Quilty as Charged

What we are dealing with is a riddle wrapped in a mystery and surrounded by a turd. We are all guests at the mad tea party, except it's a Kafkaesque mad necktie party with the gibbering Mad Hatter going "He said 'not guilty' when we asked if he was guilty -- that means he's guilty!" and dipping his watch in the tea.

Better make that not Quilty....

Certain Republicans hate Clinton because, seeing as how they represent the quasi-Newtonian absolute space of a Punch&JudeoChristian worldview in which up is up, down is down and we still fry the fags down at the courthouse, they contrariwise know certain democrats especially President Bubba represents the oleaginous quasi-Einsteinian relative space of a whatsgoodforyou, whatsgoodforme, donthurtdoit sometimesawoodstocknotion clusterfuck. Us: self-sacrifice. Them: self gratification. But Clinton saluted the flag praised God and said he didn't inhale and got elected.

He lied.

If, roughly speaking, politics follows rhetoric follows ethics follows epistemology follows ontology...

What do we do, how do we agree on it, what's right, how do you know, what is reality...

The democratic party was left in the nasty position of being the practical political expression of an unspeakable worldview. You can't say "God is dead -- the universe is meaningless -- there is no value except the value we create -- vote for me!"

You dance around and pretend.

You salute the flag and go "blahblahblah" about the sacred ten commandments...

You lie.

The source of the Clinton hatred is: from the perspective of the religious/cultural Right, the worldview Clinton represents is evil, beyond debate and not entitled to legitimate political expression. SOMEBODY WHO THINKS LIKE HE DOES IS NOT SUPPOSED TO GET ELECTED PRESIDENT.

Clinton is the snake slithering into the Holy of Holies. Clinton is Falstaff. Clinton is the Lord of Misrule squatting his fat Bubba ass on the sacred throne. It's not supposed to be! HE CHEATED!

HE LIED!

Our friends on the Right knew this, the few who are true believers, the many who are liars themselves and spout the rhetoric of godhonorflagsacrifice because (A) of the power it brings them (B) because they believe the world will blow up if most people don't buy into this shit. Hypocricy aside, they press on with the Clintquisition...

It's the principle of the thing.



Clinton, meanwhile, is sorta like a Hegelian contradiction with the nose of W.C. Fields. Clinton is the living embodiment of why the 60s didn't work: the failure of a generation made flesh.

50's....

Thesis: You can be anything you want to be. (The War is over)
Antithesis: Do what you're told and be like everybody else. (The War is never over)
Synthesis: Fight for peace. (Civil Rights, Bohemian conformity, etc.)

60's
Thesis: We should be together. (Solidarity, living simply..."brother"..."sister"...)
Antithesis: Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll. (Hedonism...the politics of ecstacy...)
Synthesis: "We are the world" (Feelgood hypocritical bullcrap)

Well, no, it's not fun. The roller coaster of history doesn't always go up.

The 60s was two revolutions: the revolution of pleasure against repression; the revolution of brotherhood against oppression. Maybe, in some alternative universe where Abbie Hoffman didn't kill himself, it's possible to have both...

But in this universe the capitalistic machine sucked up the youth rebellion and spit it back as a Youth Rebellion t-shirt. It spit out pleasure in every form, including the pleasure of hip ironic detachment, including the pleasure of being outside of society, including also pleasure tinged with pain, along with a vast oinkish wallow for millions of people who didn't need to pretend to be hip, and public television, barbed-wire bumper stickers and benefit rock concerts for those with vestigal twinges of the need for social change....

All the deadfrog jerks of save the whales power to the people rhetoric for which the twentysomethings despise the Boomers...

Here, the contradiction. Until the Boddhisattva line is crossed, your pleasure is somebody else's pain; me means mine and to fuck is to fuck over...

