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The Starr Spangled Banneran essay by Gordon Fellman, Rambo and the Dalai
Lama: (Albany: SUNY Press,
1998) |
So what would you call Monica's famous blue dress? Who can forget the vindictive aha!-ness of Kenneth Starr and his supporters in having the hard evidence, complete with DNA testing, to prove not only that the President had sex (by anyone's definition but his, as it turns out) with a consenting White House intern but that he lied about it in an official deposition. While lying under oath is indeed serious (lying not under oath is often serious too, but in a class of 90 students when I asked if anyone had not lied their way out of something significant, not a hand, including my own, went up), not all lies under oath, just like not all lies not under oath, are of equal gravity or significance. I was astounded at the glee with which so many people spoke the somewhat arcane and somehow seemingly magic formulation, "He suborned perjury." The very pronunciation of those words seemed somehow to deepen the depravity of the alleged offense that most people, other than those obsessed with destroying Clinton, seem to think is some combination of personal rather than public, and trivial.
Kenneth Starr is a compelling current example of what in my book I call "the adversary compulsion." That means a drivenness to win, a determination to overthrow, annihilate, destroy someone at all costs, a determination that can best be understood as an addiction. Prosecutor Starr can no more control his passion for destroying Bill Clinton than a drug addict, an alcoholic, or a gambler can control their passion for whatever toxin ails them. Newt Gingrich is of course cast from the same mold.
History reveals numerous compulsive adversaries. In American literature, there is no finer example than Captain Ahab. Melville shows us a man so obsessed with killing the white whale he thinks maimed him that he will take down anything and anyone, including himself, to live out what can be seen by the onlooker as utter madness.
As of this writing (November, 1998), I see Saddam Hussein as another extraordinarily clear example of the adversary compulsion, and on another level altogether. Hussein appears driven to engage in battle with the United States, fellow Muslim nations, and large segments of his own people, over and over and over again. He can no more curb this behavior than a heroin addict can control his. Saddam Hussein of course causes vastly greater damage than does Kenneth Starr, but the impulse appears to be the same: destruction of the other as the highest item on one's agenda.
In the 1942 film Sea Wolf, Edward G. Robinson plays a mysterious, evil figure whose motto, a line from Dante, is this: Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. This would seem to suit Saddam Hussein to a T. It of course applies just as well to such earlier leaders as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Somoza, Batista, the current junta in Burma, and countless others. "Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven" implies, in the sickest way imaginable, that destroying is the highest joy available to a human being. This is said, felt, and meant only by people so badly hurt, frightened, and enraged in their own histories that they seem able to manage the horror of their own lives only by inflicting horror on others.
Let's return to the more mundane, less ruthless, but no less compulsive examples of compulsive adversaries, Gingrich and Starr. (The star of their colleague in right wing fanaticism and compulsive adversarialism Rush Limbaugh, seems to have faded.) They and the big money and many supporters behind them surely want to defeat Clinton, to triumph over him, to bring him down. Were they to be asked exactly what they would have won thereby, it is likely they would talk in terms of removing an unscrupulous leader, or a public disaster, or an immoral person. It is less likely that they would admit that politics in our society is about winning and losing (and making certain the rich become even richer) much, much more than about policy, issues, and substance. Nor could they possibly admit being driven by forces they likely do not acknowledge, to win, win, win, at all costs to win. Starr has spent millions trying to bring Clinton down over Whitewater, over the Travelgate scandal, and anything else he could get his hands on. But there appeared to be not enough there to exploit. Then, following cues in recent transformations of media once as august as The New York Times, which appears to have decided to model itself on supermarket tabloids and the Jerry Springer show, Starr went for sordid sexuality.
Americans vote in ever smaller numbers. One reason is surely disgust with a political system that appears to be more caught up with chicanery and massive adversarial behavior for its own sake than with making life better for people, preserving human dignity, well-being, and the environment, all matters that the public, in striking contrast to most politicians in their actual behavior (in contrast to their often fine words) does not seem to find inappropriate in politics.
Disgust with the system may well be fueled by Pres. Clinton's oddly inappropriate sexual behavior, but it is surely no less fueled by Starr's virtually salivating at his task of finding something about the President that he may embarrass him, humiliate him, even force him out of office. Starr apparently could find nothing monumental in Whitewater, his first go-around at destroying Clinton, but with the help of certain ambitious politicians, certain rich people on the far right of the political specturm, and fellow compulsive adversaries such as Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp, he seems indeed to have found what he surely thought was his magic bullet, to wound and humiliate but finally, it appears, not to take down a president.
Because we live primarily in and by the adversary paradigm I elaborate in my book, no one accuses Ronald Reagan of immoral behavior for killing 500 Panamanians while trying to kidnap the Panamanian president, Manuel Noriega, or of the Grenada action that also killed innocent people or of the illegal Iran-Contra deal that took hundreds or thousands of lives in Nicaragua. It is perhaps ironic that, as our war paradigm would have it, George Bush's role in killing a hundred thousand Iraqis in 1991 and even more after that, due to the U.S. destruction of the infrastructure of Baghdad and the subsequent embargo on most goods to Iraq, is not considered immoral. Consensual if somewhat tacky sex with a consenting younger but of-age woman is immoral while wanton killing of innocent people is not immoral. If Clinton has to leave office, why not make the departure over something more substantive and globally immoral, like destroying the one pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, which it appears truly was making only pharmaceuticals? Worth pondering, that reality.
The flag, the original Star Spangled Banner, stands for a nation. That nation seems sick of compulsively adversarial politics. Media overflowed with stories, this election season, of peoples' disgust with the "negative campaigning" this year. As vicious negative campaigning goes back over a hundred years, it is fascinating that so many people right now seem to have had more than enough of it. I see the election of third party candidate Jesse Ventura, the professional wrestler who is now governor of Minnesota, as a collective thumbing of the nose by Minnesotans at the sordid, opportunistic, corrupt duplicity of the two parties whose regular and experienced candidates were expected to trounce Ventura.
The madness of the obsession, the depth and continuity of the compulsion, have led us from the glories of the original concept of our political system, through the muck of compulsive adversarialism, to the 1998 Starr Spangled Banner, the sickening fruit of that compulsion and its poisoning of our public life.
There is an alternative. I call it mutuality. I would be delighted if people read my book Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and its Threat to Human Survival, to see how I examine the two paradigms -- adversarialism and mutuality -- and how I see, in the last five chapters of the book, ways out of what may otherwise seem as the adversary impasse.