He's guilty or I am blind

NEW YORK, AUGUST 11

It is beginning to sound as if every Friend of Bill had been individually coached, the man on the street, the representative in Congress, the commentator on network TV. Coached to say: What can all the fuss be about, since after all we're just talking about another case of consensual sex? A few comments.

1. Consensual sex implies a relationship between equals, roughly described. Two college students, is a workaday example. When one party is an instructor, let alone a professor, the view of the matter is progressively altered. It is in acknowledgment of this graduated difference in age, station, and responsibility that conventions arise, e.g., against sex by professors with students, and regulations get enacted, e.g., against sex between officers and enlisted personnel.

2. We reach the highest position in the land, President of the United States. And the occupant is here dealing with the lowest position in federal employment -- the so-called intern, exchanging a year's service in return for a close-in look at the lives of federal officials who have power and exercise authority. We can readily assume that in the situation in the Oval Office in 1995, Miss Lewinsky was the succubus -- but Mr. Clinton wasn't asleep. In the vernacular, she was the groupie who, to express her fascination, awe, devotion, disposition to give what she could, even as if she were given an opportunity to do so by a Rolling Stone, parted her lips, submissively, obediently, lovingly.

Is that really "consensual" sex? If the young wench throws herself into the arms of the Prince, and he proceeds concupiscently, is it not correct to say that he has taken advantage of her? The Prince sets out in the world knowing that there are virgins by the trainload who would willingly spend the night with him. If he engages them, one after another, have we an exercise in serial consensual sex?

3. What has happened to the very concept of the "dirty old man"? That was the term used for generations to describe men who, whether endowed by office, money, wiles, whatever, lured young women into their house (hotel, car, canoe) to have sex. Yes, it was always proper to distinguish between rape and submissive sex. But whichever it was, the incubus was still a dirty old man. What is it that makes someone less than a dirty old man because he is also President of the United States? Aren't the arguments pretty appealing that the more august the station of the man, the more offensive his misbehavior?

4. We hear also from the chorus that the responsibility of the male in the current situation is to "guard" against the embarrassment of his wife and his daughter. We move quickly across the obvious, which is that the best way to avoid embarrassing Hillary and Chelsea is by not screwing the intern to begin with. But having done so, to whom is the primary obligation? If Clinton's preferred form of sexual contact had been such that Monica had been impregnated, and if she had resolved to carry the child, then Clinton, the father, would have been responsible for providing for the child's care and feeding. In royal days, the child would have been made a count, or whatever. Absent impregnation, isn't it the responsibility of the senior party to apologize convincingly to the groupie? And what kind of solicitude is taken for wife and child when the outcome of an act of corruption becomes grist for the mills of every comedian in the world? If thought is given exclusively to the faculty for leadership in the President of the United States, one wonders at the leadership involved in turning incontinent carnality into a national mess which involves the prospective embarrassment of every Democratic official so loyal, and so reckless, as to have believed him when he reported "to the American people" his innocence of the charge.

5. Because factual innocence is as likely as the cow jumping over the moon. Even Mr. Clinton's ardent backers are showing wariness here, as when the cosmopolitan former mayor of New York Ed Koch, while backing Clinton lustily over the radio, admitted that he didn't think the President had been telling the truth. Of course not, and with respect to the doubters, two things should be stressed. The first, that the excuse of a whatthehell consensual episode doesn't clear the air. The second, that the facts at hand require honest evaluation. If it is established that the whole apparatus of fact-gathering has been mistaken, and Bill Clinton is innocent of the affair with Monica Lewinsky, I will donate a year's income from this column to the Lighthouse for the Blind, and enroll as a member.

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