The Outrage That Wasn't

The heartland spoke, and it said, Nobody's perfect

By Michael Kinsley Monday, Dec. 28, 1998

    • John D. Gartner's In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography .

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    Most people don't want to live in a society that actually tries to make life as normal as we pretend. Or a society that stops us from pretending to more normality than we achieve. Not that everybody is an adulterer or a perjurer. Perhaps there are people who have nothing to be ashamed of. Even they have messes and complications. Is there anybody with no secrets he or she would be tempted to commit perjury for? That's not a blanket excuse for perjury. But when the perjury was a your-secrets-or-your-life stickup staged by a prosecutor who couldn't nail his target on anything else, anyone with an ounce of imagination is tempted to excuse it. People who flesh out the Bill-and-Monica story rather than stripping it down do not imagine that Bill Clinton will go unpunished unless Congress takes him to the woodshed. He'll suffer plenty.

    This is not a morally bankrupt notion. In fact, there are obvious biblical resonances: original sin, the flesh is weak and so on. The anti-Clinton vengeance seekers claim to hate the sin while loving the sinner, but their hatred of the sinner is so obvious and so extreme that it even casts doubt on how much they actually hate the sin. Most people don't even pretend to love this particular sinner. But they see how a guy can go from succumbing to momentary temptation to lying about it to a grand jury, and they see it as a seamless human story, not as a series of discrete actions. That's why the Starr report's prurient narrative backfired so badly: by putting flesh on the bones, it made the story plausible. And that is the fatal first step toward empathy. Comic details like gifts of poetry and the semen-stained dress make it harder, not easier, for reasonable people to remain solemn enough for an impeachment.

    This appreciation that life is complicated and people are funny has burst on our politics in other ways that most seers, professional and amateur, failed to predict. Tolerance of gays is an example. Despite horrible episodes like this year's torture-murder of Matthew Shepard, the general public is clearly losing patience with homophobia. Even the most obviously prejudiced politician or anti-gay political activist now feels obliged to deny any anti-gay bias, even when demonstrating one. It would be nice if this was because people concluded that gays are perfectly normal. But it's even better if people realize that nobody is perfectly normal.

    Or take a small thing like flag burning. Actually, it wasn't always so small. Only a few years ago, a constitutional amendment to ban this activity--the first-ever modification of the Bill of Rights--seemed inevitable. No one dared oppose it without expressing deep horror that anyone would contemplate an act so perverse. What ever happened to all that? People didn't decide that it's O.K. to burn the flag. But maybe they decided that if some weirdo gets his rocks off by burning the flag, what's it to me? My Uncle Bernie used to stir-fry his underwear and feed it to the cat.

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