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Whoever fights monsters
must take care not to become a monster himself. For, as you stand looking
deep into the abyss, the abyss is looking deep into you.
In light of the current, developing controversy over the Presidential sex scandal, the nation embarks on a trek of forgiveness, even as it enters on a discourse on the limits of power. While, for any man, this is an uncomfortable reality, it is doubly so for a man of his stature, faced with this occurring in the harsh, merciless glare of klieg lights and in the hungry maw of the majoritarian media. The President, faced now with a cynical and skeptical public, has begun to seek wider, public stages for his mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpas (Latin for "My fault, my fault, my most grievous faults"). It has the air of ritual in it, the stuff of play-acting on life's twirling stage. There is an obvious problem with the most recent spate of mea culpas by President William Jefferson Clinton. It is that it comes after a long, undeniable history that goes not so much to sexuality, as it goes to power: This President's history of the treatment of his alleged allies is, in a word, troubling. Consider Labor: their millions marched in his support. Clinton's Response: A Genuflection to Wall Street by the passage of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), a nefarious agreement that weakened labor on both sides of the Rio Grande, which strengthened the hand of capital, by giving them a powerful tool with which to threaten labor ('Sign off on this give-back, or we'll move to Mexico!'), Consider Blacks: Who voted for him in overwhelming numbers. Clinton's Response: His skillful use of the 'black faces in high places' strategy, while ostensibly in support of the Black bourgeoisie, masked an attack on the Black working poor, who were central, subliminal targets of a "New Democrat" attack, designed to ease White, suburban anxiety. In this context, the so-called Welfare 'Reform' Act, the Anti-Habeas Corpus Bill (so-called Anti-Terrorism Bill), and his administration's opposition to the Racial Justice Act are utterly understandable. The public dissing of strong, outspoken Black women like rapper Sista Souljah, Law Prof. Lani Guinier, and Dr. Joycelyn Elder was also a calculated effort to appeal to white ethnics, by showing he could put Blacks in their place: subordinate. His treatment of Haitians was patently immoral. Consider Gays: From coast-to-coast, his core fans. Clinton's Response: He supported gays in the military, only to flip when the right-wing barked. The ulterior motive of the Democratic Leadership Conference (of which Clinton was head) was to take the Democratic Party back from the leftist hijackers. Clinton, with his great smile and homey, Southern charm, was a chief operative in this plan, to broaden (read:Whiten) party appeal. This meant consciously betraying the expendable interests of those who supported him the most and the longest, to capture the Un-Holy Grail of a right-wing that hated him with total passion. Early in the Lincoln Administration, Journalist and agitator, Frederick Douglass lambasted Lincoln's policy as "simply and solely to reconstruct the union on the old and corrupting basis of compromise, by which slavery shall retain all the power that it ever had,..." [Douglass' Monthly (Aug. 1862),p. 692-93]. Later, of course, under the pressure of losing the War, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, not to free slaves, but to save the Union. The Clinton Administration was built on the sands of Betrayal, a betrayal that didn't begin with a girl named Monica, and didn't end there either. ©1998MAJ |
A Presidency of Betrayal