However, the Clinton impeachment was a thing of manifold splendors anyway, and it had no downside. If sixty-seven senators said so, we were rid of a half-cracked slab of sophomorocism, a moral midden heap, ethical slop jar, and backed-up policy toilet, a blabby, overreaching nooky-mooch and masher. The dirty, selfish pest would be removed from office.
If not, we were spared a busy, silly toad-eater puffed with all the bad ideas available at Harvard. That self-serious bootlick Al Gore would not be—as it turned out, would never be—chief executive.
And if the Republicans got spanked in the voting booth for prosecuting Bill, they’d get the hairbrush for the wrong offense, true, but they deserved the wallop on general principles—or, rather, lack thereof. What a feckless, timid, timeserving revolution that was in 1994, as if the sansculottes had stormed the Bastille to get themselves jobs as prison guards.
Alas, some people opposed the impeachment. They decried the expense of the special prosecutor’s investigations. But when had the federal government spent millions in such an entertaining fashion? Certainly not by funding PBS. True, there was the shuttle launch when NASA shot an aging politician into space. But then NASA decided to bring John Glenn back.
Some critics of impeachment claimed that the office of president would be diminished to a mere custodial role. Yes! George W. Bush, report to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and sign for your mop and broom.
Other naysayers argued that America’s most talented politicians would be scared away from careers in public service. But the private sector will no doubt be able to put America’s most talented politicians to use—making unsolicited dinnertime telemarketing calls.
It was said that the press was being discredited. This was a blind item planted by Jerry Springer because Ted Koppel had been swiping the most depraved guests.
It was said that we were entering an era of sexual McCarthyism. Bring on the congressional hearings! “Sharon Stone, are you now, or have you ever been, showing your boobs for purposes without redeeming social importance?”
And some earnest souls went so far as to aver that impeachment distracted President Clinton from…from raising taxes, destroying health care, appointing 1960s bakeheads to high political office, soliciting felonious campaign contributions, hanging friends out to dry for Arkansas real estate frauds, giving missile secrets to the Chinese, taking credit for the benefits of a free market about which he knew little and cared less, using U.S. military forces as fig leaves for domestic scandals and au pairs for the UN, leading foreign policy back into the flea circus of Jimmy Carterism, having phone sex, groping patronage seekers, and snapping the elastic on the underpants of psychologically disturbed school-age White House interns entrusted with the task of delivering high-level government pizza.
Plus there were the other benefits we derived from this imbroglio. Feminism was revitalized as Mack Daddy Clinton forced the tired jades of Ms. Magazine to get back out on the media street corner in fishnet stocking and tube tops. The true agenda of the Movement Left was revealed, albeit thirty years late: They want to get entrée to the nation’s highest political office—and play with themselves in it. And wild GOP private lives were revealed. The very thought of naked Republicans should go a long way to curing America’s obsession with the lewd.
Practically everyone involved in the impeachment came up a winner. Paula Jones got a nose job. Monica Lewinsky got a Barbara Walters interview. And a number of sycophants and dupes on the White House staff won a chance to prove their fealty by paying huge legal bills. Susan McDougal had her jailhouse lipstick privileges restored. Lucianne Goldberg obtained copious PR, and her skills as a literary agent have attracted many important authors who saw Vince Foster beamed up by a UFO. Vernon Jordan also secured free advertising, and everything that slithers on its belly in Washington headed to his law office. Linda Tripp got a reason to stick to that diet. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden received the air strikes from infidels that they needed to make their own pollsters happy. Newt Gingrich got some how-to tips on sex in the workplace. And Ken Starr’s lecture fees have soared on the skinny-sideburn-and-big-belt-buckle conspiracy-buff circuit. Furthermore, think of the blessing to millions of future U.S. high school students trapped in the dreary confines of American History class. Finally, a chapter that boogies.
And who cares that Clinton won in the end? Let me put this in terms that a boy from Hope will understand. No matter what, Bill, your girlfriend’s ugly, your wife’s a bitch, and your dog can’t hunt.
