Hi, Nell. It’s afternoon, I just filed my Snake Eyes review (bottom line: the movie is great right up to its dud of a climax, and the audience leaves angry–read the piece tomorrow), and America Online has finally gotten around to delivering my e-mail, which was unavailable for what seemed like an eternity. People always ask me why I have such an “unhip” e-mail address, and I reply that I’m frightened of a universe where everything isn’t kindergarten simple–where I might find myself Lost in Cyberspace. But I’m tired of competing with millions of other helpless geeks for the attentions of an overworked server, so I might just have to grow up and learn to navigate this universe on my own.
I didn’t see The Parent Trap last night, but plan to go tonight. Instead, I stayed home and watched my Wednesday night TV programs: Star Trek: Voyager and Law and Order. I don’t know why I stay with Voyager since it’s reliably ham-handed. Any elation at the fact that the captain is a woman is undermined by Kate Mulgrew’s dinner-theater Katharine Hepburn, and Jeri Ryan’s amazing Borg babe feels like a fake-progressive update on the sexy female robots of the ‘60s. I guess I enjoy it out of nostalgia: it’s terrible in the way that the old Star Trek used to be, before the franchise hired a bunch of good actors and directors for The Next Generation. Anyway, you still have tonight to see Halloween: H20.
One thing that’s interesting about your message this morning: You’re denouncing Clinton, too. We’ve both been–more or less, in our half-hearted way–attacking his critics and making lame excuses for his behavior. But something about Monica Lewinsky actually getting out of that car and going to testify that she and the Chief Executive did the wild thing in the White House elicits feelings of revulsion. If our own reactions are to be believed, the polls might be wrong about this one: The American people will give more than a hoot if the president is caught with his pants down. Maybe not enough to want him removed from office, but enough to want him impeached and tried–and enough to sour them on a legacy that might have made him one of the two or three greatest presidents of this century.
It was never a secret that Clinton was a womanizer. A person I know who spent time in Mississippi in the ‘80s used to see him at the racetrack there: “Oh, that’s the governor of Arkansas with this month’s squeeze,” people would say. Even more than Gary Hart–and certainly more than George Bush, who was also alleged to have had a mistress–Clinton flaunted his sexual appetites. That’s what gets us. Adultery might be immoral, but flagrant carrying-on seems more than that; it seems evil. How else to account for the reaction of even a liberal like Bob Herbert, who in the New York Times today concludes: “If [Clinton] had any sense of dignity or personal responsibility, he’d be working on his resignation.”
Of course, all I need to take Clinton’s side again is to read George Will in the WashingtonPost. “There is no look as baleful as that which contorts the faces of some Clinton despisers when they think he might ‘get away with it,’” Will writes. “Have they not noticed? Condign punishment is underway–public mortification, domestic torture (life on the White House’s second floor must now be gothic) and political emasculation. Yet to come, the ridicule of history.”
I’ve never figured out how Will has remained an avatar of ethics. Here is a man who, in 1980, had knowledge of–and access to–a stolen Carter briefing book, who secretly coached Ronald Reagan for a debate and then went on national TV as an “objective” observer to laud the very answers that he had put in the candidate’s mouth. If the country were as ethical as Will would like it to be, it would have demanded he be charged as an accessory to a crime, and his “public mortification” would have ensured that he never had the platform to bore us again.
