rm | the thing I forgot to write about

Today's New York headlines were all about Bill Clinton on the subject of Monica Lewinsky. I don't read the tabloids (we don't code them at work), so I didn't see the full articles, but both the New York Post and the Daily News let us all know that Clinton had finally explained why he slept with Monica. "I did it, because I could," he said.

In the whole long Bill and Monica saga I was never angry at him, and never really thought badly of her. I didn't find her ugly, fat, scandalous, stupid or really anything other than just a little bit pitiful, as most women are at that age. Certainly, very few people in her position would have said no. And many would at least have mentally entertained the idea of pursuing what did eventually occur.

I found the whole thing useful -- it presented an easy way for me to talk about the things that interest me in writing -- which are the small events that happen to us all that none of us ever talk about. The feeling of revelation people experience when they find out they are ordinary, is deeply deeply compelling to me in art, because it is a necessarily small tradgedy. Bill and Monica presented the perfect opportunity to explain this in an elevator pitch.

When the vote on the impeachment thing happened, I remember watching it sitting on the floor of my Brooklyn 1-bedroom where I had the crazy self-hating swinger landlords. I was in the midst of a terrible time personally, and this bizarre national affair was a surreal punctuation, which I never took personally, again, because I wasn't mad at any one.

Well today I was mad. Mad at that, "because I could." "Because I could," makes Monica dissapear. She had her mouth on his dick and she wasn't even in the goddamn room as far as he was concerned. He didn't have to love her, like her or respect her. But he had to think she was hot, or that the situation was funny, or have spent half a goddamn second wondering what it would be like to know her if he were only twenty-three and an intern too. But instead, Clinton had to say, "because I could."

And it's that stupid, really extraordinarily boring sort of hubris that changes what should be a long dead discussion from whether Monica's teeth were too big to whether she was pathetic and desperate or not.

Of course she was. Of course she was. But she had giant brass balls to do what she did, as dumb as it was, as sloppy as it was, and now she's just some pathetic little girl he never even noticed because he as letting her (_letting her_ -- think about that phrase) suck his dick, because he could. Because he was bored. Because she didn't really ever exist at all.

I dunno man. Bill Clinton is probably the greatest orator I'll see in my lifetime. And I've never cared whether he was virtuous or not. But Bill Clinton was a guy we celebrated because when he shook your hand on the campaign line, you were for a second the only person in the world.

Which is what makes the non-existence of Monica utterly chilling in my mind. And offensive. To all of us.

Even Dear Abby often says confession is an act of selfishness. Bill Clinton certainly proves that out on this one. At least he's smart enough to know it.