The New Sanctimony

Down with Jefferson, Clinton and '60s hedonism! American politics has declared war on the pursuit of pleasure.

By Steve Erickson

Aug 18, 2000 | Unless we take it all with the appropriate pillar of salt, as we turn to gaze at the Sodom some have come to call America, the most important revelation of the last two weeks is that the men who presume to lead us measure our national morality in the currency of blow jobs. The opening of the coming fall campaign has been about not guns or abortion or education or Social Security or the environment but eight years of lost righteousness. After a 20th century of New Deals, New Frontiers, New Covenants, the politics of the 21st century is the New Sanctimony, most remarkable for how it's been so entirely embraced by both political parties and their candidates that you can barely tell one strategically timed cri de coeur from another.

Everyone understands that at the moment the true subject of this election is not the next president but the current one. As the Republicans would have it explicitly, and as the Democrats have agreed implicitly, from the open wound known as the Clinton Conscience there oozes across the body politic an unstaunched flow of moral infection. This past week, when they weren't squabbling with a Southern California congresswoman over a prospective fundraising bash at the Playboy Mansion -- not because the Playboy Mansion is a silly place to be doing anything except silly things, but because it might offend the angels of rectitude passing over the Staples Center -- those who run the Al Gore campaign were literally issuing press releases on who was praying with whom how often. At the same time, the party was nominating for vice president a man whose most noteworthy distinction besides his religious faith is his role as President Clinton's Great Repudiator, except for a moment last week when, before an audience of clergy, Clinton became his own great repudiator.

When all the various candidates from Gore to George W. Bush to Richard Cheney to Joseph Lieberman allude to the president's immorality, to be precise they mean his sexual misbehavior, since they can mean nothing else. After eight years in which the most investigated chief executive of all time was hounded to little avail by special prosecutors, independent counsels, inquisitorial congressional committees and every major newspaper in the country about an array of alleged transgressions from crooked real-estate deals to the strange violent deaths of close advisors, blow jobs and the lies told about them are what remain. Let it be acknowledged these are not minor. The president did a shitty thing to his wife, and what he did to his country wasn't so hot either. Dispatching Cabinet members across the country to defend what he knew to be indefensible was craven to say the least; and if one might advance some moral justification for lying in response to profoundly unjust questions that violate basic freedoms of association, to most people perjury even in a civil deposition still sounds suspiciously like a breach of the oath of office. But the implication of the president's political opponents, now not so subliminally conveyed by his supposed allies as well, is that the other nonsexual infractions must be true too even if they can't be proved, though more objective minds might ask why not, given the effort and resources that went into trying to prove them.

Gore's selection of Lieberman was the deftest political move of the summer. But whether it trumps the Republican right in the New Sanctimony or capitulates to it is another question. As unseemly as the GOP may have found Pat Buchanan's Bavarian reveries of 1940 a couple of years ago, the present Republican campaign's thematic template is no less the speech he delivered at the 1992 GOP convention, which itself was only a high-spirited version of more respectable, long-standing arguments by George Will and William Bennett that the '60s were American history's great abyss. In his remarkable new book, "Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives," Greil Marcus makes a passionate and persuasive case for Clinton as the Elvis Presley of American politics; and even Mary Matalin at the Democratic Convention sighed ruefully on CNN, "These delegates are crazy for Clinton -- they think he's Elvis." But if Uma Thurman was right in "Pulp Fiction" that deep in your id you're either an Elvis Person or a Beatles Person, for all his white-trash heritage and hound-dog impersonations on Air Force One, in fact Clinton is a Beatles Person: the '60s Walking Like a Man, to paraphrase a Robert Johnson song about the devil. This is why his presidency has always been fundamentally illegitimate to people who value propriety over democracy. Because it gave full expression to the pleasure principle once coined the "pursuit of happiness" by an early American subversive rewriting John Locke's three basic natural rights of life, liberty and property, the '60s was the most American of decades, thus engendering loathing and disgust among those who adore the name of America but despise the idea of it.

To be sure, Clinton is a rather pallid embodiment of the '60s, not even really much of a Beatles Person -- more "Up, Up and Away" than "Tomorrow Never Knows." Still, only out of the '60s could such a sensibility have emerged. At almost the very moment he was a teenager shaking John Kennedy's hand on the White House lawn, 6,000 miles away four young, fairly clueless Brits were unleashing what would become the cultural equivalent of thermonuclear holocaust, atomizing all the geopolitical structures and philosophical verities that civilization believed it had resolved barely a generation before. Losers from a scuzzy English seaport that produced pop bands by the hundreds -- almost any of them, according to accounts of the time, better than the lamely monikered Silver Beatles -- they migrated to an even scuzzier German seaport to play epic amphetamine shows before Deutsche kids reading Camus. The children of England, in other words, were learning French existentialism as mediated by the dispossessed children of a Germany that just 20 years before bombed English cities to rubble, while Hitler's children were absorbing an updated black American slave music as mediated by the dispossessed children of an England that just 15 years before bombed the Reich to rubble.

Next Page: The New Sanctimony is a kind of ethical autism

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