Fuck the world. The freak with the munchies finds the fridge in the middle of the night and FUCKING EATS EVERYTHING IN IT. Every last bit of cake. Every beer. Every coke. The Snickers bar. The halloween candy in the back of the freezer. "Save some for somebody else..." NO! FUCK YOU! IT'S MINEMINEMINEYARGGHARRGHGHAMUMUNCHMMMMGGHSNARFARGGG..."

Fuck the world. If you fuck her your best friend your brother whoever will hate you forever you'll put that wall up FUCK THAT I HAVEN'T BEEN FUCKED IN A MONTH I NEED THIS SHE WANTS ME IT FEELS RIGHT LOOK AT HOW SHE'S LOOKING AT ME....YARRRGHHHHH...." And they hump, bump, grind...

And so much for solidarity.

So, the Boomers had a job: bring the war back home, defeat the Nazi within, put the power back on the shelf and stop living like pigs...

Instead, the Boomers cleaned out the fridge.

Instead of liberating the next generation...

We fucked them.

Personal liberation was the easy part -- heroic fucking or religion in all its forms. Social justice was not so easy...

The problem being (A) the good stuff, good fucks and nice experiences you would have to, hypothetically, give up to have a real revolution.
(B) the loss of income, stinky career, ostracism, nightsticks to the head or worse.

The solution: dead rhetoric and style. Works great, just so long as you don't fuck with power. Just so long as you're very very clear in yourself about what's real and what's bullshit and how far you can go -- lines that nobody talks about like "DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT FUCKING WITH INSURANCE," for example...

Back in '92 They allowed Clinton to win. Had to maintain that illusion of democracy, you know -- same principle as championship wrestling, you can't let the same side win all the time or it starts to get dull...

The deal was...listen up, Bubba, cause we're only gonna tell you once. We'll keep up the pretense a few years longer. You can give the spoiled whining Boomers a few more years of separate peace. We will slowly consolidate our globalized corporate America without scaring anybody. There's a Democrat in the White House, after all. The system works....

But don't try anything cute. Above all, don't fuck with the money.

And don't even think about fucking with insurance.

But he did -- poor damn fool must've thought he was really President one day -- which is when the Corporate Oligarchy released the dogs of the right (ready to rip Clinton's throat out for reason's mentioned above...)

And maybe it had been planned this way all along.

This is great theater, after all. A morality play. A fall from grace. A plea for cheap grace. All that, and semen stains too. Not to mention a quick and dirty war...

Bangbang. Blamblam. Sinsin. Blahblah.

And while the rubes have all got their eyes on that...

We'll just quietly string out our barbed wire here...

La-de-da...

Just keep watching them hearings, kids...is that Shakespearean or what?

La-de-da-da...

Oh look! They're dropping bombs on Iraq...ain't that something? Lookitthat!

La-de-de-da-da, hmmmhmmm....

Be done in just a minute, kids...

Lookitthat!

Some of you hate me. Some of you love me. Some of you want all this turmoil to go away. But America is in crisis -- a crisis that I will freely admit I have largely created.

I've been accused of lying -- and I have done so. Hell -- I'm goddamn good at it! "What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" -- but I've had a lot of practice, people! Oh yeah! I'm a GOOD goddamn liar...and that's the truth!

This has always been the power my enemies hold over me. My weakness. My strength.

I have fallen into the trap They set for me. I let Them back me into a corner. They got me just where They wanted me. Funny thing...that may just be Their undoing!

Because I've been backed into a corner where, goddamnit anyway, there's nothing to lose anymore. No reason, finally, not to tell the goddamn truth...no reason not to say goddamn on television! Goddamn...it feels good to say goddamn!

So here it is, America:

Back in the 60's I found myself in a fork in the road...change the system from within or destroy it from without. Two paths you can go by -- just like it says in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Letting the system remain was no option at all: America had become a machine producing death -- just plain obvious to anyone with the eyes to see it.

