Class, religion in Clinton's America

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): To puzzled Koreans and Thais, the latest turn in the Clinton-Lewinsky melodrama just proves how inscrutable those Occidentals are. To Middle Easterners, it's obviously a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Clinton (though why Jews would want to undermine the most pro-Israeli president in recent American history goes unexplained). But the French, for once, have got it right.

Generally, the French are hopeless on American culture: they think, for example, that Jerry Lewis is the greatest artist of his generation. But they are aware (since it's their history, too) that the intellectual and political principles of the great revolution in 1789, which have defined French national life ever since, were mostly borrowed from the American revolution of 15 years before.

This gives them an almost unique perspective on the United States (for Americans themselves know little history). In France, they do not just sneer at the U.S. media's obsession with the "semen-stained dress" that Monica Lewinsky may or may not have kept as a souvenir of her services to President Clinton. They lament and puzzle over the descent into cant and bathos of a political culture that was once the most open and creative in the West.

But then, so would George Washington. If you brought the founding fathers of the American republic back to life -- Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, above all Tom Paine -- and brought them forward to the United States of today, they would flee screaming from their fellow-citizens.

What would horrify them is not the body-piercing, the rap music, and the other ephemeral of pop culture: these were clever, worldly men who broke all the molds of their time, and they'd figure that stuff out pretty fast. But they would be deeply disappointed by the religiosity and humbug of modern American public life, and they would wonder what went wrong.

It was partly inevitable. The founders of the republic included a high proportion of men who had little time for organized Christianity, and insisted on complete separation of religion and the state. But most American of the time were in the New World precisely because they were more religious than the European norm, religious dissenters of one sort or another who had moved to America to practice their beliefs freely. And numbers matter.

The non-religious wrote the constitution, but it was the religious who ultimately defined the norms of American public life. Even today, the United States is an astoundingly religious country. Some 60 percent of Americans go to church, synagogue or whatever once a month, a rate of public religious observance equaled in some Moslem countries but ten times higher than in Europe.

So there was bound to be a permanent conflict between the popular impulse to legislate morality and the constitutional ban on mixing religion and politics. What tilted the balance, perhaps irrevocably, was the accident of the Cold War.

Communism was basically a political doctrine, part of an argument about the distribution of wealth and power that had been raging in Western culture for several hundred years. The atheism of Soviet-style Communism was merely a side issue -- but it was the aspect most horrifying to devout Americans, so that was what the propagandists emphasized.

For four decades, American propaganda waged what amounted to a holy war against the 'godless' Soviet Union, and in the course of it religious rhetoric took over much of the terrain previously reserved for the secular business of politics. America is probably more overtly religious now than at any time in its history.

Finally came modern mass media and the collapse of deference, making the private peccadilloes of public figures public property. Jack Kennedy could copulate with everything that moved and still escape media attention 35 years ago. Today, Clinton gets headlines for far less ambitious sexual adventures -- and he gets judged by standards that are basically religious (despite the Special Prosecutor's list of alleged legal and constitutional violations).

Clinton may yet get away with it: he is the "Indiana Jones of American politics". But surely it would have been safer and easier if he had just opted for instant confession, a pseudo- religious media ritual of redemption that has become a staple of modern American public life.

If he had just said "I'm deeply sorry I did it, and I pray to God that He will help me mend my ways" (about Paula Jones, or Monica Lewinsky, or any other trouser problems) -- and if his wife Hilary had said, "Yes, he does have a trouser problem, but I love him for his other qualities and I'm standing by my man" -- then he would have been off the hook with most of the American public.

So why didn't he? Some time ago, I asked that question of Shelby Foote, one of the finest American historians of his generation. And Foote simply drawled: "If you're from Arkansas, your first instinct is to lie."

Now Shelby Foote is from Mississippi, and Mississippians do not hold people from the neighboring state of Arkansas in high esteem. In slavery days, the white planter aristocracy of Mississippi despised the poor, redneck farmers of Arkansas even more than their own home-grown "white trash", and attitudes linger.

It's not just religion that drives things in Clinton's America; it's also region and class. Within Shelby Foote's grand and sweeping slander, there is a kernel of truth: that Arkansas is a place where the vast majority of people have traditionally been entirely under the thumbs of the powerful few.

When you cannot trust the institutions to be fair or forgiving, it is generally wiser to deny all when you get into trouble. Clinton grew up in that tradition -- so he didn't confess at the right time, and now he may be dragged under.

Meanwhile, George Washington spins quietly in his grave.