My daughter Muffin appeared in the doorway and said, “What’s bitch?”
It’s a grown-up word, honey. It means junior senator from New York. You should never say words like junior senator from New York.
“Mommy wants to know if the nut is still waving.”
Raving, I corrected. Tell Mommy she can come back in the living room. The Political Nut promises to quit talking about the impeachment.
Even though now, in the bright morning light of a new Bush administration, the legacy of the Clinton impeachment scandal has finally become clear.
Republicans in Congress impeached Clinton for doing what a Republican would have loved to have done if the intern hadn’t cracked the Republican across the face with a Coach bag full of cell phone batteries. Democrats defended a no-account, conniving jerk who used the wadded-up principles of liberalism to pad the bulge in his political jeans because congressional Democrats knew Democratic voters are so dumb they think they got their jobs at Burger King because Clinton was dating the cow. The First Lady, realizing her role in a Gore administration would be making balloon animals at birthday parties for Tipper’s kids, embraced that paragon among husbands and fathers, Bill. The stud-puppy himself ran off to do things such as view tornado damage. That way, when he looked like a sorry sack of rubbish, he looked like he was sorry for someone other than himself. And the media took time off from prodding the corpse of Princess Diana, looking up Ellen DeGeneres’s pants leg, and going through the garbage behind the JonBenet Ramsey home to wax sanctimonious about how intrusive, sex-mad, and trashy Washington had become. The legacy of the Clinton impeachment scandal is—a bequest of enormous hypocrisy to the nation.
It was about time. We needed some. If you look up hypocrisy in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (unabridged)—which we know Bill Clinton used because he said, “It depends on what your definition of the word is is,” and the to be verb gets nine and a half column inches in there, plus the Clinton White House had three copies, due to Robert Rubin, Donna Shalala, and Madeleine Albright’s all needing them to sit on to reach the table during cabinet meetings. Anyway, if you look up hypocrisy, you’ll find it means “pretending to be what one is not or to have principles or beliefs that one does not have,” from the Greek hypokrisis, “playing a part on the stage.” Republicans, Democrats, Hillary, Bill, and the TV networks were acting—acting as if they knew right from wrong, good from bad, et cetera. This was great. It meant they had some notion of the difference. They didn’t used to.
Before the advent of Monica Lewinsky, Republicans earnestly believed they were fulfilling their “Contract with America” by attending meetings of the Conservative Citizens Council while wearing bedsheets and playing dead during budget fights. Democrats were sincere and fervid in their battle against the woes of the Great Depression and didn’t have a clue that the thing had been over for fifty-some years. Hillary was trying to rebuild the Berlin Wall brick by social-program brick, in pious obedience to the tenets of Wellesley-chick socialism. Bill truly felt he was beloved, even by Hillary. And the TV networks actually thought the hair farmers behind the anchor desks knew what they were talking about.
It’s great to put that behind us. Furthermore, being a hypocrite looked good compared to being the one person who was absolutely plainspoken and forthright during the Lewinsky affair: Larry Flynt.
Hypocrisy, as a concept, required this boost. It’s been the pariah among late-twentieth-century sins. The Seven Deadlies have all been fas
hionable. Envy and Covetousness in the Reagan administration. Anger whenever it’s convenient to swat Saddam Hussein. And then there’s Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony, or, as we call them these days, “getting in touch with your sexuality,” “raising your self-esteem,” “relaxation therapy,” and “being a recovered bulimic.” Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you’ve written the promo blurb for the dustcover of his tell-all memoir. Call somebody a sleaze and you’ve hired him as your lawyer. But everyone is ashamed of the hypocrite tag.
Perhaps this is part of the cult of authenticity to which we orthodontically corrected, surgically enhanced, pompadour implanted, and Prozac-ed moderns adhere. Or maybe informing significant others that they look like hell and need to diet is simply more fun than clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. Hypocrisy is “the vice of vices,” declared Hannah Arendt, supposedly one of the most prominent moral philosophers of our time.
“Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” Arendt said that—and so did a whole bunch of teenage daughters dressed in black, with pierced eyebrows, stamping their platform shoes on the Ikea kilim in the open-plan kitchen and shrieking, “You and Mom did drugs! You and Mom screwed around! You are such hypocrites!”
This is why it’s vital for Washington to show leadership in the hypocrisy field, because I’m afraid we might be raising one of those daughters. True, Muffin’s only three. But in eleven brief years we will be faced with the awkward task of explaining to our child why she should behave like Gidget while I, at her age, was paging through On the Road, Junkie, and 120 Days of Sodom with a highlighter pen, making a list of things to do before I shot my family.
Of course there are artifacts of popular culture such as Pinocchio to warn children what a world that punishes hypocrisy would be like—like a botched rhinoplasty. But rented videotapes do not have the same impact as the living example of an entire capital city full of the nation’s highest elected officials and most prominent arbiters of opinion blowing smoke out their fundaments.
The American political establishment must be thanked for the time and effort it put into getting the impeachment right, with extra kudos to the women’s movement for providing a model of the sophistry, casuistic self-justification, and talking out of both sides of the mouth so necessary in the crucial parenting years. I mean, I almost had to tell Muffin an outright lie. (“You shouldn’t take drugs because when I was young I overdosed and died horribly, choking on my own vomit.”) Or, worse, I almost had to tell Muffin the truth. (“Yes, I was a hippie, but looking back on it I wish I had joined the Marine Corps—because drugs were cheaper in Vietnam.”) Now all I have to do is be full of it. And this, as a middle-aged dad, I already am.
To prove my thesis, let me note that when the cardinal virtues are named—Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Justice, Faith, Hope, Charity—the list does not end with “and no B.S.” If you put on a big show of being deep-thinking, brave, prudent, just, faithful, and optimistic, then that’s pretty much what you are—or close enough for government work. And it’s hard to fake charity if everybody saw you put that five-spot in the crippled beggar’s cup. Unless you run back and snatch it out. But you’d better be quick; some of those crippled beggars can really move.
Then let us also consider what the impeachment process would have been like if all the participants had been brutally honest: Republicans screaming, “Don’t you understand what a criminal this president is? He stole our issues! He swiped our illegal campaign donors! He nabbed the interns with the bonus bazoombas!” Democrats yelling, “If the opinion polls told us dogs had a seventy-five-percent approval rating, we’d be on Larry King Live licking our privates!” The press hollering, “We did that—slurp-slurp—right on national TV! And there was nothing you could do about it! Nobody elects us! Nobody impeaches us! We’re the rottweilers on the porch! Now watch us pee on George W. Bush’s leg!” And Chief Justice Rehnquist shouting from the bench, “I’m naked from the waist down under this robe!”
6
FEBRUARY 2001
Maybe George W. Bush will be a big hypocrite and then you’ll be happy,” said my wife. “For all we know he wasn’t wearing a thing under his pants at the inauguration.”
There was an expression on his face, I said, before he stepped up to the rostrum to speak—he certainly looked like he felt something cold on his balls.
“Honey, your language—”
“Daddy,” said Muffin, “does the president have balls with Goofy and Mickey on them like I do?”
We’ll have to wait and see, I said, and changed the subject. Here we are, two months into 2001, and the 1990s still don’t have a name. Almost every decade of the twentieth century has a name: the Swinging Sixties, the Roaring Twenties, the Painfully Unhip Fifties, the War-Torn Forties, the Depression Era, the Decade of Greed, the Me Decade. But what distinguishes the nineties? Triangulation of the issues? The Third Way? Compassionate conservatism?
“How about the Me and Oh, Yeah, You Too Decade?” said my wife.
“It could be that you’re too old for named decades,” said my young assistant, Max. “I understand time passes more quickly as people age. Maybe, for you, naming the nineties would be like the rest of us naming the past month and a half.”
