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- Then everything includes
itself in power,
- Power into will, will
into appetite,
- And appetite, a universal
wolf,
- So doubly seconded with
will and power
- Must make perforce a
universal prey,
- And last eat up
himself.
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- William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida (I,
iii,119-124)
 I
am no prophet, at least not in the vulgar sense of the
word. I’m not someone who by way of a crystal ball,
or tea leaves or bird entrails can foretell the future.
So, as of the time of this writing I cannot say whether
President Clinton will be driven from office by his
indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky or whether he will
survive, with the aid of a compliant press, once again.
Oracles thrive best on ambiguous statements, so when the
great general went to the oracle at Delphi and asked how
the battle was going to turn out, he was told "a great
army will be defeated" without being told which army. He
had to find out the hard way that it was his own.
But if a prophet is someone who can read the
handwriting on the wall, which means the broad forces
already working out their destiny according to the
principles informing them, then the task is less onerous,
because it doesn’t take a genius to see the
consequences facing this nation over the Clinton crisis.
In this respect the question of whether Clinton will
survive is the least important issue. More important is
whether the country will survive Clinton. Whether
President Clinton urged a 24-year-old intern to lie is
certainly significant, but it is less significant than
whether he is asking the whole country to lie along with
him.
The story is probably familiar enough to everyone by
now. Linda Tripp, a career civil servant who first
started working at the White House during the Bush
administration, gradually got pulled into the net of
deceit that Clinton had spun around himself trying to
maintain his hold on power. Tripp saw a woman come out of
Clinton’s office in disarray and later said that the
woman had had a sexual encounter with the president, for
which statement she was promptly denounced as a liar. She
vowed not to be caught in the same trap twice, and
started tape recording her conversations, and yet as the
investigation in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case
crept closer and closer, Tripp realized that she was in
the classic bind always faced by underlings in immoral
regimes. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t
is how the proverb goes. If Tripp lied, as the
administration had, and as it was pressuring its
employees to do, she could be charged with perjury;
however, if she told the truth, she would probably lose
her job. It was a no win situation, and it was in many
ways a paradigm for the meaning the Clinton
Administration had for the entire country: Go along with
the lie or be punished.
 And
so, trying to wriggle her way out of the dilemma, Tripp
started to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky,
the young lady she met when both women got transferred
from the White House to the Pentagon. Lewinsky was in
many ways the culture’s paradigm of the ideal
[young] woman. She had no problem lying; she had
no problem engaging perverse sexual activity, as long as
it fostered her career, although there was that edge of
disgust on the tapes and the residual contempt for the
man, old enough to be her father, who would encourage
this type of exploitative behavior. Lewinsky was also the
paradigmatic feminist because she was willing to trade
first sex and then complicity in a scheme to suppress the
truth as a stepping stone to some job for which she was
unqualified. She didn’t get the job at American
Express because she couldn’t pass a rudimentary
English test. The feminists, perhaps horrified at the
face staring back at them in the mirror, headed for the
tall grass, where most of them had been hiding ever since
the Paula Jones case started moving through the courts.
When one intrepid reporter finally caught up with
former
Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder at her sinecure at
Princeton University, the lady who manned the barricades
over the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court
opined lamely that there were only so many hours in the
day, as her explanation for the absence of feminist
support for Paula Jones.
The real answer was simpler: if you look as if you
live in a trailer park, don’t expect support from
the feminists. The facade of sexual solidarity, it turns
out, was just that. The pretext that feminists spoke for
women really meant that certain women were willing to
function as the ladies’ auxiliary for the ruling
class and its interests and quite willing in the end to
offer up less important woman on the altar of that
sacrifice. Shortly after Monica Lewinsky became a
political liability, the same crowd that frothed at the
mouth during the Clarence Thomas hearing about
women’s rights and sexual harassment and those who
impugned the motives of Anita Hill were now calling Miss
Lewinsky, from behind the veil of anonymity, "a little
nutty and a little slutty." As in the case of abortion
— and l’affaire Lewinsky coincided
uncannily with the 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade,
the lesson was all too obvious for those with eyes to
see: the lusts of the powerful are more important than
the lives of the weak. Monica Lewinsky was just a
24-year-old late term fetus thrown onto the garbage heap
of sexual convenience, as the feminist looked the other
way once again, because her case did not fit into their
agenda.
