Archive for October 2, 2010

The Daily Beast has a fas­ci­nat­ing new arti­cle about the Death of the Sex Scan­dal. (Read it at The Atlantic.) The writ­ers sug­gest Amer­i­cans have become more cos­mopoli­tan, or jaded, or just plain bored with sex scan­dals, which are no longer the death knell they once were to polit­i­cal careers, espe­cially on the right. Of course no dis­cus­sion of sex scan­dals is com­plete with­out ref­er­ence to Bill Clin­ton, that wily polic­ti­cal sur­vivor, who may be partly respon­si­ble for this aston­ish­ing evo­lu­tion in Amer­i­can polictics:

The 42^nd pres­i­dent of the United States was arguably the first har­bin­ger that the sex scan­dal had lost its power to end polit­i­cal careers. Even fem­i­nists seemed unaf­fected by his antics. The deeper Ken Starr delved into Clinton’s sex­ca­pades, the more his approval rat­ings seemed to rise. Today, despite that woman, and every­thing else, Clin­ton is a man redeemed. His reha­bil­i­ta­tion has been so tri­umphant that one writer on this site recently won­dered if Clin­ton had set a new bar for the suc­cess­ful post-​​Presidency.

Mean­while, the new touch­word seems to be “patri­o­tism”, rather than pro­bity and purity. Among Repub­li­cans it doesn’t mat­ter any­more how much you love your wife…nowadays, it’s all about how much you love your coun­try. My pet Freep­ers are deeply into this new politics…and so are Sarah Palin and Michele Bach­mann, with all their dog-​​whistle talk about “real Amer­i­cans” and peo­ple in Con­gress who are “anti-​​American”.

The Freep­ers have been watch­ing the “One Nation” rally on the Mall, and many of their com­ments are predictable…“Bunch of com­mie pinkos”, or “No won­der the crowd is slow get­ting up to speed, none of these peo­ple are ever out of bed before noon”, or “They won’t come unless there’s free food” and so forth. But their remarks about the flag are espe­cially telling…and deeply, bru­tally offen­sive. “Why is OUR flag at their rally?” and “Of course they have the flag there. They’re plan­ning to burn it later”.

The most zeal­ous seg­ment of the Repub­li­can base hon­estly believes it is the only part of Amer­ica that truly loves Amer­ica. They con­sider them­selves the only true Patri­ots. They sim­ply can­not imag­ine (let alone acknowl­edge) that any­one on the left could pos­si­bly also be a patriot. And in party that not so long ago impeached a pres­i­dent for a brief sex­ual dal­liance between con­sent­ing adults…nowadays, a Repub­li­can can be a player, a per­vert, a pros­ti­tute or provo­ca­teur… as long as he/​she is a Patriot.

In 1935, Sin­clair Lewis mem­o­rably pre­dicted that “When fas­cism comes to Amer­ica, it will be wrapped in the flag and car­ry­ing a cross”.

Per­haps it’s time to give some thought to that prophecy.