Mud on the President, Part 3. That’s how La Stampa announced (in an article by their New York correspondent, Franco Pantarelli) the latest decision of amazingly illuminative wisdom coming from the House Judiciary Committee to let us hear the tapes that Linda Tripp surreptitiously recorded of her conversations with a young woman who made the mistake of confiding in someone she ingenuously considered to be her friend.
And here I am getting caught up in the muck like everybody else. Reading the Starr report, listening to 4 hours of videotape, and writing about it in a column that purports to give a foreign perspective of American issues or vice versa. Well, there’s certainly no need for me to synthesize the overseas perspectives on the persecution of our President. The unprecedented standing ovation at the U.N. last week and Nelson Mandela’s words about morality and sticking by your friends in moments of great difficulty speak eloquently enough. Evidently, America's friends and enemies alike agree that the U.S. presidency and the 25 regional conflicts going on in the world right now have a little more import than the oldest sin in the world. So let me just speak for myself.
I think if they go through with this impeachment thing, it’s going to be time for me to come home. It might even be most appropriate for me to return to my native Boston to organize another Tea Party. The last one we held was in protest against "taxation without representation." This time, according to the polls, almost seventy percent of us don’t feel that we are properly represented by those bigots who have decided that sex is the evil of all evils and are set on dragging us through having to know even more about what is none of our business in the hopes of overturning our President.
Who knows why they think they’re going to succeed at changing public opinion by feeding us even more refuse? We’re the generation that made the cultural and sexual revolution. Middle age, financial well-being, and children haven’t turned all of the free-thinkers into moral and fiscal conservatives.
How can we possibly reason that this is anything less than a witchhunt? We know that Kenneth Starr hired Brett Kavanaugh and Stephen Bates with taxpayer’s money to transform the legalese of his report into something more digestible. Both are brilliant lawyers with a passion for writing. Bates, who has written several books, studied narrative techniques at nowhere less than Harvard. Since most members of Congress have studied law, what need did they have for this adaptation from the complex and abstruse language of lawyers to something that reads like the script of a sit-com? How not to conclude that the report was prepared apriori for public consumption? And how not to assume the worst about the manipulations that are going on with the Linda Tripp tapes in preparation for our consumption? Ostensibly they are cleaning them up so that we won’t be offended by all of the four-letter words that come up in the conversations of the two women. Why this sudden sensitivity to what we might find repugnant, when the American public has made it clear through the polls that what offends it is the public airing of this whole affair? How not to infer that the clean up that is being done to make the tapes fit for our ears concerns editing out elements that might raise any more doubts about the way Kenneth Star has conducted his investigation?
In the almost two decades that I have lived in Europe, I have voted in every presidential election by means of the absentee ballot which I receive by mail. I’m an independent voter and I believe I’ve given both Democrats and Republicans equal preference. I’ve always been proud of our system which ties our vote strictly to the personality of the candidates. I've never received an absentee ballot for the off-year elections and I’ve never bothered to find out about them. Since I don’t live in the United States, I’m unable to keep up with the merits of the local candidates anyway.
I have dual-citizenship, so I vote in Italy as well. Only here, up until recently, you voted for the party, and then they decided who would go to parliament according to how many seats the party had gained. I’ve never liked the detachment of this system. During the cold war, many Italians voted for the Christian Democrats, not so much out of conviction, but to be sure that the Communists would not receive a majority. A kind of negative vote, not in favor of the policies of the Christian Democrats, but against the fear of Communism.
The trouble is, people like Henry Hyde and Newt Gingrich are evidently placing their bets not on the opinion polls, but on voter turnout figures. They are much more concerned about losing the support of their own constituents by not pressing for impeachment, than the less probable uprising of the indignant and indifferent who seldom bother to vote, but may be tired of having their TV schedule modified or of having to explain oral sex to their children.
For the up-coming midterm elections, I’m going to find out about getting my absentee ballot. Or maybe I’ll just fly over and vote. It won’t be for the merits of the individual candidate though. It’ll be a negative vote of protest. I’m going to vote against the other party, Italian style.
October 1998
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