Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

7. The First Penis Impeached

7 The First Penis Impeached Toby Miller [N]othing big ever came from being small. —Bill Clinton’s Second Inaugural Address1 There are so many reasons for the left to loathe Clinton: gays in the military, health insurance, welfare, poverty, the environment, secondary schooling, antisocialist and pro-market rhetoric, failure to support left appointees when they were assaulted by the right (you sack the surgeon-general for recommending promiscuous hand jobs instead of promiscuous penetrative sex when that’s your own M.O.?), and brutal military violence. Consider Clinton’s two inauguration speeches—grotesque assortments of biblical and Catholic teaching plus clichés from the Gipper, signaling an ecumenical but strong religiosity and debts to fellow conservatives. A form of “civil religion,” these addresses troped the United States as a chosen land, despite the church-and-state requirements of the Constitution.2 On the other side of the dime, Clinton stopped the rot, the horror of the Gipper /Bush the Elder, the unrestrained gun and tobacco lobbies, the rhetoric of antigovernment , and many threats to abortion, while 1998 saw real personal incomes up by 8 percent from four years earlier.3 He represents what Warren Beatty has appositely called “the slightly more liberal one of the two accounting firms we call our major parties.”4 Clinton is a disappointment to the left, but not our true enemy.5 As the saying goes, “he’s our bastard.” 116 Throughout his time in national life, Clinton has been “a man whose political and personal lives conflate in the being of his erections.”6 Miraculously, “our bastard” survived the most astonishing of these assaults, impeachment. What are the cultural coordinates that might explain this staying power, in terms of both history and theory? In addressing these matters, I conclude that we need to conceive of the First Penis in the context of (a) the penis as an index of self-governance ; (b) the male body as an increasingly sexualized, commodified set of signs; (c) media coverage of Clinton-Lewinsky; and (d) the public’s view of (c) in the light of (a) and (b). The Government of the Penis Corporate America’s Dirty Secret: Addicted to Sex. Forget Bill and Monica. It’s a big problem for business. Companies used to wink at these troubled executives. Now they send them to desert clinics for “The Cure.” —Fortune cover, 10 May 1999 [T]he American president’s sex organ seems to have become the center of the universe. —Jack Lang7 Saint Augustine explains Adam and Eve’s post-apple physical shame as a problem of control: what had been easily managed organs prior to the fall suddenly became liable to “a novel disturbance in their disobedient flesh,” homologous to their owners’ disobedience of God. The result—the rest of us were left with original sin. The pudenda, or “parts of shame,” are named as such because people now find lust can “arouse those members independently of decision.” The “movements of their body” manifest “indecent novelty” and hence shame. Such feelings derive from the capacity of objects to get out of whack. The “genital organs have become as it were the private property of lust.”8 As Foucault puts it, what once were “like the fingers” in obeying the will of their owner, came to elude his control, a punishment for Adam’s own attempt to evade God’s will. Man exemplifies the Fall in the mutability of his penis. So Renaissance paintings of Jesus routinely depict him pointing to or touching his genitals as a sign of his human side: a begotten rather than a created Son.9 This appears to be Clinton’s problem, “the adolescent boy-king, always in trouble, yet lovingly forgivable,” as per Rob Lowe’s Billy in St. Elmo’s Fire. Clinton is unremittingly priapic and mendacious, and you can see it written all over him. Weak and trembling in the face of desire, he deals with these forces in ways that provide the world with a transparent screen of evaluation. On the surface, THE FIRST PENIS IMPEACHED 117 this priapism would suggest a massive vote of no confidence from the allegedly puritanical American public. But that never came, and it doesn’t surprise me. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the body was the locus for an ethics of the self, a combat with pleasure and pain that enabled people to find the...