"Our Monica, Ourselves"

Marjorie Garber's essay "Moniker" homes in on what few have talked about, the anti-Semitism in the public reaction to Monica Lewinsky. Some of that anti-Semitism was of the nutcase variety, like Louis Farrakhan telling Tim Russert that Monica was a Zionist agent sent to disrupt the Middle East peace talks (somebody's bow tie is obviously a little too tight). Elsewhere, it was coded, as anti-Semitism almost always is (the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman once told me of how a conservative Boston paper repeatedly identified him as "a Cambridge lawyer").

A sampling of the descriptive words used about Monica in the press tells the story: "Pushy," "ambitious," "seductive," "zaftig," "typical Beverly Hills." Men often delight in women who are as forthrightly and unapologetically sexual as Monica was, and women often loathe them. Other women see them as a sexual threat, someone who "gives away" the sexual currency they hoard. And that threat is often displaced in complaints that these open women are vulgar, gauche, have no taste. I've known several women like Monica (only some of them Jewish). In college I was friends with a girl who was short and voluptuous, with delightful big breasts and even more delightful big eyes; she had dyed raven-black hair that went to her waist. She was outrageously flirtatious, kept copies of Penthouse in her room (the letters turned her on) and went to parties dressed to seduce. She was also unfailingly kind and generous and ready to help out (she typed like a demon and it was common to pass by her room at night and hear her clacking out a friend's résumé on her IBM), yet the most common thing other women asked me about her was, "How can you like her?"

Underneath the resentment directed at that sort of woman is the idea that she has gone too far. Garber speaks of this in terms of the boundary crossings that are always the case with "images of Jewishness, and especially Jewish women." They cross boundaries "between homeliness and beauty; between Jewish mother and wayward daughter; between fat and thin; between proper and raucously improper." So while Monica may have had the upbringing and money to be thought of as "typical Beverly Hills," her story is the tale of what money can't buy you in America: the seal of approval of WASP propriety.

Likewise, Bill Clinton's story is that power can't buy that propriety, either. The leader of the free world, yet never accorded the status that usually goes with that power, Clinton in the White House was, to Washington insiders and their media cronies, as out of place as Jethro Beaudine in that Beverly Hills mansion. "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place," said journalist David Broder, speaking as if it were his place. And in a sense it was. To the keepers of "official" Washington, the town belongs to those who recognize them as the dispensers of power and not to the people who sent them there. To them, Bill Clinton no more belonged in the White House than did you or me.

That attitude produced one moment of high comedy (and something more generally pornographic than anything in the Starr referral): Sally Quinn's Washington Post piece about how Bill Clinton offended official Washington, as much by the challenge to the Washington power structure in his first inaugural address as by his later behavior. This coming from a woman who -- as Esquire noted, referring to Quinn's affair with and later marriage to Post editor Ben Bradlee -- "fucked the boss, broke up his marriage, became the toast of Washington. Twenty years later, decides to get self-righteous with Clinton."

No doubt Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton were attracted by each other's sexual appetite. But beyond that attraction, both of them were outsiders, people who it is still acceptable to denigrate because of their race or class or style (in Clinton's case because he is a white Southern male and, unlike Jimmy Carter, not a genteel one). You get that in James R. Kincaid's essay "It's Not About Sex," where he says it was impossible to think of Clinton and Lewinsky's affair sexually because he found them both so unattractive. Betraying the class prejudice that defined the denigration of Clinton, Kincaid (who is not a stupid man) writes, "It's hard to keep lit a sexual fantasy when it is showered by K-Mart-quality details."

In other words, Kincaid is telling us, he's too classy a guy to get turned on in a trailer park. As Micki McElya observes, "Just as the category 'white trash' absorbs people and practices that menace white normativity [aarrgh!] and racial invisibility, insistent assertions of Clinton's own trash subjectivity mark his deviance and his particular danger ... You can educate Bill Clinton, dress him up, and even make him president, but you can't take the trash out."

Elsewhere in "Our Monica, Ourselves," Bill Clinton becomes the repository for all sorts of meanings and fantasies. When the comedian Chris Tucker told Clinton his fantasy was to play the first black president, Clinton, echoing Toni Morrison, told a press gathering that he responded, "I'm the first black president." In one essay in the collection, Clinton is cast as the first "queer president" because his secret, semi-public assignations with Monica echo the surreptitious nature of gay sex in restrooms or parks. (If surreptitious sex were strictly gay, then every high school boy who fingered his girlfriend in the basement rec room while her parents watched TV upstairs is a closet case.)

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