The American lie

The morality play is becoming increasingly lurid. As President Clinton ponders the ways to establish his constitutional superiority over Citizen Clinton in what has become the most dragging sex-and-lies drama in Washington, new furies are marching out of the closet. Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern who reportedly had very private access to the very private accessories of Bill Clinton, has at last decided to testify quot;truthfullyquot; before prosecutor Kenneth Starr in exchange for complete immunity from prosecution. Truth8217; is the operative word here, and Lewinsky8217;s truth has the potential of reducing the presidential lie to its bare essentials. Clinton still denies sexual encounter with her. Going by US media reports, Lewinsky, under the new deal, is ready to provide the prosecutor with a dress and recorded messages from the president as truth-exuding souvenirs of her Oval or oral intimacy with the most powerful politician on earth. She is going deeper than Paula Jones, who could only verballyreconstruct the phallic geography of the president. And remember, the tormentor-in-chief, Kenneth Starr, has already subpoenaed Clinton to testify before a grand jury about his management of the Lewinsky affair. The script is a legal labyrinth. The moral of the story is getting buried under dirty dresses and sleazy tapes. And President Clinton certainly needs a respite from the tyranny of truth and the harassment of sex.

Take the truth part. There is indeed an ethical virtue about being committed to truth in an age of practical lies in governance. The institutional history of truth in America is crowded with victims of lies Nixon being the most famous one. But in the ethical terminology of America, truth is never absolute, and fiction is occasionally more alluring and convenient than truth. You have Watergate and Irangate dramatic reminders of the systemic strength of democracy. The disturbing, unsettling lie has to be sought outside the truthful nation in the domain of nuclear rogues and socialistthugs. These Americanised versions of truth and lie continue to clash in the marketplace, where the arbiters are the media, the attorneys and courts. Clinton just happens to be at the vital centre of such a clash the rules of which are hardly ethical. The morality in this case has become its own victim.

Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor, no longer smybolises truth. He is not the end-of-the-century political edition of the prosecutor in Crime and Punishment. Rather, he is the beneficiary of a system which has trivialised its own ideals. Born out of the Whitewater scandal, he has already outlived his brief. Today he is the prosecutor of presidential libido; he is the collector of dresses stained by presidential semen. And he has perhaps the best collection of X-rated audiotapes. Even Americans, suffering from Eros-fatigue, are refusing to answer his pretence: What is truth? Clinton8217;s sexual impulses are not a threat to the nation or, its being an American story, to the global peace. He is a textbook example ofthriving in adversity8217;. The current adversity needs a name better than Kenneth Starr. A thriving Clinton is not a national harassment.