By Hani Shukrallah I have as much interest in what Bill Clinton did or did not do with Monica Lewinsky as I have had in the various infidelities, and confessions thereof, of assorted British royals, living and departed -- i.e., none. True, there is a certain gloating satisfaction, most notably in our part of the world, in seeing the world's supreme thug humbled and humiliated. But this is a kind of gratification that evokes a sense of nastiness, of pettiness, that demeans rather than inspires. For all its sleaze, Watergate was a footnote to a grandiose text, made up by the stunningly complete victory of the Vietnamese people, and by the tremendous -- if short-lived -- emancipatory forces that had been unleashed in American society, in part by the Vietnam war, since the late '60s: the anti-war movement, the African American struggle, the women's struggle, the youth rebellion. There were heroes and villains in Watergate. Nixon's disgrace ennobled his enemies. Sure, ultimately Watergate was cooptation -- just what the system needed to "heal the wounds" of the previous years, to pin the blame for the deep schisms created in American society by the Vietnam war and the social and political strife it helped trigger, on one "evil" man and his coterie. But at least there was something to coopt. In "Monicagate", there aren't even real villains. All is mean, petty and sordid. And the sordid nature of the whole affair lies not in what Clinton did or did not do with Monica Lewinsky, but in the fact that we are forced to know about it in great, sordid detail. It lies in the months of mass voyeurism that reached a frenzied climax with the publication of Starr's eminently pornographic report. Sexuality is possibly the most private and most vulnerable aspect of people's humanity, and there is something horribly ugly and dehumanising in exposing the intimate details of the sexual life of particular people to the eyes of others -- in this case, millions, indeed, billions of others. It dehumanises not only those whose sexual lives are so exposed but also, indeed more so, those who revel in having it exposed before them. Equally sordid is the outpouring of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of the actual culprits on either side of the battle-line, the hypocrisy of the media and the hypocrisy of the public -- the hordes of lawyers and spin-doctors; the confessions, apologies, studied tears and prayers, all of which should evoke nothing but disgust. The fact that it rarely does is symptomatic of a deep malaise. Take, for instance, the endless debates and commentaries on whether Clinton struck the right note of contrition in his first confession. Take also the no less voluminous debates and commentaries on whether the president's sexual proclivities are a private or public affair -- how much of the commentators' own private lives would stand up to Starr-like scrutiny, one cannot help but wonder. Take yet again that supreme example of hypocrisy common to self-styled moralists and clerics throughout history and everywhere in the world: to promise hell and damnation for sinners, while actually reveling in the detailed expounding of their sins. This time around, it has not been merely Bible-bangers who drew this kind of squalid gratification from the details of Clinton and Lewinsky's encounters, but practically everybody, liberals and conservatives alike. As for the American public, it has for months been complaining that the Monica affair had gone on long enough, that it was time that the "file" was closed; nevertheless, it has lapped up every new detail, reading more newspapers and watching more television for the sake of more squalid bits of news, and more and more absurd and irrelevant pontificating by absurd and ridiculous commentators. This overflowing of hypocrisy is epitomised in the "serious" political and legal debate on whether Clinton lied to the American people and perjured himself before the courts. Gore Vidal, in an article published some weeks ago, sarcastically referred to a study conducted a few years before and published under the title "The Day America Told the Truth". The study, which polled a wide spectrum of American public opinion on a variety of subjects, revealed that 90 per cent of those polled confessed to being "habitual liars". Vidal aptly comments: "That the president of such an electorate should lie about sex makes him more sympathetic than not." What I find totally horrifying, however, is that the American public and their pundits' willingness to forgive Clinton his sexual transgressions -- but not his lying -- will depend on whether his "confession" before the Grand Jury was truthful or not. But that confession itself is horribly warped. In it, Clinton claimed that he had never engaged in "intentional touching", of Lewinsky, but did not deny the allegation that she had performed oral sex on him. According to the Starr report, Clinton testified that "the person who has oral sex performed on him" is not engaging in "sexual relations" as defined in the Paula Jones case. What kind of morality is this that condemns a public lie about a private matter, but not such a debasement of love as is to be found in Clinton's confession? Ultimately, debasement is the name of this game. The public or political sphere is no longer one in which citizens even try to develop and express a common political will, but a realm of passive, squalid voyeurism and cheap thrills. This is the debasement of the very idea of citizenship and, ultimately, even of people's humanity. Gore Vidal sees the whole Clinton/Lewinsky saga in terms of a right-wing conspiracy engineered by corporate America against a liberal president. Be that as it may. There is in my view a much larger corporate "conspiracy" at work -- one engineered almost spontaneously by a whole system, rather than by particular people. The aim is well put by Vidal: to ensure that "the country [I would add: the world] and its people exist only to make money for corporations". The object of the conspiracy are not, however, "feckless politicians" of the Bill Clinton type, but "the people" themselves -- to keep them diverted, to create for them a virtual political sphere in which they debate, discuss, and are polarised not with respect to such things as the health service, corporate taxation or the lack thereof, trade union rights, wages and working hours, the disintegration of the welfare state, or anything else that might upset the "free" operation of the "free market". Rather, they should focus on such matters as whether sexual relations include receiving oral sex; whether Clinton's confession struck the right note; and, to take our thoughts back a bit, whether Princess Di was truly in love with Dodi. This is nothing but a Roman circus. It is testimony to the sophistication of late 20th-century capitalism, however, that the instruments used to bring diversion and entertainment to the citizenry are not gladiators, slaves or Christian-eating lions, but Caesar himself. These, after all, are democratic times, and throwing Caesar to the lions for the greater enthrallment of all is possibly the most apt definition of modern-day liberal democracy that anyone can come up with now -- at "the end of history".
