May, 1998

Kenneth Starr insists on beating a dead horse. Someone please push it over and bury it. He's trivialized his office by wandering off on stuff the public doesn't want to know, clearly unable to find a crime without manufacturing one. There's hardly a worse thing in modern society than not being taken seriously and it's put him in trouble in the polls and got me in a funk. My beliefs are no longer so believable.

I believed women were serious about finding equality in the workplace. I was taken in, I've written about it, sat in on discussion groups. But this current lot, slavering after Clinton's hide have me on the ropes. It's enough to send me back to drinking with the guys. They seem overwhelmingly unable to 'just say no.' That was Nancy Reagan's drug policy and the women of NOW and other such groups might just benefit from similar sloganeering. Action and philosophy seem at cross purposes.

Whatever Bill Clinton's relationships with the women who worked for or around him, no one yet has accused him of acting forcibly or withholding promotion. Bad manners perhaps, but I've suffered that lapse a time or two myself. So, what's happened to saying 'thanks but no thanks' and getting on with life? Are these career women so timid as to need an intervention on their behalf? Hard to believe. Or are they for the most part, stick-up artists? That's less hard to believe and the reason why most of the women's groups are pretty quiet.

It doesn't seem there's anyone in this drama who isn't acting out of considerable self-interest and that poisons the well. Bad choices are no choice at all. Bad choices drive society apart at a time when it needs desperately to move closer. We need an arm around the shoulder, a smile and the warmth of touch.

I can see the eyebrows raising already, but it's true. I know it's true and you know it's true.

Yet our kid's teachers are terrified to hug a student, our co-workers afraid to put their arm around us at the copy machine, our bosses scared to death to travel with support staff of the opposite sex. Our workplaces are increasingly hostile, everyone edging away from everyone else, heads kept low. Interoffice warfare. We can't even, don't even talk about it, only litigate.

In less civilized societies, babies are picked up and loved by any adult with a moment to spend. They are carried close, skin to skin in most cases, they learn to trust and thereby become trustworthy. Not a bad system. But we're more civilized than that. We are so civilized that our children are more often raised by strangers in day-care and school where, kept at arm's length, they learn to distrust and become untrustworthy. How else to explain Clinton's principal accusers? Their backgrounds are the stuff of psychology texts.

There's a place for law in the relationship between me and the people I work for. Some potential abuses can be remedied in no other way and in case after case, when a clear history of abuse has been presented to a jury, the penalty has been levied. Not a cheap lesson either, no slap on the wrist, but big bucks and hardly a major corporation lacks 'sensitivity' training in such matters. Public support is solid. The courts may have driven us into our cubbyholes, but the evidence is there.

We've seen Bill Clinton's popularity polls hold steady or climb in the face of what couldn't be a more embarrassing set of allegations. The pundits are unable to explain it. The reasons seem overly clear to me---you and I simply do not see that a serious claim has been made. You and I are increasingly uncomfortable about having our president hung out to dry by a special prosecutor who we feel has a not-so-hidden agenda. Lacking more substantive issues, he's sought out and found a series of women who could have and should have just said no. Every purpose clamors to be served in this endless litigation save that of the public.

It's embarrassing. It's tiring and petty, undeserving stuff by any measure. I don't like to think of my president as a lecher. I'm not real pleased that he seems to have difficulty keeping his hands to himself. But in other administrations maybe I allowed my president a bit more privacy, perhaps because they used to maintain a little more distance from me as well. It's hard to take overly seriously a president in Big Mac tee shirt and running shorts. Once the image comes down, can the pants be far behind?

But polls don't tell all the truths. Figures don't lie but liars figure and if our president lied about something that any of us would have in his place, we'll forgive him. Eventually we'll turn on his detractors, tired of the pettiness. On the other hand if he lies about something we find substantive, as Richard Nixon did, we can be pretty unforgiving.

The special prosecutor has set himself up as the sole defender of your morals and mine. A ten gallon hat on a five gallon head. He further offers himself as an iron man and it's been said that no one falls like an iron man.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today