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Of course, all great political illusionists--a category that includes both historical monsters and democratic leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan--are masters of the present tense. Brown is right about this: Clinton has always made his living by working the vivid instability of the moment. He is, as someone once described Washington's Mayor Marion Barry, a "situationist"--adapting sleekly, almost shape shiftingly, to the situation at hand. The rest of us, grim salarymen of the ordinary, trail along, trying to figure out what happened last night, yesterday and the day before yesterday. And sometimes we are even able to figure it out. That may be what worries Clinton.
Clinton is America's first poststructuralist President. He has built a whole career by enacting, instinctively, the principles of the French theorist Jacques Derrida, who has argued that all reality is merely "text," subject to infinite interpretation and linguistic manipulation--but never to definitive judgment. America has become a poststructuralist text, in which all meaning is provisional, "deferred." Kathleen Willey goes on 60 Minutes and within a few days is deconstructed. As Nietzsche said, there are no facts, only interpretations: the hermeneutics of gossip in a frivolous yet dangerous game. All is spin.
Therefore, as Americans study the Monica Lewinsky text and the Willey text and, above all, the mysterious supertext that is Bill Clinton's character, they hear conflicting slogans going off in their heads. "It's nobody's business!" a thousand voices shout from around the brain. A voice from elsewhere in the mind comes back, borrowing words from a half-forgotten time and an entirely different American opera: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The present is unstable enough. Surely we do not need (except for entertainment, of course) the smoke-and-mirrors of poststructuralism. Anyone setting off on a search for the meaning in the present mess ought to brace himself with a thought from the British philosopher Karl Popper: "I hold it to be morally wrong not to believe in reality."