That reminds me, Max, I’ve got a research project. I picked up a copy of Them magazine. See these people on the cover? Who the f—?
“Honey,” said my wife.
Who the free-subscription-offer are these people? Is it just me or are there more celebrities nowadays than there are things to be celebrated? Everyone knows the last important LP was Rubber Soul, there’s been nothing worth watching on TV since Hawaii Five-O was canceled, and they quit making really good movies after Apocalypse Now. Yet, fresh crops of allegedly famous actors, singers, and who-knows-whaters keep being foisted upon me.
In last year’s “50 Most Kissed-Up To” issue of Them, the only name I knew was JFK, Jr. And I thought he was three. It turned out he was married and dead. No, there was one other person I’d heard of, that fellow that my godson’s sister Ophelia dragged home in the middle of the night. And Nick, Sr., threw him off the porch. It turns out the kid gets $21 million per picture.
So, Max, what I want you to do is go out and buy the current issues of Celebrity Excess, Yammer, Entertainment All Night, Puff, and Inanity Teen and read them and report back. And, Max, if you happen to be too old yourself to know who some of these people are, you can consult my godson Nick, not to mention his sister.
I’m going to do a piece on famous folks I’ve never heard of for Business Fun. Because it’s important for those of us in the peak of our productive years to keep up on these things. It helps us communicate with our children. Although that’s a laugh. Nothing is more embarrassing to children than “hip” parents. Remember the poor fellow in high school whose mother wore miniskirts and whose father claimed to “dig” the Beatles?
“Actually,” said my wife, “no. I was two.”
However, staying current with popular culture does make it easier for us senior-management types to relate to the twenty-somethings who are so prominent in today’s computer-driven web-intensive business world. Hmmm. Forget that. All those fresh-whelped dot.com billionaires are in Chapter 11. They’ve gone back to playing “Duke Nuke ’Em” in their parents’ rec room where they belong.
No, the ugly fact of the matter is, this article will be for middle-aged men who want to know who modern celebrities are so we have something to talk about when we hit on our future ex-third-wives at Au Bar, the Viper Room, or wherever it is the honeys hang out these days.
“Ahem,” said my wife.
I’m just talking journalistic concept here.
“In other words,” said Max, “if you are a decent person, a responsible business executive, and a good family man, you won’t have to read this article at all.”
Max returned a week later, looking a bit glassy-eyed. “Let me pull up my ‘Who the F—’ file,” he said.
; And that, I said, is precisely what I’m going to call my article: “Who the F—Are These People?” Let’s start with Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Oh, come on,” said my wife. “Don’t try to be square. You do too know who Leonardo DiCaprio is—the one you weren’t looking at when Kate Winslet’s clothes got wet, clingy, and diaphanous in Titanic.”
I’m using Leonardo as a baseline, I said. He’s the one celebrity that my Business Fun readers will have some inkling about. After that it’s downhill into the abyss of stardom.
“I’ve arranged the information in categories,” said Max, “WHY ANYONE CARES, INSIDE INFORMATION, TELLING DETAIL, and so forth, plus KNOWING COMMENTS for you old guys to make, so you won’t sound pathetically out of it.”
Here is Max’s printout:
Leonardo DiCaprio
WHY ANYONE CARES
Enormous heartthrob among females who have issues with male secondary sexual characteristics.
Inside Information (The 411, as the Chronologically Unimpaired Say)
Before wretched excess of fame, had critically acclaimed roles in This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Marvin’s Room, and other movies to which men get dragged by women. But latest, The Beach, bombed so—for all we know—Leo isn’t famous anymore after all.
TELLING DETAIL
Once made an educational film called How to Deal with a Parent Who Takes Drugs.
KNOWING COMMENT
You say: “Some claim the Columbine killings were inspired by DiCaprio’s performance in The Basketball Diaries. This falsely presupposes anyone could sit through that movie.”
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 13