Robert Kirby: Loose cannon It seems we are doomed to yet another month or so of the dreary adventures of President Bill Clinton’s prick. And what a joyless escapade it has been.
There is always available groupie- tail, like the banal Monica Lewinsky, hanging around senior politicians and public figures. Everyone knows that.
When one of them gets to give head to what British columnist Taki so expressively calls “the draft dodger”, it is hardly something to be vexed about. Except in the matter of Clinton’s taste in women. Mind you, that didn’t come as much of a surprise. Not when you look at Hillary.
The whole affair has long since lost its thrill. But now, as Clinton returns to Washington after another spellbinding world tour, reporters are fumbling around for more puns and angles to fill what must have been a very pallid 10 days up on the hill.
Once again intelligent, news-absorbing humankind is expected to drop its pen or shovel, interrupt its music and stop its mind in order to gape in wonder at the next chapter in this never-ending saga about how two spitefully unattractive people gave it to each other.
Apparently it is, if the media are to be trusted. I don’t mean the down-at- brain “popular” media. I mean ostensibly serious newspapers like The New York Times and ostensibly serious radio and television stations like the BBC, who have guttered on with the rest of them.
I’ve heard of fin de sicle decadence. But if a quick blow-job in the White House is all that the United States can come up with in the way of capping a globally depraved century, nearly a hundred years of unbounded and ruthless degeneracy have been utterly wasted.
And as for the rest of the world, not smugly nailed to its patriotic shutters the way the Americans are, well clearly we have learned many lessons from the gruesome array of political monsters who have ruled us.
We have taken tips and accepted hints from a century filled with gifted criminal imagination and activity – a good deal of that American, too.
In the cause of religious and political jealousy, in the last 98 years alone, we have obediently warred, maimed and killed, racially desecrated, destroyed, plundered, raped and abused probably several billion times as many people than in any other century.
Whole countries have been razed. The patterned brutality of the communist ideal has all but actually killed off Eastern Europe.
True, the US has done more than its fair share in helping poison the air and the waters, and in paying for the chopping down of three quarters of the world’s trees. But when it comes to war, all the Americans have done is thunder in John Wayne-like whenever one or the other side has shouted for help.
The US might have secretly financed a few wars over the past century. It may have invented, perfected and developed the most sophisticated ordnance available and sold vast amounts of it, but it has not actually started any major war of its own account. Not out in the open. By and large, the US has been unsuccessful at warmongering for the sake of it.
Which is probably why all the US can produce for an end-of-the-millennium lucky-dip horror, something to round off the party, is the vision of Monica chewing Bill’s private bits.
In reality this is a shrewd cop-out by the US spin doctors. In other parts of the world there are several vile battles on the go. In malice, some are challenging the reputations of Hitler and Stalin – it took Rwanda only a month to wipe out a million people.
Starvation, floods, genocide, paedophilia, bombs. Out there in the rest of the world’s confusions, they are celebrating the 20th century in their own terms.
If America hopes to catch up, it will, at last, have to join in the general carnage with much more will. No more threatening gestures and build-ups, no more homily piety.
The Americans are public relations maestros.We can only hope that they will step in at the last moment with some utterly unexpected, mutantly aggressive, utterly pitiless invasion of somewhere really important, like Russia perhaps. Something to make US colonialism as recognisably abhorrent as it is to the Arabians.
Clinton suddenly dropping missiles on foreign countries was a lurch in the right direction, a sign he acknowledges grassroots America wants to be a bit more obviously iniquitous than invading some minor South American republic or having illicit office sex.
This late in the day, however, it will take some doing.