So I worked from within -- ignoring the "sell out!" jeers of my radical friends -- climbing the political ladder and giving away little pieces of myself the higher I got. I surrendered my principles one by one. I cut my hair. I shined my shoes. Even so, I had hoped, to the end, to hold onto my balls. Still do...

That's the price you pay for changing the system from within.

Fact is, I couldn't be honest. I couldn't stand up and tell the world that I didn't give a good goddamn who screwed who or what they put into their bodies just so long as they didn't hurt anybody. I couldn't tell the world that Hillary and I had an open marriage and that was just fine with the two of us and nobody else's damn business. Couldn't admit, in public, that, as with so many others of my generation, my life was not about self-sacrifice -- but the pursuit of self-gratification and self-actualization.

In this, I remained a true citizen of the Woodstock Nation -- a member of the counterculture that stood up against the death machine that was America in the 60s -- for awhile anyway.

As Toynbee pointed out, every generation has a mission. History judges each generation according to whether it succeeds or fails in that mission. This mission is assigned by a process Toynbee referred to as "challenge and response." History hands you a challenge. How do you respond?

Looking backwards, the challenge of my 60s generation was to take the war America had won against the Nazis in Europe and bring it back home -- and defeat the Hitler within. Our mission was to create social justice and equal opportunity in a colorblind, egalitarian society. To end the powertrips and racism. To end the waste. To stop living like pigs...

The old Leftists used to call that "solidarity." We used that word too, until we forgot what it meant. That was part of our Revolution --

The other part being sex, drugs and rock and roll.

I'm here to tell you, after awhile it gets kinda hard fighting for social justice and the perfect orgasm at the same time...

Which is why, like many of my generation, I discovered that it was easier saying it than doing it. Talk is cheap. As cheap as a feel-good donation to "We are the World" or some similar festival of hype, bullshit and self-promotion on the part of a bunch of self-indulgent pop stars past their peak disguised as charity...

This all happened gradually. No signing your soul on a deed to the devil in blood. No door to open or line to cross. Just a process of gradual corruption. Piece by piece, principle by principle.

And then -- one day -- you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror. You look -- and the Dad that ran away from you is smiling right back.

What you realize -- what I realized -- is that, like every generation, we had become our parents. Our parents, meanwhile, were trying to pull a Joshua number and hold back the sun. They wanted to keep time's wheels from turning. They didn't want to pass the torch onto us -- ungrateful bastards that we were -- though they were content to sell us shit.

But sooner or later it had to happen. No matter how much they fought it, no matter how hard they worked out or how much Grecian Formula they applied -- the day had to come when George Bush, Bob Dole and Private Ryan were just too damn old for the White House. That day came. And on that day, I was just about ready...

I had reached the last rung on the ladder, the end of my sell-out climb. I had climbed this far by lying, of course. There was no other choice...

The Republican party had come to represent the worldview of folks who believed in some absolute moral standard -- God, the ten commandments, heaven, hell, thou shalt not -- the whole nine yards. Now -- of course this was a cover story for the agenda of various corporate interests -- but plenty of folks sincerely believed in that cover story. And sincerely believed the Republican party represented them. Millions of people...

Millions of other people believed in a relativistic world view. Essentially, these were the children of the counter culture. The democratic party was the only party left to represent this viewpoint -- as the last ditch redoubt of the ragtag remnants of American liberalism and the American left, strange bedfellows though they were...

Trouble is, you couldn't own up to the core beliefs of that constituency without committing political suicide. The other shop could holler "God told me that abortion is wrong!" We weren't free to holler back "Good and evil exists in your head, fucker!" They could say "Gay marriage is an abomination!" You couldn't say, "Who cares who screws whom?" They could say "War on drugs!" You couldn't say, "What's wrong with getting high every now and then?" They could say "Prayer in schools!" You couldn't say, "Let's leave talking to ghosts to the nuthouse."

