Philip Roth’s 2008 novel Indignation has been made into a film of the same name, just released. It is set at a Midwestern college in the 1950s and of course is meant to dramatize the stifling McCarthyite repression and crushing sexual reticence of that period, a view of the time so favored by our leftish intelligentsia but also unfortunately widely accepted by people who should know better. The protagonist is a young Jewish man who wins a scholarship to the college, where, wouldn’t you know it, weekly chapel is required. One wonders if the Temple elders who sponsored the scholarship couldn’t have found a school that did not require chapel attendance and thus spared the atheistic young man his self-righteous indignation. But then, I guess, we wouldn’t have our story, would we.
More interesting than this 1950s take is the fact that the novel and the film are clearly also reprising a period much later than the fifties. The idea of college deferments getting boys out of being sent to war, at that time Korea, is more typical of a later period and a later war. But also, the interrogation to which the young man is subjected by the college dean is clearly meant to remind those who can remember, or inform those who can’t, of the questioning to which Bill Clinton was put regarding his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky. (This also helps explain the sexual act that the female protagonist performs in the film, not likely to be practiced by a well-bred young college girl in those years.) At that time the president lied under oath and subsequently did his best to obstruct justice and tamper with witnesses. He was impeached but acquitted, with much of the country clamoring that “everybody does it” and “it was just about sex.” Few were able to take in that this type of questioning was not due to right-wing McCarthyism but to leftwing feminism and the rules of evidence allowed in instances of inappropriate sexual conduct in the workplace, whether voluntary or not, thanks to the Violence against Women Act, signed by Clinton, and signed again by him after his own ordeal was over.