I was going to be funny, today, because I have to be, on occasion. My life is too important to be serious all the time, as I once told someone at some point. And it made sense at the time. Does it now? I have no idea.
I was going to be funny, because what else can I do when the nation goes careening the wrong way down a one-way street, with nothing but semis roaring towards it?
Nobody under 30 will have any memory of who Bill Clinton is, or who Monica Lewinsky is, or what a blue dress with a white stain is in terms of American Democracy. But for those of us on Social Security, we remember it well.
I was trying to be high-minded about it all. When the news first appeared in the 1990’s that Bill Clinton, whom my mother correctly described as a hound-dog, had had a “relationship” with a young intern, I thought, “yuck,” and tried to forget it.
It was impossible to ignore, and the congressional Republicans made damn sure of it. Morals mattered! Character counts! Can it be said that Republican shirked their moral duty, scorned the very values upon which our republic was founded, and turned their back on the most basic and sacred laws governing our society?
They did not!
The stench was sickening, the moral rot was putrifying, the sight was one no mortal could have beheld unmoved!
So Bill Clinton had gotten a blow job and his ejaculate had landed on the blue dress that Ms. Lewinsky was wearing. Lewinsky had mailed the dress to her mother, as I recall, and would I forget a detail like that? I had wasted a morning, in the 1990’s, writing an imaginary letter from Monica to Mom. How to convey the message that the dress—under NO circumstances—could be washed? Oh, and that it had to be kept somewhere private, which I seem to remember was under the bed. Anyway, there the dress was, and the greatest nation on earth waited and waited for what it might reveal to us. They took a buccal swab on Clinton, they matched it with the DNA from the white stain on the blue dress, and we all waited for 24 hours or so.
Clinton strolled out on the White House lawn and ‘fessed up in a way that satisfied no one, particularly, but that did allow the Republican to save face and keep from making an ass (or bigger asses) of themselves. The impeachment trial was both huge—it was only the second time in our history that a president had been impeached, and the first time around had set a particularly low bar 120 years earlier—and foregone. He wasn’t going to be convicted, but he certainly wasn’t getting off Scot-free. Everybody knew, just by seeing the pictures of Bill / Hilary / Chelsea walking to the helicopter to fly to vacation in Cape Cod, that he was going to pay a helluva price.
I was not then what I am now—an elderly, respectable homosexual. I sniggered, and I’m neither proud of it nor ashamed. In fact, I got totally into it, to the point where I considered stealing the book The Book of Virtues, by a guy named William Bennett. Here’s a description of the book from Wikipedia:
A former Secretary of Education for the United States, Bennett began developing the book around 1988 at the behest of teachers who pointed out the deficiencies of moral education in their schools.
Bennett was being trotted out regularly to express his horror at the Clinton / Lewinsky affair, and I could go along with him, to some extent. Clinton had had sex with an employee. It would have gotten me fired at Walmart, if I had had sex with one of my students. Why should the president be any different?
Sooo…do we let the Republicans topple a democratically elected leader, the ruler of the free world? A bunch of sniveling hypocrites?
The only way out was humor, and it wasn’t particularly easy, since I had this, sitting in my background.
The youngest person in the photo is photo is my grandmother, who would later write a brief memoir that got me to start writing again. I knew my grandmother as well as a boy / young man can know an elderly lady. And as well as the aspiring hippie that I was could know the Victorian lady that she never overcame.
She may be having the last laugh.
Whatever else Donald Trump was, he was certainly the deformed tail-end of the hippie / free love movement. He was the 80’s, with the ambition and the drive and the big hair. “Free love” meant to some of us examining our values, examining how our expectations of men and women and their sexual roles had inhibited us or thwarted us. It was—in theory—about liberation from old, outdated ideas.
It was not permission to fuck anybody, without thought of their feelings and examination of our own behavior.
Well, it was for Trump!
He bragged that “his Vietnam War” was surviving New York City in the 80’s—very funny, unless you had served, and possibly lost your life, in the war that Trump had avoided. You were sitting in a rice paddy, trying to figure out if the wind or a Viet Cong was moving that bush; Trump was waiting in a 5th Avenue doctor’s office, getting tested for the clap.
Maybe it was inevitable. The sixties and seventies had been a time of high moral purpose—ending war, fighting poverty, overturning centuries-old prejudices and useless moral strictures. The 80’s were the flip side of that. Greed was good, and sex was good, and screw your feelings and qualms. I want to get my rocks off.
My grandmother thought it was horrendous.
She didn’t want, really, to know what we were up to. “We” because mea culpa, I bought into it too, and even now don’t feel bad about it. I had grown up hearing the words “faggot” and “queer” and I was perfectly happy to throw it all back in their faces, and have as much anonymous and free sex as I could get. I never went to bed with anyone underage, under any coercion, or under the assumption that what we were doing was going to last, was serious. No babies, no hurt feelings.
And yeah, I got the clap too.
We all did.
So I too was swinging, in just the way Trump was swinging. Not at his level, of course—but the idea was the same.
I was going to write, “what saved me was those people, in the photo above,” but was I saved? Was I better than Donald Trump?
Assuming I was any better than Trump, having redoubtable Victorian ancestors probably saved the day. It’s easier both to be promiscuous and also abusive if you don’t have anyone looking over your shoulder. The path from the young girl of the photo to the old woman I knew was long, but perfectly graded and smoothed. My mother had sipped the sip of righteousness, and then passed the chalice to me. I could lie gloriously in the gutter, on some nights, but I was looking up at the stars and marveling. I wasn’t bathing in the slime.
There was an adult quality about my own dissipation in my youth that I think Trump never had. There was something, I like to think, that would have kept me from writing this, in this way, to this person.
Raise your hands, all you guys out there who doubted that the letter, bound in the leather binding with so many others, existed.
Dammit—raise your hands!
I said—RAISE YOUR HANDS!!!
What?
No one?
Guess it wasn’t funny.
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