So the democratic party was left in the nasty position of being the practical political expression of an unspeakable worldview. You can't say "God is dead -- the universe is meaningless -- there is no value except the value we create -- vote for me!" You can't say anything except pure flying horseshit. Just flapping through the skies like Pegasus dropping your load on the world below...

Salute the flag! Support our troops! Praise the Lord! America's great!

In other words -- you have to lie.

The reason our friends on the Right hate me so much is because they know this. Somebody who represents a relativistic way of seeing the world ain't supposed to get to the White House -- the reason I'm there is I cheated. I lied....

They know. And so they hate me.

They know that, despite my suit, tie and haircut, I'm a goddamn draft-dodging, pot-smoking hippy in the White House.

And that's what this is all about.

I stand before you as a walking Hegelian contradiction. I had hoped to bring about a Revolution of social justice and equality. I had also hoped to party hard.

Holding onto my balls, in other words.

And every time I grabbed another stolen piece of pleasure out of the nooky jar, that's when I'd tell myself "This is the real me. All that horseshit for the camera's just an act. This is the real William Jefferson Clinton. I just don't care...this sure FEELS like Revolution...WOOO-HOOOO!"

That's what they figured I was doing. And they found me out...

It's come down to this. My generation failed in its historical mission. We lost the Revolution -- because you couldn't have a life devoted to pleasure and solidarity at one and the same time -- at least not just yet. Instead of liberating the future we fucked it -- just like me and Monica, though technically speaking that wasn't intercourse. How goddamn symbolic it all is, huh?

Now the death generation wants to bring me down -- because they want to impose their view of reality on America like some thermoplastic mold. What they want is a schizoid perpetual motion machine -- the Puritanical America of public discourse full of flag-saluting, Church-going, parade-marching, war-supporting sacrificial patriots -- and the Love for Sale America of the capitalist marketplace in which everything and everyone has a price and honor, love, loyalty and compassion do not exist. An America of atomized selves trying to buy their sense of identity and belonging back based on the latest glittering horseshit they see sandwiched inbetween a bunch of actors pretending to be real people on television. Trying to buy their souls back -- but just going deeper and deeper in debt in the endless mall of Satan's Company Store America...

Once again, America wants to eat its young -- in this case the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the WWII generation. Listen up kids...

Seeing as how they've got me on the ropes, I can be honest now. The tube's been lying to you. You can't have it all. You can't do anything you want. You can't grow up to be President, even if you get to wear the suit. The tube promises a party but that party's about to end. This is what this is all about...and I wish I hadn't lied about it.

All you young folks out there who either don't believe in God or don't believe God particularly cares about whatever gets you through the night are going to be screwed. You will learn to wear a public face and salute what They tell you. You will wear a suit and tie and shine your shoes...forever. You can be your real self in the dark, of course -- They'll be making money off that too. But out in the open, get ready for a whole lot of smiling and saluting if you don't all get together and stop Them now. The time has come to fight!

Relativistic amoralists of America -- I call to you now! The time of decision has come. My generation failed in the 60's, but perhaps it's not too late. The challenge has come before us once again -- and perhaps for one last time -- we can still bring the War back home!

That is the challenge of history. That is my challenge to you today -- my challenge to all you bad boys and girls out there who got me elected in the first place...

Animal House America -- I call to you! Unbelievers, hedonists, pagans and pleasure-seekers everywhere -- I call to you! My call goes out to all you hard-working, hard-partying folks out there who are sworn to fun and loyal to none -- and you know who you are!

Revolution now! Revolution TODAY!

Hear my call. Accept the challenge of history. Stand up. The time is now...

The time has come to stand up and fight for what you don't believe in.

Good night, America.

The time has come. The time is now.

I give you this challenge. I give you this call...

Two paths you can go by, as


A party full of odd bedfellows, let me tell you, who had only recently stopped tearing each other apart As the last-ditch stand of the rag-tag remnants of America's liberals and the left -- folks who, once upon a time