nature of her testimony,” Newsday reported, “all the prosecutors, defense lawyers and stenographers in the room during the session were women.”

Since the “explicit nature of the testimony,” the “unusual activity,” the “throw-up details” everyone seemed to know about (presumably because they had been leaked by the Office of the Independent Counsel) turned out to involve masturbation, it was hard not to wonder if those in the know might not be experiencing some sort of rhetorical autointoxication, a kind of rapture of the feed. The average age of first sexual intercourse in this country has been for some years sixteen, and is younger in many venues. Since the average age of first marriage in this country is twenty-five for women and twenty-seven for men, sexual activity outside marriage occurs among Americans for an average of nine to eleven years. Six out of ten marriages in this country are likely to end in divorce, a significant percentage of those who divorce doing so after engaging in extramarital sexual activity. As of the date of the 1990 census, there were in this country 4.1 million households headed by unmarried couples. More than thirty-five percent of these households included children. Seventh-graders in some schools in this country were as early as the late 1970s reading the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves , which explained the role of masturbation in sexuality and the use of foreign objects in masturbation. The notion that Americans apparently willing to overlook a dalliance in the Oval Office would go pale at its rather commonplace details seemed puzzling in the extreme, as did the professed inability to understand why these Americans might favor the person who had engaged in a common sexual act over the person who had elicited the details of that act as evidence for a public stoning.

But of course these members of what Howard Fineman recently defined on MSNBC as “the national political class,” the people “who read the Hotline or watch cable television political shows such as this one,” were not talking about Americans at large. They did not know Americans at large. They occasionally heard from one, in a focus group or during the Q&A after a lecture date, but their attention, since it was focused on the political process, which had come to represent the concerns not of the country at large but of the organized pressure groups that increasingly controlled it, remained remote. When Howard Fineman, during the same MSNBC appearance, spoke of “the full-scale panic” that he detected “both here in Washington and out around the country,” he was referring to calls he had made to “a lot of Democratic consultants, pollsters, media people and so forth,” as well as to candidates: “For example one in Wisconsin, a woman running for the Democratic seat up there, she said she’s beginning to get calls and questions from average folks wanting to know what her view of Bill Clinton is.”