Privacy

...November 2, 1998 DAVID BROMWICH is an editor of Dissent and teaches English at Yale University...

...As one watched the debate unfold, one could not help recalling that the president has done more than anyone else to sink our politics to the level of "conversation," a mode of conversation particularly modeled on the soap opera, the radio or television call-in, and the encounter group...

...There an important ideal of privacy, and an ideal of public dignity, were broken while the spectators had their attention fixed on details...

...The power and the public status of the target are not themselves what provoked the attack...

...so that the apology had, in his mind, already the quality of a public fact...

...genuine humility and genuine vulgarity, all most strangely rounded by a rational yuppie appreciation of the glitz of the world...

...The resistance called for a certain stamina, but it did not require much reflection...

...The argument for postponing the trial—that it would become a national distraction—was a matter about which the justices felt compelled to have no professional opinion...

...What should he have said...

...But perhaps the mistake was ours, too...

...Senator Joseph Lieberman's "Everyone entering public life must give up his private life" may be the first of these...

...Wrote Brecht: Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another...

...They stand exposed as fanatics to the core, and fanatics of a changeable hue, for whom their ends can justify any means, while the ends themselves change to suit the tactics of the year or the month...

...Who but a besotted moralist like William Bennett, or an on-the-run strategist like William Kristol, would now pretend for a moment that the incontinence of Bill Clinton is any match for the indecency of Kenneth Starr...

...It is not right to call these people reporters anymore...

...They are now an autonomous milieu of pure publicity: the talking carriers of the media manner, their faces drawn in the permanent rictus of a faintly amused half smile...

...It is the feelings of the people that are natural on this issue...

...Forty-five years ago the workers in East Berlin struck against the communist government, and the government dismissed the uprising as not representative of the real people...

...The O.J...

...We then have to decide what facts we will never pay to find, and what inquiries we ought to prohibit in principle...

...They kept their disapproval pure by keeping it theoretical...

...To repeat: what the media have done and contemplate doing to the life of Bill Clinton, they are in the process of licensing themselves to do, eventually, to any of us...

...I lied also in order to defend the dignity of my office, which I had injured but not destroyed by an unconsidered series of private acts...

...Change those poll numbers and change them fast, or we are going to keep on deluging you with filth...

...What more was he to say...

...It miscarried, for the anchor people, in two ways at once...

...But a national leader who said even that much would sound like a man preparing to surrender his leadership...

...In earlier ages, it was done to a canting and whining accompaniment...

...They wanted him to grovel...

...With concern, they tell us that they cannot talk to their children about the president...

...In the fifties, on television, there was a sick game show with elements drawn from soap opera, called Queen for a Day...

...And hypocrisy has never meant to fail to practice what you preach—that is just human weakness—but rather the pretense of cherishing feelings you do not really cherish...

...Meanwhile, we cannot talk to our children about them...

...They do not see the man of whom less professional observers have formed a vivid image: the fundamentalist zealot who corrected himself for ambition's sake, hoping for a seat on the Supreme Court, but who, disappointed of that prize and on the verge of academic obscurity, found in some taped conversations about the president a stimulus impossible to resist, and hired a team spearheaded by small-town prosecutors —bullies, religious enthusiasts, and of course sex-mad, but invigorating helps for a desk lawyer who had never presented evidence to a grand jury, and did not so much as interview a witness in all his exertions to bring down a president of the United States...

...Our affection for each other as friends, our toleration of each other as neighbors, and our mutual responsibility as citizens depend on our not being interested in knowing every private thing...

...The president's late-found desire to lift the nation to a semblance of public discourse is in his self-interest, but it is also in the nation's interest, and we ought to observe the irony with an unrebuking silence...

...When the looked-for gesture of contrition did not occur, the media pronounced his dry and dignified utterance the worst speech in memory and began to subject it to a novel therapy of collective rewriting...

...They ask questions in a reflexive format that scarcely requires an informing idea ("Bill Kristol, how do you react to that...

...Most of them saw what the publicists did not want them to see, that the story of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was political after all, and part of a larger world than politics...

...He was wrong to take us down the road of a personal politics...

...It was a speech not a talk...

