Individualism is the cornerstone of America, and ‘sensuality and leisure above all else’ is its credo. No less than an American president practised it ‘because I could do it,’ said Clinton of his lapses, and get away with it
TWO contemporary issues of morality and power play out in the peoples court of America. Roped in to read Bill Clinton’s amazingly candid memoir My Life and watch Michael Moore’s chilling film Fahrenheit 9/11 the moment of reckoning for America is here. Part one posits the presidential obsession with sex and his “psychobabble mea culpas” in the fastest selling book ever in US history.
The world loves a lover. The ‘world’ of course is the US, as it likes to call itself. And the ‘lover’ is Bill Clinton, their 42nd president. Alongside sizzling beefy steaks at barbecues tonight, will be stories thrown in, bawdy jokes traded, about My Life and how its adulterous author woke up his wife one night to admit having an affair with a White House intern, no older than daughter, Chelsea.
As Americans celebrate their independence from England 228 years ago with family and friends over hamburgers and beer, the self-pitying ribaldry of their former president will ricochet across the American skies in sync with the heady fireworks at night. “The most religious, optimistic, patriotic, rights-oriented and individualistic” America has lately heard its supreme commander and Oval Office occupant, tell the people that sex always got the better of him, hence Monica Lewinsky. And that Hillary, his wronged wife, banished the president from her bedroom. With a couch as his sleeping partner for two months, the ensuing year found that the estranged First Couple solicit marriage shrinks for eight hours a day every week.
Finally, the purgatory for his carnal sins ended with his wife, daughter and the Congress washing away Clinton’s “old demons” from the White House.
How in the world ... oops, I mean America, was such a deviant — what else does one call a sex offender? — allowed to run the corporate-military-industrial complex for eight years? Son of a five-time-married woman, routinely bashed by her alcoholic husband in the presence of little Bill, we now learn for the first time that Clinton since childhood was a master masquerader, who in his own words hid from his friends, his inner anger, forever leading “parallel lives”.
Maybe that answers my above question. Blame it on mom!
Clinton writes his memoirs of growing up with flourish and often indulging in frank and very personal soul-searching (feels he’s lying on the psychologist couch) psychoanalysing his sexual perversion instead of shining light on national issues under his watch when America’s reserves touched a record $60-plus trillion and the jobless rate hit its lowest in years.
He’s an open book, a tragic hero. While Americans suffer from swagger, or are sickeningly self-absorbed and meanly materialistic, one thing they hate is hypocrisy. Americans have zero tolerance for liars. The ‘comeback kid’, as Clinton is known, has thus bared his chest out to his people, teary-eyed and all choked-up, giving them a gossipy book that makes for a racy summer read.
Honest-to-goodness Ronald Reagan, another hero, called America his shining city upon a hill. The star-spangled flag even today flies half-mast to mourn his death!
“We are not a war-like people,” Reagan declared 30 years ago, “nor is our history filled with tales of aggressive adventures and imperialism ... never again will young Americans be asked to fight and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful that we, as a nation, pledge our full resources to achieve victory as quickly as possible.”
Today’s “War President”, as Bush likes to call himself, has led his nation into an abyss by invading Iraq, making the treasury bankrupt only to eat crow in the end by admitting that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction, nor is he buddies with Al Qaeda — the two excuses Bush bandied to fight Iraq.
How history will judge him, “we will not be alive by then” Bush quips, but comics on late-night shows are lampooning Bush’s Attention Deficit Disorder, when he stammered “Abu Ghaa..raff”! And then searched his brain for the word prison, but it never came to his mind ... so he faltered some more, bumbled, muttered and turned deathly white before the White House press corps last week (stifling laughter must have been hard for the hacks!).
I tell you, our President is mighty lucky! Bush by now has managed to memorize his name and has no problem pronouncing it either! Remember, there was a time when he didn’t know who the blazes Pervez Musharraf was.
In My Life, Clinton first mentions Musharraf on page 864, blaming him for “crossing the Line of Control” when Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, “called and ask if he could come to Washington on July 4 to discuss the dangerous stand-off with India.”
On Musharraf’s coup, Clinton again blames the General on America’s failure to get Osama: “Musharraf’s ascendancy had one immediate consequence: the programme to send Pakistani commandos into Afghanistan to catch or kill Osama bin Laden was cancelled.”
But at the end of Clinton’s book, come accolades for Musharraf: “He was clearly intelligent, strong and sophisticated. If he chose to pursue a peaceful, progressive path, I thought he had a fair chance to succeed, but I told him I thought terrorism would eventually destroy Pakistan from within if he didn’t move against it.” Wow! We hope the General is listening.
But let’s talk about America on its birthday (now that Clinton’s sins have been forgiven by the people).
Bush pontificates that God has a plan for him since he’s kind of His vicegerent on Earth, assigned to squash sin from longitude to latitude around the planet, and later even sweeping Mars (no kidding)!
“Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world” .... Ahem! Excuse me, Mr Bush, ... who wants to ape America, where men marry men and women bed women; where Viagra and Cialis (for male erectile dysfunction) penetrate our privacy over prime-time TV viewing as do creams for male enhancement (no wonder the American kids talk dirty as soon as they are out of their diapers)!
Is it that US today faces an epidemic in impotence? Reading the sexy advertisements in the New York Times news pages, one would imagine so. Last week, the NYT devoted a whole supplement on male and (dysfunctional) sex. Ditto for TV channels.
Not to be left out are the 90 million females eager to turn back the clock and willing to spend $1.15 billion on anti-aging treatments that promise eternal youth which equals everlasting love and sex!
July 4 birthday blues — aside from the impotent Romeos and the aging Juliets — are being lived by many millions, swimming in poverty with an oceanic divide between billionaires and paupers of the most ‘egalitarian nation’ under the sun.
“Are they my poor?” the poet, Emerson, said of the underlying American philosophy of fending for oneself, refusing the riff-raff charity. Even Andrew Carnegie, the rags-to-riches icon who left $400 million for the arts, preached that money must never be “wasted on the poor”!
Individualism, then, is the cornerstone of America, and “sensuality and leisure above all else” is its credo. No less than an American president practised it “because I could do it”, said Clinton of his lapses, and get away with it!
Next week: Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie that has taken America by storm and ruined Bush’s chances of re-election.
Individualism is the cornerstone of America, and ‘sensuality and leisure above all else’ is its credo. No less than an American president practised it ‘because I could do it,’ said Clinton of his lapses, and get away with it 
