Democracy on life support

To be fair to Barr, he may have slipped out to the men's room around the time Starr was muttering this particular aside, and therefore would have missed it. He would have missed it because Starr didn't feel compelled to elaborate, at least not to the extent of a 445-page referral; and if Barr didn't hear it from Starr himself, there was an excellent chance he wasn't going to hear it at all, because the media said almost nothing about it. Now, I got my master's degree in journalism at UCLA back in the waning years of the Industrial Age, so we must acknowledge my opinion is by now irrelevant in the matter of journalistic ethics and what used to be called "hard news." But allow me to explain that this romantic notion of "hard news" had to do with information of a quaintly factual nature -- "of or pertaining to facts," as the dictionary defines it -- either affecting people's lives on a large scale or otherwise warranting their interest in an extraordinary way. Since there was only a single piece of hard news that came out of last Thursday's marathon, in all my naiveté I honestly woke to Friday morning's front page expecting to see at least one tiny little headline somewhere that read, "Starr clears Clinton of all other charges."

There was no such headline. There was virtually nothing about the exoneration to be found in anything but the fine print. In the delirium of words concerning Starr's admirably becalmed demeanor, the only real news of the day was barely mentioned on the nightly news shows; and on this past Sunday morning's talk shows it wasn't mentioned at all, except by the president's lawyer in conversation with Wolf Blitzer on CNN and, in a rare outburst of professionalism, Tim Russert on "Meet the Press." The wise men and wise woman at the roundtable of ABC's "This Week" didn't speak a syllable of it. They did cluck-cluck a lot about the journalistic disgrace of CBS's upcoming "60 Minutes" broadcast, and Sam Donaldson lectured the country yet again about how it was going to have to come to terms with the president's wrongdoing sooner or later; like much of the rest of the media, Donaldson routinely wonders in bewilderment at the "disconnect" between what the president has done and how the nihilistic, selfish and shallow American public has responded to it, as though they haven't been coming to terms with Bill Clinton for six years now. As though they haven't processed all the information about Bill and Monica and reached the uneasy conclusion that -- in a process where the only resolution offered is the constitutional equivalent of capital punishment -- the president's transgression is simply not the constitutional equivalent of a capital crime.

The Judiciary Committee show last Thursday was not without its redeeming figures. As it happens, the two who most reminded me of those congressmen and congresswomen from the Watergate hearings 25 years ago were sitting at the far end of the lower row, so far to the side as to always be off-screen. Both were conservative Republicans. It remains to be seen what Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mary Bono of California decide on impeachment; they may very well vote for it. But whether one would agree with such a conclusion (I, for the most part, wouldn't) or whether one agrees with their politics (I, for the most part, don't), one got the feeling both were actually grappling with an anguished sense of duty as they construed it. As a citizen-politician who finds herself in the House by virtue of a tree, Bono seems to be trying to cast the case against the president in the context of Real Life as she's lived it and as she knows others to live it, while Graham appears truly haunted by the single argument no liberal Democrat has yet refuted with any persuasiveness: that in the America of our dreams, no man is above the law.

Anyway, this is what it's come down to: Fearing for America, my best hope is the widow of the guy who sang "I Got You Babe." But after all, as time went by, "I Got You Babe" turned out to be a better song than we thought it was 30 years ago, and as time goes by, Mary Bono may turn out to be a better congresswoman than we thought when she was elected; and at any rate, however she votes, the televised execution of the Clinton presidency will be somewhat less irresistible to the country than the televised execution of terminal patients now appears to be. Truth is, in the end I didn't watch "60 Minutes" on Sunday night anyway. I shirked my journalistic obligation. Not only did I decide that watching the program out of a sense of journalistic obligation was to effectively endorse whatever sick horseshit about journalistic obligation was used to justify the show in the first place, I decided just writing about the show at any serious length, even in condemnation, was somehow an endorsement as well -- further fueling the very controversy the program so cravenly and successfully pursued.

Maybe that's just me letting myself off the hook. But if we all let ourselves off the hook on this one, then no one would have watched Sunday night, and how bad would that be? The next time Jack Kevorkian talks about someone's right to "die with dignity," let's not waste a single moment belaboring the obvious absurdity of a definition of dignified death that includes a whirring video camera a few feet away. This assumes it's not too late anyway. This assumes that, in TV time, Dec. 31, 1999, isn't already here, and that Whitney Houston-Mariah Carey duet you think you hear in the background, coming from someone else's radio, isn't really in your own head, and getting closer.

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