Dowd: Sympathy for Beelzebubba
Bill Nalty
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/11dowd.html
The New York Times
March 11, 1998
LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD
Sympathy for the Devil
WASHINGTON -- Time's cover story this week on "Primary Colors" offers an
incendiary hypothesis about the movie's Bill Clinton clone, Jack
Stanton.
"He shows up occasionally to bring fear, awe or happiness to the mortals
who are at the center of the story," Time's Richard Corliss writes. "He
asks them to slaughter their first principles, hurls plagues of tabloid
headlines their way, gives their lives meaning and hope with his
captious majesty. Except, of course, that Jack isn't God. In luring his
team toward corruption, twisting their idealism into Realpolitik,
Stanton is Satan."
Well, Mr. President, this is a case of you know you're in trouble when
. . . You know you're in trouble when all the Hollywood liberals and
Scientologists do their best to soften Joe Klein's mordant novel and
give you a valentine -- and the sweetened version depicts you as
Lucifer.
It had occurred to me that Bill Clinton's swelling popularity could be
explained by America's love of bad boys and anti-heroes. He's the
charming Butch Cassidy to Kenneth Starr's relentless Pinkerton man.
Hillary and Bill are the joyriding Bonnie and Clyde to Kenneth Starr's
killjoy Texas Ranger.
It had even occurred to me that Bill Clinton was so preternaturally
lucky he seemed to have cut a deal with the Devil. Given the carnage
that always surrounds Mr. Clinton, and given the fact that he always
smilingly walks away stronger than ever, I could easily see him as Faust
or Dorian Gray or Joe Hardy in "Damn Yankees."
But in light of the latest triumphs of the President -- in public
opinion, at least, he has vanquished the hymn-singing, holy-rolling
Starr, as well as Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and the Nosy
Parkers of the press -- Time is right. We must think cosmically about
this.
Perhaps Bill Clinton is the Devil. It would explain a lot. Certainly,
Hillary Clinton is condemned to her own little hell. Certainly, the
voters have closed their eyes and made their pact with the Devil: Keep
us prosperous and we won't hold you to any special moral or ethical
standards.
The Mephistophelean scenario has a wonderful logic. It would explain the
extraordinary level of human sacrifice around Bill Clinton -- why so
many people around him end up dead, jailed, betrayed, shackled, exiled,
subpoenaed, depressed, humiliated, broke, ruined and smeared. (And, in
the case of poor Buddy, neutered.)
James McDougal dies abruptly, a broken, crazy man, in solitary
confinement in Federal prison while his ex-business partner has more
political lives than a black cat.
It explains why our moral universe has turned upside down. It's fine if
Mr. Clinton preaches against tobacco one day, and the next goes to a
fund-raiser given by a lawyer trying to reap a tobacco windfall.
And it explains all the diabolical behavior of late, people saying
things so bizarre they could have come out of Linda Blair in "The
Exorcist."
Even the angelic seem possessed. Billy Graham telling Katie Couric that
the President should be forgiven all because "the ladies just go wild
over him"? Why should Mr. Clinton have to show any responsibility when
he is deemed an innocent victim of his own sex appeal by the nation's
most respected preacher?
You expect the feminists' heads to start rotating on their necks any
moment now. They've abandoned everything they've fought for all these
years to join the let-devils-be-devils chorus -- as long as the sex is
consensual or the President at some point, sooner or later, eventually
takes no for an answer.
Instead of racing to the White House and beating the stuffing out of
Bill Clinton, Monica's father waits a month and gives an interview to
Barbara Walters. Dr. Bernard Lewinsky ignored the fact that Clintonites
were trashing his daughter as a troubled temptress, and said he couldn't
imagine this scandal would erode confidence in the President. In loco
parentis fades into the loco parent.
And what is the green goo spewing out of David Brock's mouth? Suddenly,
the right-wing hatchet man who posed as a journalist is full of
repentance. But his belated and self-serving apologia doesn't make up
for the scummy innuendo he hurled at Anita Hill and the Clintons before
he decided that shredding someone's reputation might not be such a good
idea.
Americans seem to have decided that the Devil you know is better than
the Devil you don't know. Literally.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company