...but any decent parent would shame a child out of aspiring to the status of a Tim Russert, a Cokie Roberts, a Chris Matthews...

...The evolution of the paternal stance from condescending hope ("Wait till they see how ugly the facts really are") to a punitive scorn ("People seem to be worrying only about their pocketbooks") to weary disapproval and finally unconditional reprobation may have been the only comic diversion of 1998, but it was a sideshow fit for a connoisseur...

...The failure has several dimensions: the arrogance of the courts, which stripped a president of the security of office and the trust of friendship...

...We have only to decide not to inquire into certain parts of the lives of other people...

...So, what any citizen could have told the Supreme Court justices about distraction, and about the tenor of American public life, they could not legalistically consent to see for themselves...

...Yet far below politicians, on the scale of moral dignity, all thoughtful children now rate lawyers, and far below lawyers the media...

...The press followed eagerly...

...But we need another name for the culture of mock-scandalized horror and euphoria, which, with the publication of the Starr Report, has become America's leading export of morals and manners to the world...

...So far, the people have not...

...The private deliberation of jurors (a deep convention among the rituals of civic conscience) was tampered with regularly by the press, and the judge in that case went far to foster the understanding that no power on earth could limit the contest of wills between determined lawyers...

...above all, the silence of the legal profession, from which some stirrings of indignation might have been expected in a society where respect for the law and the perpetuation of liberty are not accidentally related...

...The Republicans in Congress marched through the same stations of generous confidence, annoyance, and disenchantment, first giving out every possible DISSENT / Winter 1999 27 document of the investigations to let the people judge, and then, when the judgment did not go their way, taking the high ground of constitutional reserve and a most deliberate deliberation...

...The Supreme Court looked on Paula Jones's civil suit as a thing to itself, a piece they were not obliged to set in any larger picture...

...It was public, rather than confessional...

...Clinton, stung by his ordeal, has now mined deeply in this native ore of tear trawling, but he dipped into it long before, and his being known to perform in that element is one of the hidden causes of his trouble...

...I apologize to the American people for having lied to them in order to protect the privacy of my family, which I had exposed to embarrassment by my own conduct...

...Simpson trial was a watershed...

...They were running ahead of themselves and ahead of the story—wondering, for example, why he did not apologize to the DISSENT / Winter 1999 25 Lewinsky family, without knowing that he had done so, hours before, in the "secret" grandjury testimony whose secrecy he knew would not be respected...

...It is the feelings of the investigators, and their tools in the media, that have coarsened to an amazing degree...

...The great presider over political sinning and repenting, Senator Orrin Hatch, the man with the lowest boiling point in all of Congress, was quoted with awe by the media when he offered an "olive branch" to the president, on condition that he produce a speech sufficiently servile and abject...

...He has philanthropic instincts, with unlimited personal appetites...

...The crime has been an outright assault on the common privacy of a citizen, disguised as a search for the hidden vice of an important neighbor...

...This experiment on the happiness of the American people has also been the work of the mass media...

...They had only to ask themselves, like lawyers: why should it be a distraction...

...A free people cannot be trusted to comply with requests made in this spirit: they may think it rather an insult to their pride than a compliment to their docility...

...to calumniate in the press as a prelude to impeaching in the Congress and indicting in the courts...

...For what they do to the president of the United States, they may do more easily to ordinary citizens, and we can be sure that they will do it in the future when the projected obtainable ratings are high enough...

...Also, it was not said on bended knee—the greatest mistake of all...

...The media have been doubly wrong in their effort to keep us there, and, with a prosecutor feeding them lines, to instruct us in the pleasures of making and punishing a scapegoat...

...If a boy or girl today were to confess an ambition to go into politics, one would feel some reserve...

...and they give inside estimates of the rhetorical calculations they suppose are the essence of political thought...

...He approaches a good deal of his own life as a spectator, even now, and this has always carried extreme dangers of which he appears unaware...

...He stood on his rights as a citizen, and deplored the searches, seizures, and interrogations that have exposed him and his friends and associates to a mortification without precedent in American history, and without sanction in the Constitution...

