POST-IMPEACHMENT / A QUEST FOR MEANING

Trials and theater have always been siblings. Both produce heroes and villains and depend for their form on audience recognition. Both engage ideas of deception and honesty, attempting to create public, culturally resonant spectacle out of private, even illicit truth. Yet, while it contained all the elements of great drama, the trial of President Bill Clinton failed miserably as theater. It’s not just that the House managers never got the chance to present live witnesses to the Senate; their timing was off. Though the impeachment vote Clinton received in the House, no matter how partisan, is an indelible blot on his record, Republicans worried publicly that, once acquitted in the Senate, he would go scot-free. What they meant was that the American people hadn’t yet emotionally absorbed the meaning they intended to convey. The playwrights prolonged the production, dragging in one bit of bad stage business after another, culminating in l’affaire Blumenthal, in vain. They never persuaded the audience to share the assumptions their play was constructed on, and they don’t seem to have a clue why.

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s description of himself as Jack Webb, intent on “just the facts, ma’am,” collided with stories of prosecutorial zealotry and pretrial collusion. Cast as the villain and left for dead in Act One, Clinton kept returning, elbowing aside the stars, cagily, even magnificently, uninformed about the play in which he was purportedly appearing. In her Senate deposition, Monica S. Lewinsky, the designated ingenue victim, was poised and savvy, capable of taking care of herself and amused by those who thought otherwise. The playwrights existed in one historical zone, the audience in another. It looked less like good versus evil than cultural lag, the conflict between the up-to-date and the obsolescent.

The Clinton scandals are conventionally viewed as a continuation of the culture wars of the 1960s: the draft-dodging, multiculturalist president pitted against those upholding the values of the now much-romanticized World War II and 1950s decades. But, in fact, the conflict dates back to the struggle between the moderns and their Victorian elders for cultural supremacy in the first three decades of the 20th century, the era in which Sigmund Freud discovered the unconscious. Freud was a ferocious critic of Victorian culture, and he believed that civilization was, in part, an illusion: a policing system of moral pretense obfuscating and repressing the savage impulses of the sexual self, only to have them resurface in “slips” of tongue and deed, unwanted giveaways of secret desires. Nowhere were Freud’s theories more enthusiastically welcomed than in the United States, where a group of urban intellectuals and writers seized on psychoanalysis as a means of making their enemies betray themselves.

Cultural critics and historians in the 1920s exposed the corrupt motives feeding the lofty rhetoric of various Victorian icons, labeling them hypocrites and hysterics in the grip of unacknowledged sexual neuroses and right-wing agendas. Flamboyant movie star Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” asserted, “I ain’t no sneak,” and won the nation’s heart with her public misbehavior. The humorist Robert Benchley remarked that where the reformer saw a criminal, he might find “darned good company.” “Freuding” parties were the rage. A man did well, the novelist Sherwood Anderson noted, “to be somewhat guarded in the remarks he made, what he did with his hands.”

The habit of packaging mixed motives as beleaguered virtue that the Freudian-minded 1920s tried to ban enjoyed a spectacular comeback in the Cold War 1950s. Though the 1960s saw a fresh insurrection against the reigning public pieties, conservative critics today argue for the reinstatement of the punitive, moralizing self that Freud and his allies tried to downsize. William J. Bennett prescribes a culture of shame, outrage and blame as antidote to the postmodern ethos, in general, and its promiscuous presidential exemplar, in particular.

Yet, for those who live there, the highest spheres of U.S. politics have long constituted a holdout, a Freud-free sovereign state, apparent proof of Freud’s contention that his insights were so intrinsically hostile to human vanity that they would never be fully accepted. Though Freud himself took on Woodrow Wilson and, in the last few decades, Garry Wills, Fawn Brodie, Robert A. Caro and Michael Paul Rogin have written keen analyses of John F. Kennedy, Richard N. Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, while in office these presidents cultivated, with varying degrees of success, media-friendly personas without ever admitting to a psyche. The Clinton era, which documented presidential libido-run-amok with unprecedented explicitness, has produced a vogue for movies like “Bulworth,” “Wag the Dog” and “The American President” that insist on portraying political figures as human beings, no matter how good or bad. Yet, Clinton, himself, seeks help from spiritual advisors, never psychiatrists.

