COLUMN: Domestic and international relations

From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98 From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98What is the relationship between fiction and the fate of nations? "Wagging the Dog" (as the saying goes), some windbaggy seers (including Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Arlen Specter) have speculated that Bill Clinton's decision to bomb two suspected terrorist sites was prompted by his "scandal with his secretary" (the phrase of Russian Communist Gennadi Zyuganov). For U.S. senators to reduce the President's motives merely to spin is irresponsible for a number of reasons. First of all, it diminishes the public respect for the political decision making process. If life were to imitate art so exactly (or was art, in this case, especially prescient?) -- and on such a grand scale, where the security of nations is concerned --then is policy still a serious science? Was politics ever serious, or did the irony of officialdom simply increase in direct relation to the magnitude of the threat? (Think Dr. Strangelove.) Secondly, it equates the office of the presidency with its tenant, which, especially today, is a crude misalliance. The United States remains the world's most robust economy (in spite of recent reverberations from Russia and the Pacific Rim) -- and the world's only superpower. But our President remains a man of tepid character and brutal paradox, a personality forged in the stale semblance of focus groups. He is both all-powerful and impotent; he's the Chief Executive, and the employee of everyone in America. He kisses ass professionally, and he can order 75 Tomahawks to explode in the Middle East within hours. The office of the Chief Executive should mirror the stature of the nation. That is, the man or woman in office should rise to the position; ideally, our conception of the Presidency need not be tailored to the moment. Leaders abroad are shocked that a scandal based on such insignificance can be allowed to interfere with world-historical decision-making. Yet it is interfering, and at the worst possible time. Or perhaps the world's growing problems are a result of Clinton's personal difficulties. The question is: Do events produce comment and rumor, or does talk in itself produce events? Put another way: Where politics (and economics) are concerned, are prophesies self-fulfilling? Taking markets as an indicator, the answer us obviously "yes." The threat of Asian recession spilling into Russia and then into Latin American -- combined with the uncertainty surrounding Yeltsin's succession and vitriolic party politics in Russia -- has engendered the second largest decline (in terms of points) in the history of the Dow Jones industrial average. If market gurus predict a fall, investors will flee into safer securities. When Goldman's Abby Joseph Cohen finally goes bearish, you can bet the market will follow her downward. Yet when Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin opines on the health of the market (as he did last Thursday), the Dow swings up a hundred points in a matter of minutes. For financial markets, therefore, rumor certainly has a life of its own, with devastating potential. (Acknowledging this, exchanges can enforce a "circuit breaker" to cease trading when fear itself becomes the impetus behind high-volume dumping.) No such moratorium, though, can freeze the speculation of pundits, consultants, experts, TV-lawyers and suchlike, who produce the complex web of fact and fiction which is our politico-legal culture. Monicagate is so popular at home (and misunderstood abroad) precisely because of its willful imprecision: It lends itself to endless interpretation, interpretations of interpretations, and so on. For example, on the July 19 episode of Late Edition, CNN's Sunday morning political talk show, the commentators, lacking anything newsworthy, simply went back to the videotape: they decided to comment on their comments, to assess the accuracy of old predictions (which, they assured us, were "shockingly perspicacious"). The result was yet another layer on an already tenuous structure of fact, a slipshod edifice wrapping back upon itself like a strand of DNA?. Clinton's constant legal conundrums have been likened to classical tragedy: Clinton is a smart man, potentially a great man, yet brought down by one tragic flaw. But the analogy is misleading. He doesn't quite fit the heroic mould. It is not his dalliances (his "Achilles heel") that interest the American public and the independent council so much as the aftermath, the cover-up. As Nixon taught us, foibles can be cleaned up with a well-executed mea culpa (though secrecy is suspect before the law). But Clinton's apology was bellicose and half-hearted. It was not a "Checkers" speech, in which a prominent politico became, for a moment, a regular guy, with unpaid bills and a family dog. It merely accentuated his distance from reality and his unimpeachable (no pun intended) self-concept. Clinton has been pop-psychoanalyzed (most visibly by Maureen Dowd of The New York Times), likened to a Big Baby, accused of "Don Juanism," labeled "desirous of attention." I read somewhere that men who seek positions of political power are "ipso facto unstable." Yet despite the kernel of fact in most of these readings, Clinton remains first and foremost someone who sought celebrity through politics. From the beginning, he treated his offices (governorship or the presidency) like the director's chair on a big-budget movie. Female coworkers -- especially those many years his junior -- became susceptible starlets. And as far as most of the world was concerned (even after his sexual transgressions were confirmed with a reasonable degree of medical certainty), this was OK, as long as he maintained a proper reverence for, and capability in his office. The real problem arose not from his lusts (which are obscene and insatiable and ultimately understandable), but from his obstruction of justice, his wicked, willing embrace of power's perquisites. American "Puritanism" cannot be offended because it does not exist; the more sex the better. But very few Americans will abide an offense to the Constitution, no matter who the perpetrator. This is another of Nixon's lessons. But Clinton is not Nixon. He does not have the latter's integrity in office or aptitude in foreign policy. Clinton will not resign unless the Starr Report tells tales of Marion Barry-type drug slumps and RFK-style pool parties; nor will he be impeached; nor should he be. Nobody would benefit. A discredited democrat in the White House has already sabotaged the Democrats for November, and an incumbent Gore in 2000 would most probably insure his reelection. So Republicans are gloating, but quietly. America needs a united front against the volatile menace which is oligarch-driven Russian politics. (Yes, Soviet-style communism is dead, but a return to state-ownership of major industries and services following seven years of capitalist failure is the probable alternative to Yeltsin's democratic dictatorship.) And a healthy pessimism in foreign policy demands a strong stance against Muslim Fundamentalist Terrorism, not to be confused with the glorious Islamic religion. (Expect more retaliation for Afghanistan and the Sudan.) The point -- and the reason Senator Specter was so out of place to question the president's motives publicly -- is that domestic discord must end at the borders of the United States. America is the most powerful nation in the world, with the best political system -- (what other government in history would tolerate the present level of critique?) -- and a lot of nations resent that. They cite the wanton influence of American culture, the domination of American companies in world markets, America's secular "imperialism." But you can't argue with success. Nor can you take it for granted. Where survival is at stake, we should prepare for the worst eventuality.