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Chapter 21 The Spectacle and the Libertine David Kennedy What was going on last year anyway?1 Monica, Clinton, the Republicans: some kind of freight train through our collective life, massive, unavoidable , by turns exciting, gripping, and then gone, as suddenly as it had come. A year ago an interdisciplinary Monica festival like this would surely have convened a full house, and look at us now. The incandescent spotlight cast then on the chattering classes has been switched off, the cud chewers of the academy have returned to pasture. I must say I’ve had a hard time figuring out just what cud to chew, chastened that our ephemeral pop-cultural phenomena should turn out to be, well, ephemeral and pop-cultural, resistant to the weight of interpretation and analysis. It all seemed very meaningful at the time, and I remain convinced that Monica was basically good for the country.But maybe the whole thing was simply very present, a thrilling presence, less a “distraction” from other pressing matters than the breaking through of sound, sight, and feeling onto an otherwise cloudy cultural and political surface. There is no shortage of explanations, interpretations, and reactions to what happened, just as there was no shortage of commentary at the time. Take only the questions of politics and sex: the Clinton Impeachment retold as a story about the maneuvers of politicians in a legal regime, the Bill-Monica (Hillary) Affair as a story about the machinations of men and women in institutions and families, evaluated in every sort of social, moral, legal, and religious frame. People have attitudes about things like “What the nation’s first impeachment trial in more than a century meant for our institutions.” We get conclusions like “Congress did its duty,” or “the presidency has been compromised,” “the Republicans went too far,” or “the Democrats will stop at nothing,” or “someone politicized what is properly legal,” or “legalized what is properly political,” and so forth. And 279 there are reassurances that, in the end, our institutions worked rather well, even as any number of reform proposals, from proportional representation to term limits, elbow their way onto the event’s ample coattails. People have attitudes about things like whether Bill and Monica’s adventure was or was not sexual harassment, or exploitative, or demeaning, or adulterous, attitudes which are every bit as nuanced as Bill’s own analysis of whether it was “sex” at all. And there are reassurances that, in the end, the American people showed good sense about the whole thing, just as there are numerous proposals about what Bill and Monica—and for that matter Hillary and Linda and all the bit players—should, in fact, have done. Once it all got going, no one could move without stumbling into a tar pit of moral and political and legal interpretations. In books like this, one can certainly revisit this terrain. I’m sure the event did (or, as some of our authors argued, did not) have one or another consequence of this sort, and there is nothing wrong with getting a bunch of academics together to try to sort it all out. But monumentalizing last year’s experience into these molds loses a lot of wax. And it was great wax, even where it prefigured this meltdown into meaning—there is just something different about it before it turns to bronze. In today’s academic world, it has been the traditions of “cultural studies ” which have held onto the wax most aggressively, resisting the pull of our most familiar interpretive machinery while simultaneously expanding its range. In cultural studies, the ephemeral, the low, the random, and the rote can all be grist in the mill of meaning. These broad historicalcultural readings do open things up, and the results can sparkle with wit and wisdom. But I am wary to turn Monica over to the mavens of cultural studies—their practices can be at once too earnest and too glib. For all its zip and buzz, much of cultural studies today remains a redemptive practice—emphatic while looking down the microscope that these little things do mean something. Although we know that reading the surface can also efface it, there is gravitas in being savvy this way, reformatting the lofty and the base in the key of history, a world of mythical antecedents and hidden political effects. Somehow Culture already knew all this and now embraces all this, understands all things and, ultimately , judges all things. It...

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