Scandal File: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

ALAIN de Botton, the brilliant “Literary Life” columnist of the London Sunday Telegraph and author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, reminds us that Walt Whitman’s introduction to Leaves of Grass celebrates the poet’s free-ranging sexual appetite and his “intention of becoming the national prophet of unashamed sex.” In this volume—which was one day and in a very different world to be given as a love-offering by Bill Clinton to Monica Lewinsky—Whitman even ventured to hope that his public shedding of inhibition should influence his fellow countrymen, up to the highest in the land— “perhaps launching at the President, leading persons, Congressmen, or judges of the Supreme Court.” As Mr. de Botton drily observes, “143 years later, he has succeeded spectacularly.”

Or has he? For it is not the least of the ironies surrounding the shockingly public sex life of our first rock ’n’ roll President that, so far from justifying himself by appealing to a Whitmanesque, let-it-all-hang-out ethos, the crypto-hippie in the White House is lying his head off, and thus implicitly invoking the aid of all the old hypocrisies about sex that his idealistic generation was supposed to have buried forever. The implications of this accidental counter-revolution, and especially of the fact that the feminists seem willingly to have signed up for it, are tremendous. But they have not yet begun to dawn on those conservatives whom force of habit continues to keep focused on maximizing the potential political damage to Mr. Clinton.

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James Bowman

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ALAIN de Botton, the brilliant “Literary Life” columnist of the London Sunday Telegraph and author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, reminds us that Walt Whitman’s introduction to Leaves of Grass celebrates the poet’s free-ranging sexual appetite and his “intention of becoming the national prophet of unashamed sex.” In this volume—which was one day and in a very different world to be given as a love-offering by Bill Clinton to Monica Lewinsky—Whitman even ventured to hope that his public shedding of inhibition should influence his fellow countrymen, up to the highest in the land— “perhaps launching at the President, leading persons, Congressmen, or judges of the Supreme Court.” As Mr. de Botton drily observes, “143 years later, he has succeeded spectacularly.”

Or has he? For it is not the least of the ironies surrounding the shockingly public sex life of our first rock ’n’ roll President that, so far from justifying himself by appealing to a Whitmanesque, let-it-all-hang-out ethos, the crypto-hippie in the White House is lying his head off, and thus implicitly invoking the aid of all the old hypocrisies about sex that his idealistic generation was supposed to have buried forever. The implications of this accidental counter-revolution, and especially of the fact that the feminists seem willingly to have signed up for it, are tremendous. But they have not yet begun to dawn on those conservatives whom force of habit continues to keep focused on maximizing the potential political damage to Mr. Clinton.