The Monica and Bill Show Nukes Popular Culture

The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote today on the Clinton impeachment inquiry. Yet those who are cogitating over the definitions of “perjury,” “misprision” and “lying under oath” are missing the greater meaning of the Monica Lewinsky case, which is not to be found in lawbooks, but rather all around us, everywhere.

This scandal has hit the popular as well as political culture like an atom bomb. When the first such explosion went off a half-century ago, all that could be seen was the mushroom cloud. Only when that subsided did the devastation become visible; it took even longer for the symptoms of radiation sickness to appear. But by the time Strontium 90 could be measured in mothers’ milk, “nukes” had changed human thinking. As if by chain reaction, words and concepts such as ground zero, megaton, fallout and doomsday cascaded into everyday discourse.

The Lewinsky story has launched a thousand late-night monologues; new phrases and images crowd our consciousness: berets, cigars, stained dresses, the Black Dog and “Wag the Dog.” With Halloween coming up, Reuters quoted one costume shop owner: “All of our ghosts, ghouls and skeletons are taking a back seat to Monica and Bill.”

Even the Oval Office, the sanctum sanctorum of America’s civil religion, will never be the same. Tommy Hilfiger may have pulled his suggestive clothing ads, featuring an internish young woman in presidential repose, but around the world, cartoonists and street theaters routinely depict Bill Clinton with his pants around his ankles, chasing a Monica around his desk.

Some insist that the injury to Clinton has been minimal, although they do so in decidedly damning terms. In the words of Ruth Coniff, Washington editor of the Progressive, “Most Americans are unsurprised that a powerful and sleazy man would take advantage of a woman in his employment.” And while two strongly anti-Clinton books, Bill Bennett’s “The Death of Outrage” and Ann Coulter’s “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” are No. 1 and No. 5, respectively, on the New York Times’ bestseller list, Clinton’s approval rating stays high.

Yet some collateral damage is obvious. Naomi Wolf, author of “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women,” and certainly no conservative, joked that the National Organization for Women should come clean about itself and become instead the National Organization for Democratic Women.

Meanwhile, law professors and lexicographers must find ways to undo Clinton’s disfigurement of both law and language. If ordinary words such as “is,” “alone” and “sex” can be used to conceal rather than reveal, then a higher standard of precision is needed. Indeed, a recent issue of the New Yorker, long a citadel of Clintonophilia but for an even longer time a pillar of proper English, depicts young George Washington, hatchet in hand, standing next to a felled cherry tree, telling his indignant father, “It all depends on how you define ‘chop.’ ”

Looking further ahead, no one can foresee the political equivalent of the genetic mutation from the Clinton blast, but clues abound. Although, Clinton frequently cites “children” and “education” as his reason for being in office, the young, be it from idealism or revulsion, want the one thing Clinton won’t give them: the truth.

The student newspapers at Clinton’s two alma maters, Georgetown and Yale, both have called for his resignation. And a Gallup Poll found that the age group most eager for Clinton’s removal from office is 18- to 29-year-olds. In other words, their parents, the Baby Boomers, who see the incumbent president through the indulgent prism of their own hippie-dippy past, have failed to transmit their sex-and-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll value system to their own children.

So who will the millennial generation pay heed to? One new voice is Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). At 42, he’s a decade younger than Clinton. “The current mess,” he said in an interview, “has expanded young people’s interest in cultural conservatism.” Why? Questions about integrity and responsibility, Brownback continued, are “no longer a ‘you’ issue, as in ‘you’ in Washington.” Instead, he added, “They are now an ‘us’ issue, as in ‘us’ in the country.”

Could young people really seek shelter in the wisdom of the ages? It’s already happening because they know that the fallout from Clintonism will still be raining down on them long after Clinton himself goes, wherever he goes.