Saturday, May 17, 2008
Clinton's enemies have made him a culture hero.
Dec 30, 1999 | Perplexed and not a little pissed off by the president's historically high ratings -- in the wake of an impeachment spurned by all but the rabid, the rotund, and the bedridden -- pundits and prophets of the right have taken to castigating the people. "The Founders were right to have a certain distrust of democracy," conservative commentator William Kristol recently asserted, echoing the James Dobson's more apocalyptic admonition: "Our people no longer recognize the nature of evil." This impulse to save the nation from itself brings to mind Bertolt Brecht's advice to East German Communists grousing about the lack of popular enthusiasm for socialism. If the people have betrayed the government, Brecht quipped, perhaps the government should "abolish the people and elect a new one."
Not even Bob Barr has broached such a solution. But the Republican "Superior Dance" would do the Church Lady proud. This rigid strut clearly reflects a painful recognition by the children of the Reagan revolution that they are out of step. For all their success at winning office, something more potent and less tangible than politics blocks the right when it comes to producing fundamental changes in American life. That baffling "something" is the culture, and in this retail realm, the dominant sensibility is every bit as resistant to salvation as it is to socialism.
Clinton owes his survival to the uniquely American conflict called the Culture War. What began in the 1950s with the brush fire rebellion of the Beats and exploded in the '60s in a full-blown countercultural revolt has by now become a jihad fought at every mall and microphone in America. So sweeping is this cold civil war (complete with the specter of an enemy within) that it has become a permanent part of politics, lingering just below the surface of issues as seemingly distinct as abortion, affirmative action and free speech on the Internet. Indeed, it's possible to argue that the entire impeachment spectacle is an attempt by the right to shift the terrain of this conflict to an arena where they have the numerical advantage. As it turns out, however, they've seriously miscalculated the odds.
The daily dose of scandal has been greeted by the public as another opportunity to be entertained, and Clinton has emerged from the mire with something he didn't have before: a mystique. Greeted by adoring crowds as the Elvis he always pretended to be, the president now represents an American type that has always lurked behind our sanctimony: part victim, part perp, all trickster. He is far more adept than his enemies at slippin' and slidin', a silver fox in the wolf run. Instead of a bully pulpit, he projects a laissez-funk aura that fits the culture like a love glove. And no one has given this president a bigger boost than the Republicans who decided to saturate the media with Monicana. Instead of the revulsion and outrage they hoped to create, they have made Clinton a guilty pleasure, the political equivalent of death by chocolate.
But calling Clinton "a poster child for the '60s," as Pat Robertson has, doesn't begin to explain his popularity. In fact, the reason the culture war is so resonant is that it represents a conflict that has raged for more than a century in American life. One can find all the elements of the current scandal in Hawthorne, who was acutely tuned to the central bifurcation in our culture between what might be called the structure of authority and the spirit of love and liberation. In "The Scarlet Letter," this clash takes root in an adulterous love affair, in which shame and stigma work their cruel magic. But Hawthorne also wrote about a band of rebellious Puritans who lead the young into the forest, where they let their hair grow, dress like the animals and dance around the maypole of desire. In this cautionary tale, the rebels are pursued and captured by the colonists, who kill the adults and cut the hair of the young -- much like what transpired as the counterculture collapsed. You see the dichotomy between authority and liberation again in Mark Twain, between the upwardly mobile Tom Sawyer and the renegade Huck Finn, whose journey down the Mississippi with Jim is a matrix of the '60s observation that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Walt Whitman, an unambivalent champion of political and personal liberation, wrote a century before the counterculture, and his exhortations about a democracy in which "the body electric" is the bond between citizens continue to haunt American politics.
Seen in this light, the triumph of Clinton is not about a collapse of moral sense in the American people, but an inevitable sign of the return of the repressed.
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