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Monica
Lewinsky was just a 24-year-old late term fetus
thrown onto the garbage heap of sexual
convenience, as the feminists looked the other
way once again, because her case did not fit
into their agenda.
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Since most of the talking class are
feminists, it should come as no surprise that
the columnists didn’t have muchto say
either, even though they needed newspaper
columns to make their cluelessness apparent.
Columnist
Ellen Goodman struggled valiantly with the
fact that her favorite politician was engaged in
behavior that would be grounds for lynching if
perpetrated by someone at the other end of the
political spectrum, and came up with the notion
that American’s are now more "morally
sophisticated" as the explanation, which is to
say that they have stopped trying to believe
that there should be some congruity between a
person’s public and private life. Molly
Ivins, another feminist columnist, not
particularly inclined to all this ambivalence
and agonizing about feminist lack of principle,
had a simpler point to make: I, for one," she
wrote in her column, "do not think that the
president’s sex life has squat to do with
his job."
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And I, for one, think that Molly Ivins is being
completely honest when she says this. If the big question
mark when it comes to Bill Clinton is not his
intelligence, but his honesty; the exact opposite is the
case with Molly Ivins. Between the two of them, between a
stultified talking class and the mendacious politicians
who exploit them for their own ends, we have a major
problem, and the problem which is moral at root, has
grown so large it has created a political crisis in the
highest office of the land.
Actually, after a while even the normally jocular
Molly grows pensive for a moment or two and gives some
indication that there might be some common denominator
here between fidelity and the duties associated with
leading a country. It used to be called integrity, but
that was before sexual liberation wiped moral
distinctions off the cultural map. "Of course, lying
under oath is never a trivial matter," the unflappable
Molly concedes in an uncharacteristically pensive
moment:
...But the instinct to conceal sexual
indiscretions is, at least, entirely human, and
it’s not the kind of sin that we ordinarily
associate with thunderous legalisms like
‘obstruction of justice.’
Not the kind of sin Molly associates it with anyway.
The Thomistic tradition, which is to say, the classical
tradition of moral thought in the West, has always
claimed that lust, like ideas, has consequences. Lust
according to the Angelic Doctor darkens the mind and
divides the powers of the will. In the latter instance,
Mr. Clinton has been lucky. His presidency has
corresponded to a period characterized by unprecedented
prosperity, at least for those who own large amounts of
stock, and an absence of international crisis. As a
result the only crises Clinton has had to face have been
crises of his own making, brought on solely by his own
sexual compulsions. Hilary, his wife, who has taken over
the task of damage control in the White House, announced
on a network talk show that her husband was the victim of
a "vast
right wing conspiracy," and the talking heads did
nothing to challenge her.
Well, maybe so, but the only way a right wing
conspiracy makes any sense in this context is one in
which Jesse Helms or Jerry Falwell implanted a computer
chip into the President’s brain which caused him to
drop his pants whenever whoever was in charge of the VRWC
pushed the button. Clinton’s adversity is clearly of
his own making, and he hasn’t coped well even with
that. Imagine, for a moment, that he were faced with a
real crisis which required a clear mind to understand the
situation and a determined will to see a solution
through, and you have some sense of the peril in which
this country finds itself. As it stands now, it looks as
if the president is going to launch an attack on Iraq as
a way of diverting the attention of the nation away from
his sex life.