...AGAIN AND AGAIN in this crisis, one has had to wonder about the value of privacy as an irreducible republican good—a value the investigation of the president has placed so suddenly in such a doubtful light...

...Justice Antonin Scalia's tone when he asked this question—you can hear it on the Internet—was jaunty, sarcastic, dismissive...

...Poor media, they should elect another people...

...He is a strange combination, too strange to duplicate, or to be quite representative of anything but himself, whatever people say about the spirit of the sixties...

...What Clarence Thomas saw on the Coke can, and what he said about it, had exactly as much relevance to his candidacy for the Supreme Court as the physical acts of the president with Monica Lewinsky have to his capacity to execute faithfully the duties of his office...

...Probably not— it is not yet prostrate enough...

...The prestige of a career in politics has declined in the last generation...

...Would that have done it...

...It matters only because we are governed by opinion much more than by laws...

...Privacy is a good, if we agree to call it a good, that comes without much effort to a people early in its exposure to the technologies of information...

...Whether or not the refusal continues long, there is cause to celebrate the durability of their skepticism...

...Women of humble lives and disastrous fortunes would tell their sob stories, and the studio audience, wrenched by the spectacle of grueling misery, would choose by measure of an applause meter the one they thought most pitiful, the winner being awarded her choice of a refrigerator, a washing machine, a week in Florida, or whatever basket of goodies the sponsor had prepared...

...To what other end could their tactics conceivably point...

...In relation to the technology of trespass, the manners of American liberty are in their infancy now...

...In the language of the Constitution, there is nothing about a suit against a standing president by an inflamed citizen with a personal grievance...

...We will also have to believe, or pretend to believe, a good many patent lies...

...A more disturbing precedent, and closer to the burden of the charges against Bill Clinton, was the confirmation hearings for 26 DISSENT / Winter 1999 Clarence Thomas...

...He admitted his faults as a man, and suggested that these, while worthy of rebuke, were not properly the subject of a major national investigation...

...Thus the door that some Democrats swung open in the Thomas hearings, with their sacred doctrine of "the asymmetry of power in the workplace" (they will take another ten years to solve the asymmetry of power in life)—that door, the Republican Party walked through in January 1998 and beckoned the press and the American people to follow...

...The line between public and private, so plain to so many Americans, now seems invisible or unimportant to the prosecutors in the Office of the Independent Counsel...

...28 DISSENT / Winter 1999...

...Yet the fanatics have worked with materials ready to hand...

...Yet all that is necessary for the morals of a nation to become thoroughly depraved is for people to act and judge by a motive of unfettered curiosity...

...This recognition emerged first in the wide disparity between the reactions of the press and the people to Clinton's speech of August 17, 1998...

...It was too personal in its protest against the independent counsel, and too lofty in its disdain for the national pornographic dialogue...

...But in this they seem to represent, only with greater intensity, the feelings of most Americans outside the thrall of the media...

...the bureaucratic timidity of the Justice Department, which allowed the independent counsel to pursue his revisions of the Constitution without challenge...

...if a career in law, pity for the sacrifice of mother-wit...

...a gift for friendship and none for loyalty...

...For a time, they may have been all that deterred it...

...The rest of us are much less formidably armed against such assaults of publicity...

...BETWEEN the silent industry of the lawyers and the splatter of daily disclosures, something ordinary yet remarkable, something in fact almost miraculous, was happening in the minds of Americans...

...The innovation of Sam and Tim and Chris and Cokie and George and George, and all the rest of that crew, has been to prove that the solemn posture is consistent with gaping and giggling...

...The procedure has proved too intricate for the public mind, which looks on it as a species of blackmail...

...They do more than report, and they do less...

...It is a crisis in the government of opinion, in which the conveyors of opinion, on whom the public still relies, have played a despicable part...

...They judge him by the part of his career that is familiar to them, and what they see is a fellow member of the legal elite, who, as solicitor general and as judge, bore all the markings of a reasonable man...

...It was concise —unlike almost every previous utterance of Bill Clinton's—and it made a consistent point...

...But this holds true only for a free people—the sort of people who would want to invent so queer a thing as privacy...

...An opinion backed by approval or disapproval remains preferable to a law, for the same reason that persuasion is preferable to force...

