Monica Lewinsky makes me wanna puke. That is a direct quote. From me.
To you. Not from anyone else, not even from "Calabash," my astute but
mostly mute Political Muse, who has, not altogether unkindly, predicted
Monica's eventual attempted demise at her own hand rather than live on
her knees -- so please confiscate her nail-file, emery board, meds, and
CIA two-way vibrator-radio immediately, then watch out for Death By
Chocolate. Alert!! Alert!!!
No, I didn't watch Monica spill her guts to Babwa Wawa. I didn't
wanna watch her. I don't care about her thong. Or what kind of kisser he
was. Or her parents' suicidal fantasies. Or her struggle with f-a-t. Or
how weight, not politics, has governed her life. I would rather not
envision a 175-pound Valley Girl so worried about her weight she wears a
green suede mini-skirt to work, sashaying into the Oval Office so she
could flash her bootie at her boss, the president. Who should know
better? Him asking, if he really DID ask, What's underneath? MY
President. Though I did not vote for him. I just can't stomach that
stuff. Yuck-O.
No, I did not watch Monica and Babwa, because I just knew Babwa was
dying to recommend Monica for an Ambassadorship, or a Cabinet slot. I
wanted to stay ideologically pure. So I could just feel free to rant,
spew my biases and bigotries and half-baked theories here for you,
unmodulated by logic, uncontaminated by real factual information. You
know, what columnists do. Have opinions. Mouth off. Jump into the fray.
Wade into the melee. Rave on. Besides, I truly hate to get my news from
TV. I haaaaaaate it!! Here's Monica on medication! Cut to Monica's hair
finally ... controlled! Here's Monica looking like a subdued, somewhat
chastened Hester Prynne, blank forehead momentarily bereft of her
Scarlet "A." DID it fall off in the sauna as she gave blow-by-blow
descriptions of her truncated affair to a select and sympathetic group
of 74 million of her closest friends? Let's hear more. After this, cut
to Monica smiling eerily through the whole interview, even giggling at
inappropriate junctures. Watch out, this is what those marvy
anti-depressants can do to you -- they can be worse than a bad
face-lift.
But like those annoying floaters that sail across your eyes' field of
vision when you approach middle age, I have been unavoidably assailed,
assaulted, bombarded, anesthetized, numbed out, and dumbed down by media
detritus and bilge catapulted into my consciousness from Andrew Morton's
apologia for ***Monica*** http://www.amazon.com recently released into
the panting American marketplace. ...
Lucky for us, Monica has taken to portraying herself as a beleaguered
brunette version of Princess Diana -- she chose the same re-packager,
er, biographer, a Brit with Royal Envy. Canny move. There is perhaps a
pithy piece of wisdom to be derived here: some Princesses are made, not
born, some are re-made, and some are willfully manufactured, unwarranted
and unwarranteed. Monica may be suffering from a severe case of lifetime
over-privilege coupled with childhood psychological deprivation that has
rendered her an emotional tinderbox. A pompous assessment? Maybe. But
this is a chick with an admitted tendency toward tergiversation and a
desperately demonstrated homing instinct, like a heat-seeking missile,
for the crotches of married men. Sure the dudes are receptive; dudes
will be dudes, because, as the rock group Devo says, "Are we not men?"
Never before have I seen someone make low self-esteem into such a career
credential.
I have come to view Monica as a perfect Patron Saint of Y2K: decked
out, whacked out, out of control, maybe even viral, replete with
glitches and bugs in her programming that threaten to bring a government
down into complete and utter chaos unless we stop letting her
shenanigans distract us from the real work at hand of running a country,
before it gets run into the ground. This is the trollop who took Bill's,
er, hard drive and turned it into a floppy. And now she wants our hugs
and kisses and donations to her retirement fund. Let that be a lesson to
all of us. Get over it, re-install, and move on!
And you know what else really tees me off? How Ken Starr, that
misguided pseudo-pater familias acting in loco parentis -- can I get
away with saying that -- dared to paint Monica as some desecrated vessel
of young womanhood in need of his knightship to vanquish her besmirched
virtue? And how Monica presented her very dangerous liaison with Bill as
a Sacred Love Connection, plus the FUN of phone sex, right? So now what
do we learn lovesick Monica did during a lull in servicing Bill? To
demonstrate her party loyalty? Have an affair with a Pentagon official,
get knocked up, have an abortion, then accuse the dude of not standing
by her, though her Pentagon Romeo came forth with canceled checks to
disprove her claims of financial abandonment. A clear case of Toxic
Wench Syndrome if I've ever seen one. I hope he was a General who read
Von Clausewitz On War: "We may therefore say a strong mind does not lose
its balance even under the most violent excitement" (p. 147). Ah, yes,
the heartbreak of heartbreak.