This shows definitively that life imitates art, in
this case the movie Wag
the Dog, but beyond that it shows that a man in
the throes of lust is: 1.) never going to understand the
situation and 2.) never going to have the fortitude to
stay with a plan of action until the job is done. Foreign
policy is now a function the president’s sex life
because everything the president does is a function of
his sex life. Compulsions have a way of taking over. At
this point too, we need to make a distinction between
sin, which is something everyone does, and depravity,
which is the destruction of character which results from
habitual sin and the equally habitual rationalization
which follows from it. If we were talking about a sin
which got repented with a firm purpose of amendment, it
is unlikely that a special prosecutor could have
proceeded so confidently on the assurance that some
corroborating evidence would show up sooner or later. At
the very moment that Clinton was denying his sexual
harassment of Paula Jones— in the very same
deposition, as a matter of fact—he was admitting his
affair with Gennifer Flowers, which is to say admitting
that he lied to the country six years earlier, and with
the help of the press which supported his sexual
liberationist agenda, got away with it.
Which indicates that Clinton is not alone here. He
could never have gotten to where he is now without riding
the ebb tide of sexual liberation. The fact that lust
darkens the mind, adumbrated in some abstract way by the
Angelic Doctor, becomes obvious in a particularly graphic
way now anytime one picks up a newspaper. The best column
in this regard was written by Patricia
Smith of the Boston Globe, who gives some indication
of how the talking class behaves on its off hours. After
trivializing Clinton’s sexual exploits, Smith then
tells us that
We all have secrets. The media will have a
field day if I’m ever nominated for the Supreme
Court. There’s the unfortunate “sniff
this” episode; the pompon squad tryout fiasco;
the fact that I have indeed inhaled—rather
deeply—and I wouldn’t be afraid to admit it.
And who hasn’t at some time or another in
their sexual history, found themselves sharing sweat
and sleeping quarters with a no-no? Who hasn’t
slept with the wrong one at the right time, the right
one at the wrong time, or the absolutely wrong one at
the definitely wrong time? And for heaven’s sake,
who hasn’t engaged in a hasty two-minute
encounter in a stall elevator in the Sears Tower?
The lesson here is clear. The talking class has
adopted sexual liberation as its moral code. What they
don’t understand, since this sort of behavior
darkens the mind, is that the moral order is not like a
supermarket shelf full of discrete items. It is a
seamless garment, to appropriate a term from someone
else. If you pull on one thread, you unravel the entire
fabric.
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The
lesson here is clear. The talking class has
adopted sexual liberation as its moral
code.
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For now it should be obvious that claiming
that we’ve all had sex in stalled elevators
has other consequences as well. This sort of
behavior cuts the nerve of indignation. People
in glass houses don’t throw stones, nor do
they write columns calling for the impeachment
of presidents who engage in the same kind of
immoral behavior. If we think about it a little,
we can understand why it is in the interest of
the ruling class to promote sexual liberation as
a way of consolidating its power. The people who
engage in this type of behavior are besotted and
stultified and unable to object to any violation
of the law, moral or positive, because they
themselves are unindicted co-conspirators in the
same scheme.
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Demos, which is the ancient Greek word for poor white
trash, often has trouble thinking, especially when his
mind has been darkened by sexual license, so he has
recourse to the talking class, which does his thinking
for him in terms that make no sense but which mirror the
latest opinion polls and tells Demos what he wants to
hear or what he needs to hear in order to make him
comfortable in his subjugation. Demos, as usual,
doesn’t get it when it comes to l’affaire
Lewinsky. His understanding of the moral issue, as
framed by the talking class, goes as follows: “If
Clinton can get away with it, so can I.” Or as
expressed in one Doonsebury strip: “Where can I get
an intern?”
Demos as usual doesn’t get it, because he
doesn’t see that the world is not just made up of
people like him, even if the President of the United
States does act like poor white trash. The Greeks were
smart enough to see that the world was radically
bifurcated into two classes; the aristoi, their word for
the best, which at the time involved virtue, something
related to manliness, vir in the Latin, and strength, and
the polloi, the common man, from which we get the term
hoi polloi. The aristoi, in keeping with the collapse of
standards which followed from implementation of the
Enlightenment, are now merely the rich. The English
ideology, the rebirth of neoliberalism which the pope
decried in Cuba, the ideology of laissez faire: all have
decreed that government will be plutorcracy, which is to
say, that it will serve the interests of the rich at the
expense of the common good. Hoi Polloi are the rest of
us. Aristotle could talk about whether men were slaves by
nature or by law, but he never in his wildest dreams
would imagine a world in which the great majority were
not slaves whose lives were there principally to benefit
those who were “free” because they owned them.