...posers, the sham piety of whose sentiments is exceeded only by the savagery of their voyeurism...

...a partly selfless ambition, with courage that hardly serves him but on selfish occasions...

...The Gingrich-Kristol revolution is a combined assault of sex mania and publicity, with steady doses of obscenity administered as a healthful emetic to a valetudinarian populace, who are expected to deplore with proper solemnity what they obediently consume...

...Hypocrisy is always glib, as these people are glib...

...It takes a more conscious effort on behalf of privacy when so much information is simply available...

...And yet some things about the speech had impressed people not ordinarily susceptible to the charms of this president...

...They have metamorphosed into screenmasters whose only motive is curiosity, whose only standard of judgment is "Will it play...

...Still, the most cynical observer could not have predicted the reversal by which conservative Republicans would embrace real-life pornography as a means of achieving the sanctification of private life and the family...

...They represent the finishing touch in America's long work of perfecting the arts of insincerity...

...Bill Clinton is the most powerful man in the country, and a man with an incurable fondness for public attention...

...and the reason was, they did not know what they wanted him to say...

...The media are only the loudest infants, and if one is puzzled to account for their indifference to the methods of Kenneth Starr, the answer may lie chiefly in the nature of the target...

...Then it was the feminists, among full-time opinion makers, who were willing to bring under a glare of hideous publicity a forgotten private trespass, and to break new bounds in the grossness of public revelations so long as in the process they could secure the defeat of a nominee they loathed...

...They are giving themselves permission...

...There is hardly a life that will bear to be looked at from every angle, in every corner and hiding place...

...This was not enough for tastes now seasoned to the refinements of the media...

...If we accept an impeachment on the sex data, we will have to embrace some maxims alien to democracy...

...If, as has been said, a people are ready for liberty when they do not ignore a cruel attack on a fellow citizen in a public street, then Americans these past several months have been acting like a free people, while the media and large elements of the political culture have been acting like slaves...

...Few of the gossiping moralists tried to put into words the exact formulation they would have preferred to hear from the president on this occasion...

...It is an episode in the destruction of privacy that has become the totalitarian democratic project of our time...

...Out of the daily glut and purge of nauseous matter, these statesmen hope to bring forth what their advisers call a virtuous polity...

...We have relied on lawyers too much for our liberty—forgetting that they are all in some degree legalists, and the best of them necessarily pieceworkers...

...It is not yet a crisis of democratic government, though it may be approaching that...

...But the decorous response of some senators was a proof not only of obtuseness, but of acquired decency, a trait not much remarked because not much possessed by the left-wing Senate staffers who dragged Anita Hill into the spotlight...

...And by a professional deformation, an awareness of that line, and so a sense of ordinary shame and decency, have been bred out of the collective character of the national media...

...President, it is not our intent to embarrass you...

...THE LOBBYISTS of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the Christian Coalition, and the politicians who serve their will in spectacles like these, have been doing something terrible to our institutions, as Clarence Thomas said during his ordeal...

...The liberal notion about that event has been that it opened a broadcast seminar for the older male elite who "just didn't get it" regarding the theory of sexual harassment...

...But, by the wreck of privacy generally, the media are doing something far more dangerous...

...Hatch's judgment of the actual text of the speech, "What a jerk," was quoted with respect for its canny statesmanship...

...Maybe, in a previous life, these people were good for something...

...This may have served to lighten the usual prohibitions...

...They know close to nothing about the immediate background of current events or about the history of the regions they cover, 24 DISSENT / Winter 1999 which are rapidly shrinking to the White House, the White House, and the White House...

...But of course that was their intent: to embarrass and humiliate and destroy...

...IT is not surprising that black Americans should sympathize with a president hounded all the way from an Arkansas hotel to the illusory shelter of a summit conference in Moscow...

...As for the formal respect for Kenneth Starr among lawyers of moderate or liberal views, the reason again lies in the professional metaphysics of piecework...

...and much as he has given up at various times, and on various issues, Bill Clinton was not yet ready to surrender entirely...

...Solomon Wisenberg, a lesser luminary of Kenneth Starr's office, said in his interrogation of the president on the grand-jury tape, "Mr...