The Hell of Gates, Jr.
This week's New Yorker is light on ads (Chatterbox picked it up and
for a second thought it was the New Republic !) but thick with highbrow
Clintophilic rationalization in the form of an essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
You thought Flytrap was about sex and perjury? Wrong! It's really about the
decline of loyalty among former Clinton aides like George Stephanopoulos and
Leon Panetta, and the nefarious spread of atomistic individuals loyal to an
abstract, "uniform set of principles" such as "impartial truth." Kenneth Starr
is the embodiment of these inhuman principles, the "Enlightenment's...curse."
All poor Clinton was doing was trying to "struggle with the gummy, vexed
exigencies of the merely human."
Well, Gates is right about the gummy part, for sure. Three questions,
though:
1. Who says there's more disloyalty in this scandal? Chatterbox
carries no water for George Stephanopoulos (see 1/25 and 2/2). But his sin is
less his disloyalty in acknowledging a potential crime by his ex-patron than
his failure to confess his own complicity in that crime. Overall, the striking
thing about Flytrap is not how much disloyalty there has been but how
little . Nobody from inside the administration has yet broken ranks
(though there have been rumblings from cabinet secretaries Rubin and Riley).
There is no John Dean, no Deep Throat. Compare those Watergate betrayals with
the watered-down subversion of Stephanopoulos and Panetta, which amounted to
saying on television what was obvious--that Clinton is in trouble unless he
explains himself soon--and you would conclude that loyalty has been on the rise
since the Nixon years. (Maybe what has changed is we no longer expect a loyal
aide to admit even the obvious. We're so accustomed to spin that common sense
sounds like treason.) Gates includes a few "to-be-sure" paragraphs about Dean,
and then proceeds undeterred. Like a thinking man's Johnny Apple, he surveys
various Kennedy and Johnson hacks--even tracking down that familiar standby,
the unnamed "Washington veteran"--and reaps a harvest of self-congratulatory
harrumphing along the lines of "I come from an era when loyalty and gratitude
were regally honored," not like these young whippersnappers, etc. He cites
JFK's secretary Evelyn Lincoln as one of the ancient paragons of loyalty--the
"embodiment of the courtier's discretion." Would that be the same Evelyn
Lincoln who after JFK's death, according to
Slate's David Plotz,
"circulated stories that Jackie had had adulterous trysts in the White House"
and "spent the remaining 32 years badmouthing LBJ and Jackie..."? (See Plotz's piece.)
Sounds a bit like Dick Morris defending Bill by badmouthing Hillary.
2. Do we really want to place loyalty over truth? Gates' main straw
man is one William Godwin, who in 1793 argued that if you can rescue either
your mother or Archbishop Fenelon from a burning house, "you go for the
Archbishop, since he has the greater social contribution to make." [Gates'
words.] In Gates' essay, those who would favor a stand of principle over the
ties of blut and boden (or even business)--whistle-blowers,
antiwar dissenters, anyone who says "I often place my duty to society above my
duty to my company"--are characterized as "William Godwin types all, letting
their own dear mothers burn to a crisp with nary a second thought while they
grandly escort some silk-bedizened cleric to safety." Worse, they're selfish,
rootless cosmopolitans--sorry, they're selfish "moral illuminati" pursuing
their own vision of individual "authenticity," of "unbridled self-assertion,"
at the expense of family and group ties ("the intricately reciprocal character
of a life lived within community"). Of course, Gates comically stacks the deck
with the Godwin example, since Godwin asks that we rescue the cleric, not in
the name of truth but in the name of some sort of obnoxious aristocratic
utilitarianism. (Nor is betraying Clinton exactly like burning your
mother.) In reality, of course, it is Clinton's defenders who are making the
utilitarian arguments about the overbalancing value of the president's "greater
social contribution." A larger point concerns the value of loyalty--whether to
family, "community," employer, or other social group. Is it really such a great
thing? Loyalty, in this sense, has given us wars, racism, tribalism and
genocide. Selfish uniform principles have given us science, human rights, and
the Constitution....The Enlightenment! Individualism! Take it away, Leon
Wieseltier!...
3. Even if Stephanopoulos should be loyal to Clinton , why should the
rest of us? By the end of his piece, Gates has subtly slipped from
attacking ex-aides who criticize Clinton to attacking anyone who
criticizes Clinton. We must all, he says, start "learning to talk about right
and wrong without recourse to abstract principles." Anyone else is a
mama-barbecuing, Ken Starr-style fanatic. Gates never explains why Chatterbox,
or any other ordinary voter, owes Clinton the same loyalty as Stephanopoulos
does. If the charges against the president are true, isn't it he who has
betrayed us?
Chatterbox could go on and on. Didn't Bill Clinton champion the very "new
economy" of rootless, skilled free-agents--the very disloyal types Gates claims
threaten to subject the president to the laws that apply to other Americans?
Would we have been better served in Vietnam if fewer officials had quit the
Johnson administration to protest the war--or if more had quit, earlier, and
more loudly? Why should we spend valuable time reading the journalism of Henry
Louis Gates Jr. if he is happy to place his loyalty--to his family? his race?
his colleagues? to The New Yorker? , to the academic empire he's building
at Harvard?--over an annoying abstract principle like truth? Maybe Chatterbox
has seen On the Waterfront too many times. But should we really root for
the guys who poison Marlon Brando's pigeons?