The Clinton Administration, no matter what it calls
itself, is based on these principles. The rich can do
whatever they want. Their pleasure is more important that
the poor man’s life, if he is a fetus, or his job if
he is a worker, or his virtue if he is a woman.
A fallen world always reverts to this configuration,
and as a result Demos better get one thing straight. Bill
Clinton may act like poor white trash but he is not one
of them. Bill Clinton is part of the ruling class and one
of the illusions they love to create is that they are
just like the rest of us, which is not true. They are not
like the rest of us because they are rich and/or
powerful, and so when they urge Demos to break the moral
law in the interest of some specious liberation they are
really bringing about his enslavement.
Why? Because the moral law is the only thing that
protects the poor. Because Demos is neither rich nor
powerful, the only protection he has against the
predations of the rich and the powerful is the law, which
is to say the moral law and positive based on it. If he
liberates himself from the moral law, he creates a
society in which desire is the only measure of right and
wrong. But a world like this, no matter what Demos
thinks, is not democratic, because in the absence of
moral order, the desires of the rich will always triumph
over the desires of the weak and the poor. As I said
before, this is the lesson of Roe v. Wade. The
desires of the powerful are more important than the life
of the weak. The same applies to the political world at
large. A world without morals is a world in which the
rich get to do whatever they want. In this the Clinton
administration is the poor white trash version of the O.
J. Simpson trial.
Demos got it wrong because he failed to understand
that a world without morals is a radically two-tiered
universe, power and wealth being the main distinction
between these two groups. Demos is seduced into
supporting sexual liberation with the promise that he can
now do whatever he wants. This is followed by a momentary
sense of intoxication, which is followed by a period of
acting out his fantasies, which is followed by another
more sobering thought: If I can do anything I want to
them, Demos suddenly realizes, then they can do anything
they want to me. It’s that simple. And suddenly we
understand why horror is always the natural consequence
of sexual liberation.
In towns like South Bend, Indiana this scenario
usually plays itself out in the following way. During the
midst of l’affaire Lewinsky, a 49-year-old woman
shows up at the local bowling alley and guns down a
32-year-old woman and the 51-year-old man accompanying
her. The 49-year-old woman, you have probably guessed by
now, used to be the 51 year old’s wife. If he can
abrogate the moral law by taking up with another woman,
then why can’t she follow suit by shooting both of
them? Needless to say, if the Clintons hadn’t ended
up in the White House, one or the other of them would
have probably been gunned down in a trailer park or the
parking lot of a bowling alley by now too. But that only
brings up a second point.
The general anarchy which sexual liberation brings
about is a function of power. In the absence of morals,
the rich will get away with murder because their desires
are more powerful, and power in this context is the only
measure of right and wrong. Either might makes right, or
we are all bound by the terms of a moral order which is
not of our making. There is no third alternative. If
Demos abandons the moral order, he is ipso facto
guaranteeing his subjugation because Demos is ipso
facto neither rich nor powerful, simply by the fact
that he is Demos.
Demos, after watching television all these years
thinks that he is in the same class as the people who
rule over him. He thinks he has the same prerogatives.
The customer is king he is told as a way of convincing
him to buy things he does not need. Seeing the gods of
Hollywood and Washington acting like the gods which
inhabited Olympus long ago, he feels that he too can
ignore the moral order with impunity, until his ex-wife
shows up in the parking lot of the bowling alley with a
gun, like nemesis, to restore the order he spurned.
A world in which Bill Clinton is rewarded for lying,
which is precisely the world we live in now, is not a
world which will reward Demos for the same kind of
behavior, because Demos is, as I said, ipso facto, not
part of the ruling class. So once again, Demos gets it
wrong. A world in which the ruler is rewarded for lying
is a world in which his subjects can be punished for
telling the truth. This is the lesson which Linda Tripp
had to learn the hard way. She and Monica Lewinsky are
expendable, and if we allow the Clintons and the ruling
class they represent to continue their transvaluation of
all values, we will become expendable too. This is the
lesson this country needs to learn, fast and before it is
too late. The only protection the poor will ever have on
this earth is the moral law, enculturated as the basis
for the positive law. The only way a nation can guarantee
rights is in light of that moral order, and any nation
which subverts that moral order can only propose force,
which is the rule of the rich and the powerful as its
substitute.