A pox on all their houses, I say.
"Monica is just a stalker," says Sforza Destino, Manhattan
adman-turned-relationship advisor. "And so was Paula Jones. These women
fling themselves on ... his charisma."
Remember when David Letterman's stalker finally killed herself -- not
him -- last year? "A sad end to a confused life" was how the so-called
comedian put it. Which made me think how differently America perceived
Margaret Ray than Monica Lewinsky. The butt of any number of cruel
jokes, Margaret Ray knelt in front of an oncoming train and was crushed
to death instantaneously.
"The thing is, she's insane," Letterman had once said of the
obsessive 46-year-old woman who was first arrested in 1988 driving the
comedian's hijacked Porsche in Manhattan. She subsequently showed up at
his Connecticut property in a bathrobe, slept on his tennis court, broke
into his house, insisted she was Mrs. Letterman, and the mother of his
son, though they had never met. Convicted of trespassing and harassment,
she served time in prisons, jails, and state mental hospitals for her
infatuation from afar, which in medieval times might have been
considered mere Courtly Love.
Then, turning her excessive attentions to ex-astronaut Story Musgrave
-- "the oldest man in outer space" -- for four years Margaret Ray
called, wrote, and sent HIM packages, showed up on his doorstep, turned
on all his outdoor water faucets, and proclaimed later from her jail
cell, "I love him and want to spend the rest of my life with him."
Where have we heard this before? Right. From Monica Lewinsky,
Presidential Stalker. Monica "never expected she would fall in love with
the President," but did, then entertained thoughts of someday becoming,
you should pardon the expression, the next Mrs. Clinton. It is my
contention that Monica stalked Bill from the git-go. And, instead of
branding her as crazy, or at least hysteroid, dysphoric, and putting her
in restraints of some sort, we make this admitted liar the centerpiece
of a sorry sideshow unlike any other in this nation's history.
I'm sorry, but Monica Lewinsky is as much transgressor as
transgressed. Having seduced her married high school drama teacher, she
set her cap for President William Jefferson Clinton, an easy mark.
Packing her kneepads next to her bottle of Obsession ("It's a perfume,
It's a Lifestyle"), she descended on Washington, DC to nail her prey,
worming her way into the White House and eventually flashing her thong
at someone whose theme-song should be "I'm Just A Guy Who Can't Say No."
Margaret Ray died because she had no special prosecutor Kenneth
Starr, confidante Linda Tripp, or NY literary agent Lucianne Goldberg in
her corner, simple as that. Admittedly, David Letterman is not Bill
Clinton, though I can imagine Clinton leading off a meeting of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff with a list of "Top 10 Reasons to Bomb a Foreign
Civilian Facility During a Domestic Political Scandal," wrapped in a few
riffs from his saxophone.
To Bill Clinton's staff, Monica was "The Stalker." But, rather than
filing criminal charges and sending her to prison, jail, or the bin,
they transferred her out of the White House, with loss of prestige but
not pay. And so, to a thwarted, adolescently whining and pining Monica,
Bill Clinton became "The Big Creep," subject of endless hours of moony
fascination. No wonder last year's big Halloween costume seller was the
Monica dress, complete with cigar, beret, and removable stain.
Perhaps toy-makers will take a cue from the headlines, creating the
Monica Doll, nicknamed "Spoiled Brat," a highly interactive babe with
big hair, even bigger mouth, bendable knees, showing signs of petulance
and laziness: e-mails and letters rife with typos, and a repeating voice
chip with the insistent message, "I don't want to have to work for this
position, I just want it to be given to me."
Meanwhile, many Americans are sick of tawdry "revelation" after
"revelation." Think of what a lovely Y2K bonfire Kenneth Starr's
four-year, $40-million-dollar report which reads like a tacky,
breathless, burning-loins, bodice-ripper romance novel would make, if
our heat goes off next winter. Throw on a few million remainder copies
of Monica's biography and you'd have -- thank you, Tom Wolfe -- a true
bonfire of the vanities!
There are no victims, merely collaborators. What do you think?