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Chapter 15 Impeachment and Enchanting Arts Eric Rothstein Why revisit the “Clinton Scandal,” wading waist-deep in the yellow confetti of previous punditry? Well, free from calls for clairvoyance or for calming jitters about The System’s death rattle, one might inquire what we gained from Impeachment besides another slam-bang episode in a Punch-and-Judy show. And gain we did. To doubt it is to embrace the Hack’s dictum in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, that true felicity lies in being well deceived. We gained hostile caution about politicians, journalists, and other chattering classes. Americans also gained, I’d say, insofar as their disenchantment went beyond simply being fed up. That is, they gained insofar as they felt a different, more profound disenchantment, Max Weber’s Entzauberung. My argument is this: During the Impeachment Spectacle, energy spilled from one model of politics to another. The awesome wheels of government turned out to be the stage effects of disreputable wheelers and dealers. One could best accommodate this fact, still watchful of Washington’s power over our lives, by being entzaubert rather than fed up. Politics could make sense through a new cognitive model that junks magic, myth, and mystification, thus disenchanting the staging of events. By aestheticizing what’s staged, we learned, one can evaluate the actual running of the government pragmatically. This cognitive model, I’ll suggest, could alter American politics, without having to displace all other models, work for everyone, or get adopted in toto. By the 1990s in America, multiple cognitive, moral, and aesthetic stances everywhere competed for legitimacy. In doing so, they kept elaborating a trading floor for values, an options exchange. On that trading floor, legitimating arguments and legitimated interests met, mingled, vied, and swapped energies. This produced strangely complex problems of appraisal. The typically nineteenth-century formation of Kierkegaard’s 212 Either/Or (1843) cast moral and aesthetic allegiances as existential, exclusive alternatives, along the ancient lines of a rivalry between duty and pleasure or community and self, lawlike codes of principle. In living one’s real life, though, moral and aesthetic practice are nearly always a both/ and, cooperating as applied skills. Since they resemble each other in structure, they often seem to stand over against the cognitive, in rivalries like heart and head or value and value-free. Separately and together they also depend on cognitive stances as to truth, belief, knowledge, and opinion . None of these standards—the true, the good, and the beautiful, so to speak—has its own simple legitimacy, let alone simple ways of legitimating the particulars that fall beneath it. On this complex trading floor for values, the Clinton imbroglio was staged. Staging fit admirably with current politics, a branch of the service industry , advertised by testimonials and come-ons. Politicians get fitted out to be the optimal stand-ins for themselves: they thus vend themselves as representatives of their constituents (with capacities as to programs, responsiveness , savvy, and energy) and as representations of selves with glamour, aura, and gravitas. By 1998 the various media had long been highlighting the backstage dressers, such as spin doctors, pollsters, and PR experts. We’d all learned how to see politics as marketing and theater. In talking about the portrayal of roles in literal theater, a director has remarked that we can say this: that an actor playing Hamlet is not notHamlet .1 The actor’s doubleness draws one into a doubleness of one’s own, as viewer and participant. Thus we’re complicit with the make-believe . From and over the structure of the occasion, audience and actor produce an antistructure of responsive performance. So with first-rate politicians. That’s why pressing the flesh is electric: it’s the moment of real presence when Hamlet and not not-Hamlet (or, for Washington Republicans in 1998, Macbeth and not not-Macbeth) closely coincide in a single, present, image-bearing body. The figure can pass from a public prop into a private, make-believe, participatory-game prop, with our keeping a double awareness as in theatrical or fantasy experience. The pathology of extreme passion for or against President Clinton may arise in part from his genius at just such deep, flexible impersonation of “himself .” Correspondingly, Impeachers tried to dissociate a “real,” fleshy, rapacious Clinton from the President as a satisfactory public prop—hence the heaping on of prurient detail in Starr’s report. Even if this were not true, staging would have had to take place. However...

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