As anyone who has ever seen the
Frank Capra film It’s
a Wonderful Life could testify, we now live in
Pottersville, perhaps because someone committed suicide
but more probably because too many people were seduced
into thinking the benefits outweighed the drawbacks in a
world without morals. Shakespeare must have been a
prophet because he saw Pottersville 400 years before it
came into existence. In Troilus and Cressida, Agamemnon
talks about a world without degree, which is to say, a
world without order—moral, political or musical. In
this world, the rude son should strike his father dead,
because right and wrong have been replaced by force as
the sole arbiter of action:
- Force should be right, or
rather, right and wrong
- Between whose endless jar
justice resides,
- Should lose their names
and so should justice too.
- Then everything includes
itself in power,
- Power into will, will
into appetite,
- And appetite, a universal
wolf,
- So doubly seconded with
will and power,
- Must make perforce a
universal prey,
- And last eat up
himself.
Is that clear, Molly? Do we understand now the
relationship between politics and morals? In a world run
by the English Ideology, as ours is, money is the prime
expression of force. The plutocrats want a world without
borders, a world without government (or one in which
government is the tool of their interests), and a world
without morals, because all of these regulations impede
the power their wealth can impose on the rest of us.
Writing in the New York Post at the height of the
scandal, Neal Travis said that New York’s "movers
and shakers. . . see the Whitewater prober [Kenneth
Starr] as a bumbling outsider who doesn’t
understand how the world works." And how does the world
work? "It’s all just business, power networking,"
said another tycoon. In other words, what do right and
wrong matter in a case like this as long as the people on
Wall Street are making money?
If right and wrong lose their names, force is all that
is left, and in a world run by force, the rich will be
rewarded for their vices every bit as conscientiously as
the poor will be punished for their virtues. The lesson
of the Clinton presidency and the O.J. Simpson trial, and
Roe v. Wade and the sexual revolution which
brought this regime to power in the ‘60s is very
simple: the rich and the powerful can get away with
murder. Demos goes along because his besotted mind is too
darkened to understand that sexual liberation is a form
of political control.
 It
wasn’t always this way. John
Adams, for one, understood that our constitution
could not function in the absence of a moral people. The
classical paradigm was still fresh in the mind of Adams
and the other founding fathers. Democracy always led to
tyranny because desires always got out of hand, and then
order had to be restored from without. The only
alternative to political control is self-control based on
the moral law, which all men can discover but no man
create or abrogate. The only protection a poor man has on
this earth is the moral law, which binds both rich and
poor, and allows a culture which is democratic in the
best sense of the word. The alternative is the culture of
death. A world without morals is a world without
protection for the weak, where right and wrong are simply
another word for the appetite of the powerful. That, by
the way, is the best description of the perilous state
this republic (or should I say empire?) has reached at
the end of the 20th century.
Bill Clinton didn’t get to the White House on his
own initiative, even though he is an ambitious man, and
even if he is nowhere near as ambitious as his wife. He
got to where he is by riding the ebb tide of moral
decadence and representing all of the forces which have
fostered this decline in their own interests. The fact
that he has risen as far as he has from humble origins to
being a Rhodes
scholar to the Yale Law School to governor of
Arkansas and then a president who can be literally caught
with his pants down and still ride high in the opinion
polls is at once an indictment of the sexual revolution
as well as one of its major sequelae.
Let there be no mistake here: if he gets away with it,
the country will have crossed a Rubicon of incalculable
proportion.
E. Michael Jones is the
editor of Culture Wars and the author of nine books.
Monsters from the Id explores the
connection between sex and horror and will be
published by Spence Publishers, Dallas, Texas, in
September 1998.
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