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

11. Monica Dreyfus

11 Monica Dreyfus Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, and Joe Lockard A specter haunted more than one continent last year, the specter of Monica Lewinsky. Stories about Monica did not remain stories: they mutated into political facts and explanations. Repetition transformed and localized stories, and another story emerged reinterpreted from the husk of its forebear. We live in an economy of stories where trading has been globalized, an economy where we seek the embodiment of power within these globalized mystery stories interwoven with images. As the stories swirl, interpretation descends into conspiracism. Conspiracy lives within an empty shell of factuality, a shell that has long been deserted here by the self-sufficient simplicity of sexual attraction as explanation. Desire for an alternate world of cause and effect creates the image of conspiratorial desire, an image tinged with both attraction and loathing. A story of a secret and of desires becomes the story of how political power operates. Minimal factuality feeds maximal interpretive fantasy. Monica Lewinsky’s absent presence spread everywhere; she appeared in the most unlikely contexts. According to news reports, in Serbia both pundits and public graffiti repeatedly linked Clinton, the NATO bombing campaign, and sex with Monica. For insult, antiwar graffiti on a Montmartre wall in Paris read “Adolf Clinton Aime Monica Chirac.” For pseudoanalysis, in the 203 words of one Russian tabloid, Moskovsky Komsomolets, Clinton’s support for the Kosovo campaign stemmed from sexual frustration after ending his affair with Lewinsky.1 “Bill without Monica has become a complete beast,” it declared, obviously forgetting Monica’s testimony that the president held a telephone discussion of U.S. infantry deployment in Bosnia while receiving fellatio. Even as Clinton ’s sexual memory, Monica remained an explanatory power. Lewinsky became part of the fabric of hidden social meanings, as she was ever since first being identified in the media. While American public opinion grappled with the implications of the Lewinsky-Clinton affair, opinion in the Middle East reinterpreted the story in a radically different form. We’ll first examine Monica Lewinsky as the “dark stranger” within American media imagery; then look at Clinton-Lewinsky in Middle Eastern public opinion; and finally use that comparison to speak about conspiracism and political analysis. Domestic Monica Who is Monica Lewinsky? The American media propagated concatenated images of her: a femme fatale, different from All-American girl power, an abused but exuberant upstart. Behind these images lurks a suspicion: Monica is a stranger. Lewinsky does not belong to the genteel, self-controlled, and rational “us,” but rather is an external, alien presence; she constitutes a threat to a known and honored order, a menace to sanitized American politics. Monica blazes with the energy of exotic sensuality: raven-haired and swarthy, thick-lipped with tons of diabolical lipstick. With her foreign, if not Gypsy mystique, she becomes an ominous Dark Lady. You can almost feel the musk-scented heat of the Bohemienne, glowing, drenched in perspiration. Lewinsky ’s erotic charm made her the Cosmopolitan Lady, easily suspected as a plotter. Photographs in the National Examiner depicted her as a sultry dominatrix clad in a pitch-black dress with a necklace of pearls. Is she not an unmeltable Slav, an exSoviet , or a Jew? These elements represent superstitious, backward, and irrational forces devoid of the internal conscience reserved for Protestants.2 No wonder that, in unison with Puritan prejudice, both the white militias and black extremists pigeonhole Jews, Catholics, and sexual minorities.3 With her elemental desire for sex, Lewinsky challenged pure America. The Dark Lady poisoned the purest of the symbolically pure, the White House. She was also out to stain other national sanctuaries and, according to the National Examiner , invaded the “prestigious Smithsonian Institute”—the newspaper seems to TOMASZ KITLINSKI, PAWEL LESZKOWICZ, AND JOE LOCKARD 204 mean the Institution—to “hunt for men.” The National Examiner drafted her into a political bestiary as a “sex-crazed vixen,” a woman “who would stop at nothing to satisfy her insatiable lust,” and who—expanding into zoomorphization—uses sex to “keep her claws” in men. She was alternately a man-eater, a praying mantis , or just an immature nymphomaniac with her “oversexed teen’s scheme.” Monica’s “non-stop stalking” gratified her desire for power; she plotted to “get the supreme representative of the People”; she became one of his “crutches”; and eventually “graduates from his seraglio.”4 The mystery and...