The shaming of America

...Commonweal 9 November6,1998...

...But Bill Clinton has at least encountered religious teaching, family loyalty, and basic moral concepts of honorable behavior...

...All such abuses of power are morally shameful...

...He has had upright friends and contemporaries who came out of his Arkansas milieu...

...And unlike a judge sentencing a drunken driver to attend AA's twelvestep program, the House and Senate cannot enforce therapy...

...He knows perfectly well that a prime minister, however dictatorial his impulses, can always be removed by the voters, as happened to John Major, and occasionally by his colleagues, as happened to Margaret Thatcher...

...My sense of shame over her degradation could not be assuaged by thinking that since this is Holland, she could be a licensed "sex worker," get regular health care, and be in line for a pension...

...But maybe not...

...Embarrassment can be social and collective...

...Something similar was true of Margaret Thatcher, whom Blair admires, when she was at the peak of her popularity...

...Guilt, on the other hand, is felt by an individual who actively commits a sin or engages in wrongdoing...

...I found Blair fascinating and puzzling before the election, and do even more so now that he is in office and so evidently enjoying the exercise of power...

...We're gasping for fresh air, but we're probably not going to get relief any time soon...

...Many of Blair's political aims remain obscure but one is already very clear: to win a second full four- or five-year term of office for Labour, something which has never happened in its occasional periods in government...

...Welcome are studies in religion and politics in which Christianity is approached comparatively and/or in which systematic empirical research plays a role...

...But Thatcher believed in division and exclusion, openly regarding not only the left in the nation but much of the center right as her bitter enemies...

...Functioning parts of the self appear to be going off in different directions, with no "there there...

...In properly socialized persons, both shame and guilt arise from a violation of internalized standards of worth that transcend the self...

...An addicted person loses much of his or her freedom, but moral resistance is always possible...

...I'll never forget walking through the redlight district in Amsterdam and seeing a scantily clad prostitute standing up for sale in her window...

...Thus my defenses against the Monicagate mudslide were breached...

...Yet in Clinton's case there may be more going on than immoral abuse of power...

...One of the most disturbing details in the Starr report is the account of Clinton eating, talking on the phone, and being sexually stimulated, all at the same time...

...He dominates the government, the Commons, and the Labour party, which has not yet officially changed its name to New Labour, though you might think it had if you listen to Blair and his ministers...

...So what's to be done...

...When the compulsive behavior is admitted to be harmful, there is always the moral option to seek help...

...A puzzling prime minister n ~ have an ingenious acquaintance who is convinced that Tony Blair's New Labour regime provides sinister parallels with the Fascist dictatorships of prewar Europe...

...Oh no, arrgh, I felt stricken with shame and covered my eyes as though I could blot out the knowledge...

...It+s a very bad sign when sexual activity gets isolated from a person's family, and from professional and religious commitments...

...He publishes letters in the press giving his reasons, some of which sound disconcertingly plausible...

...Bernard Bergonzi WHAT DOES TONY WANT...

...Suffering indignity and shame may be a form of trauma...

...in modern British politics a prime minister with a disciplined cabinet and a solid and docile majority in the House of Commons (docile because many of the members have hopes of preferment), backed by popular support, can get his/her way on practically anything...

...Without informed consent, I was treated to the Starr report with all its soap opera-curefarce details...

...But skipping here and there means you miss a lot...

...Eighteen months after coming into office, Blair remains extraordinarily popular in the country, as shown by opinion polls...

...The most skillful manipulators are those who, at the moment they utter falsehoods, can self-deceptively be convinced of their own story...

...Clinton's shamelessness has already ensnared us in months and months of embarrassed shame...

...Wincing and flinching, I reluctantly skimmed my way in and out of it...

...Shameless behavior infects observers...

...While the guilty may atone, the ashamed often strike out to save face...

...If one part of Bill is not in touch with the other parts of Bill, it makes it easier Commonweal 8 November6,1998 to lie...

...Not watching TV news provides protective insulation...

...Monica Lewinsky may never have had a chance, coming from California and her Valley Girl world...

