A Way Out: Hold Public Shaming

Although the English language is justly celebrated for the richness of its vocabulary, in at least one respect it is somewhat deficient: on the whole, English lacks single words that adequately capture the essence of truly contemptible behavior. Consider the Spanish word sinverguenza. Accurately translated into English this noun means something like “one who is so utterly lacking in any sense of shame that his behavior has put him beyond the pale of civilized toleration.”

Indeed, reading Ken Starr’s report to Congress or watching President Clinton’s grand jury testimony can leave a person grasping for descriptive terms that go beyond the linguistic bounds of any single language. Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Starr and many others in this cast of hundreds reveal themselves as quintessential sinverguenzas, whose shameless disregard for anything more important than petty lusts and political hatreds must sicken anyone who cares about the country they are collectively dragging into the slime of this bizarre national disaster.

Yet the question remains: What now? The process that has already begun seems likely to result in the worst possible resolution to this crisis. Clinton has lied repeatedly under oath; there is also evidence that he may have tampered with witnesses and used the powers of his office to obstruct the legal process. Nevertheless, the American people appear to have little stomach for impeaching a president whom they had the poor judgment to vote into office in the first place.

The problem is that our legal and political institutions seem to offer only two formal alternatives: doing essentially nothing at all (for example, having Congress pass an almost meaningless resolution of censure) or attempting to enforce the political equivalent of the death penalty.

How should one deal with a sinverguenza whose tawdry crimes do not deserve either the ultimate harshness or the relative dignity of a political death by impeachment? I suggest that if we are going to indulge in extraordinary investigations, let us at least consider the possibility of extraordinary punishments. Let us attempt to shame the shameless.

Many cultures employ shaming rituals as a way of imposing appropriate punishments. For example, the Lakota Sioux of the northern plains would sometimes deal with a thief by holding a formal ceremony, in the course of which the most respected elders of the tribe would “praise” the thief with florid speeches celebrating his supposed honesty. After what must have been an agonizing public humiliation, the thief would pay restitution to his victims and the matter would be dropped.

In this way, the shaming ritual would punish the wrongdoer, serve as the first step toward his reintegration into the community and give him a moral and psychological opportunity to face up to the consequences of his actions.

Imagine, then, that instead of subjecting the nation to a farcical and destructive replay of the Watergate hearings, Congress required Clinton to appear before it to give an honest account of his behavior and to listen to those he has most directly wronged. Such testimony could come from presidential aides and lawyers, from Democratic lawmakers and other party faithful, from Cabinet officials and long-time friends. Perhaps he would listen to Betty Currie describe what it was like to have years of faithful service repaid by being exploited as a bag woman in a scheme to illegally withhold evidence in a federal lawsuit. Or perhaps the women who have suffered at the hands of the White House spin machine might remind Clinton of how he allowed them to be slandered and libeled.

In return for enduring this day of public shaming, the Lewinsky matter would then be dropped. A suitably humiliated Clinton would be allowed to serve out his term, and the country could get on with the business of, among other things, devising ways to avoid another outburst of legalistic insanity along the lines of the Starr inquisition.

Before dismissing this suggestion as part of the legalized craziness of our times, consider this: Crazy as compared to what? As compared to enduring months of agony as we pursue a fruitless exercise in constitutional legalism? Such a procedure would also force the president to stop lying, if only for a moment. It would allow his lawyer David Kendall to stop making preposterous claims that might make sense when defending a sleazy white collar criminal but that degrade the office of the presidency. And it would spare us more of the stomach-churning spectacle created by the president’s transparently phony claims of contrition.

Finally, such a ritual would help undercut the cult of personality that we create around our presidents, and that is the source our outrage when we discover that the First Father is also the First Philanderer. Shaming and humiliating the president in a formal public setting would remind us that what can be said of even such an unregenerate sinverguenza as Clinton can be said about many of those who are even now preparing to sit in judgment of him: that, in the immortal words of Tammy Wynette, “he’s just a man.”

This man who never stopped being a boy deserves neither the dignity nor the severity of a solemn constitutional process. In more ways than one, subjecting Clinton to a public verbal flogging would give both the president and the American people exactly what we each deserve.