In the image market, where today’s politics are played out, Clinton still has the advantage. If he mouths the platitudes that high public office seems automatically to beget, his energy, breakaway curiosity and sheer luck tell a different story. His ear is preternaturally alert to contemporary rhythms; whatever else Clinton may be, he is unlike any of his predecessors. By contrast, without changing their costumes or lines, Reps. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), Robert Barr (R-Ga.) and Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) could walk into the role of the sanctimonious, anti-intellectual “American Boobus” crafted in the 1920s by the brilliant satirist H. L. Mencken.

Starr seems to be vying for the title of “the most sedulous fly-catcher in American history,” which Mencken bestowed on William Jennings Bryan after watching Bryan defend his fundamentalist views at the Scopes trial in 1925. The GOP Congress dumping thousands of pages of lurid testimony into the public domain obeyed the same logic that, in the first decade of this century, persuaded Ladies Home Journal, an organ of the purity campaigns against vice then sweeping the nation, to run frank discussions of prostitution and venereal disease. Today, as then, at the headquarters of the Christian right, new levels of sexual explicitness are justified only by moral indignation.

The most revealing moment in Tennessee Rep. Ed Bryant’s interrogation of Lewinsky on Feb. 1 came after she said Clinton was “an intelligent president.” “Thank goodness, this is confidential,” Bryant responded. “Otherwise, it might be the quote of the day.” What planet was he on? In the media age, everyone must anticipate exposure before they inflict it. Today we have Larry Flynt and Salon doing the work of demystification Freud and Mencken brought to a high art, but the outcome is the same.

Freud grounded his insights into the human psyche in his study of drama. Oedipus mattered to Freud less because he slept with his mother than because he played unwitting detective to his own hidden life; the excitement comes in watching Oedipus confront the unassimilable evidence of who he really is. Good theater is anything except predictable, and nothing is more predictable than unbroken self-evasion. Amid revelations of DeLay’s equivocations under oath, Hyde’s marital infidelity and Barr’s white-supremacist ties, the subtext of the presidential trial was as obvious to the audience as it was opaque to its actors. Finally, the GOP had no choice but to exclude the public it had failed to win.

Freud observed on more than one occasion that the U.S., a parvenu nation intent on finding shortcuts to establishment status, holds a commanding share of the hypocrisy and euphemism market. He detested the “pious Americans,” who veiled power plays as “noble intentions” and evaded “fact” on all levels. Yet, as Mencken pointed out in his magnum opus, “The American Language,” if Americans once talked of “limbs” instead of legs (to the amusement of 19th-century European visitors), they also specialized in synonyms for truth as the “lowdown”--the “scoop,” the “dirt,” the “dope”--dismissing pretense as “bunk” and “cant.” The U.S. is the source of much of the English-speaking world’s slang, the racy, dysphemic language of the instincts wised up to their own vicissitudes.

Public officials, unlike private citizens, need a language constantly in touch with the idea of a common welfare. Yet the long-overdue cultural modernization of the public sphere, as Clinton at his best suggests, is both possible and imperative; and it can come only from a fuller recognition of the new economic, ethnic and gender realities of the body politic actually implicated in that welfare. Boredom and indifference aren’t wired into the postmodern DNA; they are results of an enforced diet of unreality.

As the volume and pace of communication increase, people are quicker to reject information they see as simply not belonging in their minds. For two-thirds of Americans, the president’s private sexual misbehavior fell into this category; his efforts to conceal his misdeeds were filed under delete before they were exposed. This sort-and-file, retain-or-discard process is democracy’s precious defense against its own liabilities, an updated and necessary version of the old privacy laws. What was once by common consent shielded from view is today automatically revealed, but ejected before impact.

Though censorship is alive and well, at its most effective, it’s an at-home affair. Our age is post-Freudian only in the sense that the basic insights into the human psyche that Freud codified are now second nature to the public, if not to their politicians. As long as Congress stays in kindergarten while growing numbers of its constituency move into college, a majority of Americans will continue not to vote and not to care.*