Our Monica, Ourselves: What Remains of the Public Dialogue About "The Scandal"

I miss Bill Clinton something awful. His departure from the White House because of the pesky 22nd Amendment, not to mention his recent absences so he can rack up speaking fees by traveling abroad, have left me slightly despondent and more than a little nostalgic. It's a feeling shared, I suspect, by comedians and late night talk-show hosts across the nation. Say what you will about old Slick Willy, but at least he was live. The lies, the finger-wagging, the scandals, the sex. Back when the good times were rolling, I recall sitting in my office late into the night downloading the Starr Report: page after page of salacious detail and innuendo flowing from my laser printer. The culmination of years of activity by that vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down the Philanderer-in-Chief did not disappoint. And yet, he managed to survive it all. In my mind's eye I still see our Bill, posed defiantly (and suggestively) on the cover of Esquire magazine, legs akimbo with that cheeky grin playing across his features. American politics, for better or worse, may never be the same.

Now that the party is officially over, we are left with the daunting task of trying to figure out what it all meant. It has become something of an established pattern among contemporary academics, especially those working in fields related to cultural studies, to greet the aftermath of a major media-saturated event with a volume of exploratory and explanatory essays. The Rodney King videotape, trial and subsequent riot sired Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams; while the "trial of the century" gave us Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, edited by Toni Morrison, who does quite a bit of this sort of work. The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill affair was judged worthy of a few separate collective contributions to the postmortem fray, only one of which?Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality?was edited by Morrison. Hence, it was only a matter of time before Bill and Monica came under the scholarly knife to be dissected for broader meanings and wider implications. Enter Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (NYU Press, 340 pages, $18.95), edited by Lisa Duggan and Lauren Berlant, two leading figures in gender and sexuality studies. (Berlant is professor of English at the University of Chicago and director of its Center for Gender Studies; Duggan is associate professor of American Studies and History at NYU.)

Aside from their clever pomo titles, all of these works share a desire to present?or (re)present?a range of views emanating from the political and cultural left. Operating at the intersection of sex, politics and public culture, Our Monica, Ourselves, as Duggan and Berlant write in their introduction, "is conceived as a progressive forum for thinking through the largest cultural, political, and public-policy issues raised by the spectacle of national investigation, worldwide publicity, political contestation, sexual scandal, and congressional impeachment proceedings surrounding the Clinton/Lewinsky affair." With essays ranging from Lewinsky's Jewishness ("Monica Dreyfus") to Linda Tripp's appearance ("The Face that Launched a Thousand Jokes"), and from Clinton's private parts ("The First Penis Impeached") to the hypocrisy of the President's accusers and the boredom of the American public, the volume aspires to hit all the highs and lows of Washington's most recent contribution to reality tv programming.

The major problem with all such collections is unevenness and redundancy. And while Our Monica suffers from these unavoidable defects, it is, overall, a thoughtful and well-edited contribution to what remains of the public dialogue about the scandal. Of course, the editors and contributors presuppose that we still do care and are still talking about this "seminal cultural event of the '90s."

The volume presents little in the way of new information about what has become well-trod terrain, but does open up quite a few original insights. One particularly intriguing essay, by Micki McElya, who is a graduate student at NYU, questions the notion presented by Toni Morrison (no, she is not among this volume's contributors, just quoted frequently by others) that Clinton was, in essence, the nation's first black president. Instead, McElya argues, he was our first white trash president. Besides injecting a much needed bit of humor into these overly serious proceedings, McElya's piece manages to substantiate her claim with nimble prose and keen insight. In "Trashing the Presidency: Race, Class, and the Clinton/Lewinsky Affair," she maintains that almost from the very beginning Clinton's good old (poor) boy traits?a single-parent home, a love of fried foods, a weakness for big-haired women?were understood through a framework of "deviant heterosexuality and imperiled normative whiteness." That's a mouthful, to be sure, but as McElya explains: "As both icon and political actor, the presidential body is imbued with immense cultural power. His critics fear that if he is not exposed as deviant, his behavior and background could be accepted as normative. The discourses of impeachment operated both to identify and expunge this threat while simultaneously saying to the American people, 'We told you so.'" The "we" being not only caustic congressional Republicans and crusading journalists, but also conservative moralists, such as Bill Bennett, who chastised the American people for not being outraged enough.

The editors promise a "range of views across the political/cultural left," yet most contributions agree in terms of the broad strokes. Indeed, if there is one dominant interpretative framework that seems to unite the majority of the volume's 18 essays, it is a certain preoccupation with Clinton's weakness. Weakness not so much in terms of his inability to tell the truth or to keep his pecker in his pants, but rather in terms of his unwillingness to mount any semblance of a challenge to the political and sexual conservatism of his detractors. By lying, as Ellen Willis ("Tis Pity He's a Whore") writes, "he acceded to his opponents' moral framework. Had he challenged it and won anyway, he would have done himself and the entire country a favor by showing that politicians, even presidents, need no longer submit to the sexual blackmail of the right. Instead, he supplied the rope that effectively strangled his presidency." Thus does Willis link Clinton's capitulation to the sex and morality police of the right with his visible lack of a spine in much more pressing policy debates affecting women, families and the poor.

It is in this context that the volume's critical edge emerges most clearly. Although there is a general agreement that Clinton was subjected to a witch hunt of sorts, this is by no means a pro-Clinton apologia. Like many on the left in general, the contributors to Our Monica are forced to navigate between the Charybdis of the right's political and sexual conservatism and the Scylla of Clinton's own less-than-sterling record on issues relating to gender, sexuality, race and class. In another of the collection's most compelling essays, Janet R. Jakobsen, director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College, asks one central question: "Who, after all, wants to defend Bill Clinton on moral grounds?" and follows it by another: Who, at least on the left, wants to defend him on political grounds? Pointing to Clinton's undermining of gay rights with his "don't ask, don't tell" policy; his signature on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act; and his support of the "homophobic" Defense of Marriage Act, Jakobsen sees little reason why leftists, and especially feminists, should have come to the president's defense in the first place. "Having given up on Clinton as a lost cause," she writes, "imagine our surprise when in the fall of 1998 and winter of 1999, as the impeachment saga unfolded, feminists were accused of moral hypocrisy for not hopping on the bandwagon to remove the president from office over his sexual misdeeds."

Many may not buy Jakobsen's assertion that some feminists were interested less in defending or excusing Clinton's behavior than in supporting the principle of sexual freedom, or that "there were no feminist principles promoted on either side of the aisle or the drama." Yet, hers is a provocative attempt to separate potentially misplaced moral outrage on behalf of Clinton's personal sexual behavior from the well-placed political outrage on behalf of his "centrist" policies.

Some of the essays are rough going in terms of academic jargon, but the savvy of the arguments as well as the moments of sparkling wit and humor make them well worth a little work on the part of the reader. Our Monica, Ourselves is a good read for the dog days of August and a welcome fix for fellow scandal addicts as we await the next one. Who knows, maybe this Condit thing will shape up in time for the new fall season.