NOT A PARODY
Not a Parody A number of leading writers were asked to comment on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair by the New Yorker magazine. The following are excerpts from their groupthink essays. All references to...
...it is this comfort, in fact, which might lead a man of his constitution to stray from what in some circles is thought of as morality...
...After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas...
...it can be narcissistic, heedless, exploitative, or devotional...
...in the dim, bloodstained past of certain cultures, sacrifices of kings were holy acts, performed by priests to obtain for the king's subjects a great benefit—averting a famine or a plague...
...LOUIS BEGLEY What i remember about Bush is that the only time in his whole presidency that he got a little animated was when he went to war against iraq...
...E.L...
...Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President...
...DOCTOROW one thought that public executions and floggings, putting sinners in stocks, shaving the heads of adulteresses and similar pastimes that have beguiled the multitude ever since our ancestors evolved into the human species had all gone out of style in the industrialized democracies...
...When it is exposed to an audience, it deconstructs as something inevitably prurient, automatically scandalous...
...LORRIE MOORE What the French don't possess is the equivalent of the American South, where a strain of Protestant fundamentalism is so maniacal that one of its archetypal zealots, Kenneth Starr, has been able to nearly dismantle the Presidency because of a gawky and fumbling sexual dalliance...
...His façade of Eastern-establishment savoir-faire slipped, and there he was, a guy for whom launching a missile seemed to be better than sex...
...OF CLEAR THINKING African-American men seemed to understand it right away...
...JANE SMILEY [Clinton] is comfortable with the extremes of human possibility, with the grandness and loathsomeness of mankind, with the icarian dream and petty stumble that is human character...
...Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime...
...But the particular character of a consensual act is manifest only in the intimate connection of two minds...
...In the course of one person's life, it can, at one time or another, be all these things...
...WILLIAM STYRON All you need is a sinner and a suit...
...DEPT...
...Toni Morrison That our ungentlemanly President's gentlemanly failure to kiss and tell should be subjected to the legalisms of judiciary procedure is, of course, total madness, a torture and a regicide, which could only have been brought about by Starr, the crazed zealot the right wing didn't even know it had...
...it can be infantile and ludicrous, or spiritually exalted and profound...
...All references to the McCarthy hearings, Torquemada, Javert, and the Salem witch trials have been rigorously excised...
...Something akin to those rites, but obscenely profane, has been acted out in Washington...
...The sexual act can be barbaric, brutally selfish, and self-aggrandizing, or loving and revelatory...
...if you happen to be a prosecutor with a righteous bent, you can transform what morally offends you into a criminal offense...
...ETHAN CANIN...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 6