...slowly a habit becomes ingrained, and it becomes compulsive...

...Ad hoc spiritual counsel for this kind of deep-seated habitual disordered behavior can hardly be effective...

...She was dark-skinned and, like many other prostitutes who are immigrants, she might be vulnerable to the abuses that produce so much post-traumatic stress disorder among prostitutes...

...Private sexual behavior may not always affect public professional functioning, but when a person's behavior points to inner contradictions and a lack of selfcontrol, trouble lies ahead...

...he has turned the Labour party, once an engagingly ramshackle structure that sometimes managed to win an election, into a super-efficient machine manned by sharpsuited spin doctors and image burnishers...

...Manuscripts will be received until April 1, 1999...

...Guilty persons can act to make reparation, but shame cannot be so easily corrected...

...All manuscripts should be submitted in QUADRUPLICATE to The Review of Politics, Box B, Notre Dame, IN 46556...

...The vile system of chattel slavery included the cruel exposure and public sale of human beings...

...Being sorry because you have been caught and painfully punished is not the same as feeling truly ashamed or truly guilty...

...Shame makes you want to sink into the ground and hide...

...Could Humpty Dumpty be put together again with prayer and good intentions...

...Welcome are studies that bring the resources of the Christian tradition to bear on some problem of national or international politics...

...Words and deeds become dangerously separated from one another...

...he has warned Blair's intellectual guru, the sociologist Anthony Giddens, to beware the fate of Martin Heidegger, who once supported Hitler...

...Communications indicating an intention to submit a manuscript are encouraged...

...But I am an omnivorous reader, and especially faithful to the New York Times...

...If nothing else, such risky and predatory behavior is incompatible with Clinton's high intelligence and ambition...

...Even when the deficiencies and lapses exposed are not yours, you can feel ashamed to be a bystander...

...Many morally tone-deaf folks have flunked "Morality and Civilization 101," that crucial course in life...

...Washington insiders tell tales of Clinton's crude pursuit of women in public, which were clear signs of a problem...

...Welcome are manuscripts that consider topics (or some aspect or instance thereof) such as Christianity and Liberalism, Catholicism and American Democrac3~ Christianity in Post-Modern Analysis, and thinkers such as Thomas More, John Calvin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr...

...Questions may be addressed to the editor at ROP.Editor.l@nd.edu...

...For the next two years we are probably condemned to limp along with a leader who would be promptly fired if he were a school superintendant...

...His v~3dess and self-destructively obsessive behavior has all the earmarks of a sexual addiction...

...Blair is a good democrat, leader of a party which last year swept to power in one of the greatest electoral victories in British history...

...But power is the key word...

...Impeachment for high crimes doesn't seem to exactly fit the case...

...It turns out you can feel shame for others, even for people who don't know enough to feel ashamed of themselves...

...I don't think the country actually condones his behavior, but most people are willing to let him get away with it, if they can be spared prolonged entrapment in the shameful stink...

...It's nonsense, though...

...He has made many changes, not all of them agreeable, even if they are claimed to be necessary...

...What were all these sly jokes about cigars, I wondered...

...In particular, powerful males who sexually exploit less powerful females are despicable...

...A broad interpretation of that theme is encouraged...

...Most addictions emerge after repeated choices that are voluntary...

...Air pollution and moral smog are suffocating us...

...Are they feeling ashamed for him now...

...A columnist has THE REVIEW OF POLITICS Christianity and Politics: Special Issues The Review of Politics will mark the passing of this millennium with two special issues given to essays and scholarly studies engaging in some way the relationship of Christianity and Politics...

...Just ask those who have dealt with clerical pedophiles...

...This fragmented, unfocused behavior seems to be that of a person who, to put it mildly, is not operating as an integrated, self-controUed unit...

...Blair, on the other hand, wants to include everyone in the New Labour project, such as middle-class home owners who usually vote Conservative and businessmen who always do, and is making his pitch accordingly...

...as a result, she provoked hatred as well as devotion...

...Coming upon the explanation in a magazine article, I was instantly sorry to find out...

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