File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 377


Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 20:34:49 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Clinton & the limits of secularism


        
>Clinton will stay only as long as Capital says he stays; the end of 
>his tenure may be in sight.  Gore is certainly preferable to Gephardt
>in that he is a stable, predictable technocrat as likely to rile the
>swinish mass as he is to publicly partake in frenzied >autoeroticisim...The
Ownership may want to give him a leg up on the >Democrat Party nomination by
removing what's-his-name now, and maybe this >is what this [Monica Lewinsky]
is all about...

I can't decide whether infidelity to one's partner is, *sui generis*,
unacceptable to the American mentality; I suspect it is not.  Sexual favors,
like everything else, come at quite a discount in our forlorn culture.
Nonetheless, there is a special opprobrium to this kind of 
betrayal.  Does it have to do with our own sense of grievance, with some
sort of internalized self-doubt?  In a society where everything is measured
by its re-sale, its external value, does such a betrayal belie our own
intrinsic unworthiness?  Clinton is dealing with, potentially, some very
powerful resentments here.

It is fitting that this sordid episode should eclipse the Pope's visit to
Cuba, with its obscene caricature of *Cristo* languishing in the same
pantheon with Marti and Guevera at the Plaza de Revolucion.  As religious
illusions have gradually disappeared, and the extrusion of religious
superstition from such domains as law, government, politics and education in
modernizing societies, the current quest for personal meaning and salvation
has perceptibly replaced it, becoming what Thomas Luckmann called the
"invisible religion" of "self-expression" and "self-realization".  Both the
Pope and Fidel are fighting a losing rear-guard action against
"secularization", against the idea that it is the individual, rather than
the collective, that matters.

All this can mean two things.  In a temporal sense, we are becoming more and
more that which our leaders have always been -- promiscuous, mercenary,
prodigiously disloyal, contemptuous, even, of obligations higher than those
pertaining to ourselves.  Too, we are further along that road -- indeed, so
far along that we shall never turn back -- of reducing all things intangible
to context-bound judgements that recognize *all* morality arises in
particular contexts.  Can Clinton any longer be praised or condemned by the
lights of a doctrine whose universalist pretensions are no longer credible?

Louis Godena


   



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