LAWYERS AND CIRCUSES
BROOKS, DAVID
LAWYERS AND CIRCUSES By David Brooks If there's anybody left in America who qualifies as genteel, surely it's New York Times columnist and PBS frontman Russell Baker. But these days Baker has been...
...There was recently a segment on a Los Angeles radio station that had sages Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Unlike journalists or writers, lawyers with subpoena power can unearth personal details with a thoroughness that was previously available only to novelists...
...So to address such confusion, public discussion has shifted to topics of private behavior, and not just on Jerry Springer, but on the network news and in the news magazines...
...So too, it's a little odd to see some conservatives, who talk a lot about the degradation of culture, suddenly unbothered by public discussion of semen-stained dresses...
...These lawyers are portrayed as the strategic masterminds behind the conflict...
...But the shift from Walter Lippmann to Geraldo Rivera is not strictly a story of cultural decay...
...mined which subjects were fit for public discussion...
...But these days Baker has been in what for him qualifies as a quaking rage...
...They were the ones who prized frankness...
...Not long ago, the boomers were attacking decorum as stuffy and repressive...
...But as compensation, the writers (journalists, intellectuals) got to play a unique public role...
...Its donors have stopped giving, to protest the group's decision to support Paula Jones's lawsuit...
...People weren't innocent about such topics (read John O'Hara), but that was no reason to acknowledge them...
...The fact that the public has so far accepted Clinton despite his behavior is more significant than anything that has happened or is likely to happen to Clinton personally...
...Monicagate, which has unfolded in Washington and involves its top politician, is more a legal spectacle than a political scandal...
...In last week's Newsweek, lavish attention was paid to Clinton lawyers David Kendall and Nicole Seligman...
...At its head were issues involving guns and money...
...Unlike Iran-contra or Hiss-Chambers, it is not related to any great policy matter...
...It's O.J., the Menendez brothers, Lewinsky, babies in the dumpster, kids shooting in the schoolyard...
...He recently wrote a column titled "A Shudder of Disgust," about the degradation of public discourse...
...But the novelists have retreated to their alternative academic universe...
...In Time, there was a worshipful profile of Lewinsky lawyer Billy Martin...
...America is always in the midst of redefining itself...
...It's hard not to sympathize with the last defenders of the old order...
...But these legal spectacles are not traditional stories, or non-fiction novels in courtroom form...
...The legal arena is perfect for controversies about private behavior because it allows us to probe for ever more lurid details while at the same time giving us a dispassionate and technical way to talk about them...
...We're seeing the emergence of a new social phenomenon: the legal spectacle...
...These spectacles serve as the pretext for that kind of discussion...
...And it's not just liberal fogies who feel this way...
...Legal spectacles are like war in that they make fast promotion possible...
...It's clear the old Protestant establishment can no longer exert sufficient social pressure to enforce its standards...
...The lawyers, of course, had to squirrel away over boring briefs...
...Then you got down to less prestigious but still important matters, like education and welfare...
...And what these people are praised for is their ability to give advice on etiquette and conduct...
...So instead, America has turned to . . . lawyers...
...The legal arena has taken center stage...
...During the Cold War, there was a broad consensus about private morality, but strong disagreements about public policy...
...It's more accurate to say that public passions have migrated...
...Unlike Watergate, it didn't start as an effort to gain political advantage...
...Baker, Schlesinger, and those Rutherford donors are all standing up for a set of social standards now eroding—something conservatives ought to respect...
...Pretty soon, the legal superstructure and the sociological commentary begin to overshadow the original event...
...It is not some temporary blip that the country can put behind it once Monica leaves the scene...
...Monicagate's importance will lie in the way it influences our tolerance of adultery and lying...
...So arms control, foreign affairs, and monetary policy were the most prestigious topics...
...It's hard now even to recall the furious intensity that surrounded aid to the contras, let alone episodes like the Hiss-Chambers trial...
...Below them all, however, was a range of subjects, private matters, that were unfit for parlor chatter—abortion, adultery, private perversion...
...Now there's a general scrambling of high and low, and this, since Monica, has provoked a raft of hypocrisy on both sides...
...When America needs to take its temperature, it doesn't look to novels or to the halls of Congress—it looks to the courts...
...Imagine a Shakespearean tragedy that has Othello's legal team battling Iago's legal team while the two principals sit in the dressing room, awaiting the outcome...
...Political corruption like Whitewater or Asia-gate arouses passions only within the niche market of political junkies...
...So the current fascination with lewd details and suspect dresses is not simply some lapse of taste...
...The writers, meanwhile, would wear rumpled jackets, play tennis wearing any old T-shirt, and enjoy cheap vacations in national parks...
...They aren't sure how they are supposed to treat people who have committed sins...
...These legal spectacles are going to dominate the media and American life for quite a while...
...In college, the deal was you could be either a lawyer or a writer...
...What's interesting is the arena we have chosen for our discussions about private morality...
...matters because of the lessons different groups have drawn about race relations...
...As the months go by, the lawyers and pundits construct a legal superstructure and a dense thicket of commentary around the original kernel of crime...
...It's a little rich to hear baby boomers who have spent their lives attacking the WASP old-boy network now lamenting the loss of the decorum established by that network...
...It's a sentiment we're hearing more and more from commentators on the far side of the generation gap...
...Mon-icagate is about politics like the O.J...
...And maybe start thinking like them...
...An O.J...
...In true postmodern fashion, the meanings ascribed to the events are more important than the events themselves...
...If anything, it's surprising that at this late date there is still such widespread resistance to frank discussion about private matters...
...But once the spectacle begins, this figure is passive...
...Simpson...
...Sensitive people," Baker wrote, "will be content to loathe them all quietly for what they have done to the country, for how they have debased our culture...
...During the Cold War, there was a hierarchy, rarely articulated but perfectly understood, that deterDavid Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...They are the only truly glamorous figures in the entire event...
...They impose a silence and idleness on the genesis figure and they take over the action...
...And the sort of people who rise to prominence in times of spectacle are those who are good behavior coaches...
...That code is now gone...
...They'd play tennis wearing whites and enjoy winter vacations at resorts...
...His peg was the Lewinsky story...
...We're going to be spending our time with all those yucky private details we sort of don't want to know...
...So the public can follow the stories with the same steady fascination that 19th-century readers followed serialized novels...
...But Americans are confused about private morality...
...If you had to predict, you would say that it would be psychologists or novelists or clergymen who would lead public discussions of personal morality...
...Politics is the route Bill Clinton used to achieve celebrity, and a celebrity surrounded by lawyers is what you need to get one of these new-style spectacles going...
...We live in a world in which Dan Rather and New York Times columnists go on the Don Imus show...
...But what separates these spectacles from normal storytelling is that, in spectacles, unlike literature, the central figure is beside the point...
...Today, there are few passionate debates about fundamental public issues...
...Almost nobody argues the pros and cons of capitalism...
...and Richard Reeves scolding the media for paying so much attention to this lewd affair...
...It's these stories, not legislative battles or works of literature, that are the real markers of the age...
...These people may not like Bill Clinton, but they despise tawdriness even more, and they're willing to blame anybody who airs it...
...Using the magic word "allegedly," pundits can fashion arcane discussions about events that may never have occurred in the first place...
...or (in radically different circumstances) a Clinton may get the action going...
...Whether the subject is race, sex, the way we treat our parents, or the way we treat our children, it's one damn legal proceeding after another...
...They got to take part in the national conversation, tackle the really big issues, and hash out moral disputes...
...Several pundits have likened the Monica story to a tragedy, with Clinton being brought low by his tragic flaw...
...It is the lawyers and commentators who are the main players...
...And most leading psychologists and church leaders have values so non-judgmental that they are of little help to mainstream Americans...
...The conservative Rutherford Institute is now fighting for survival...
...But now lawyers get the money and the public role...
...Many Americans don't know how to be judgmental...
...Today, you can't turn on the TV without seeing Jonathan Turley, Greta Van Susteren, Richard Ben-Veniste, Alan Dershowitz, Johnnie Cochran, or some other lawyer expanding on the events of the moment...
...Folks were willing to cover up scandal and vice for the sake of reticence, which was a value they thought essential to decent public life...
...Johnnie Cochran has had more influence on American life than O.J...
...Moreover, the pace and rhythm of legal proceedings stretches each drama over months, even years...
...trial was about football...
...And we're going to have to listen to a lot more lawyers...
...The lawyers would go off and get nicely tailored suits...
...His contempt was for pretty much everybody involved in it...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 47
