Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 14:29:33 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: Edward Said:		The President and the Baseball Player



	A brief note:

	I was informed that Said's recent article appeared in POCO 
	in a truncated form.  I'm reposting the whole text 
	in the hope it will arrive this time intact.
							MD



		The President and the Baseball Player
			By Edward W. Said 

 Now that most of the Starr Report has been released and read by people all
over the world, one can stand back a little and try to make sense of this
quite extraordinary episode in American history. The fact is, first of all,
that there is simply no precedent for it whatsoever. The Independent
Prosecutor Act, by which Congress established the office of a special
investigator for executive branch misdemeanours, is hardly a decade old, and
the kind of powers it gives this prosecutor are virtually unlimited. So no
president has been so intimately investigated as Clinton, and it is likely
no one ever will be again. For the first time in history, the American
public has been virtually inundated with detail about the President's
private life, not just information from the Starr report. For the past nine
months the media -- unprecedented in its power and reach -- has bombarded
everyone who can read, listen to radio, or watch television with literally
innumerable stories, speculations, reports and interviews concerning
Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Janet Tripp, David Kendall, plus the whole immense
cast of players in this outrageous farce. Yet perhaps the most egregious
aspect of the story has been the prying into an individual's private life
without limits set either by law or by taste. The idea that even a US
president -- arguably the most powerful person on earth -- should not be
immune to this kind of vicarious prurience is frightening, but that indeed
is what has happened. Despite this, however, the polls show that a majority
of Americans still seem to believe that, no matter how gruesome or unsavory
the details of Clinton's private life, they approve of his performance on
the job for the time being. 

   There is no doubt, however, that things have changed with the actual
availability of the Starr Report. Having read most of it myself, I am
satisfied in concluding that it has become exclusively an indictment of the
president's sexual behaviour with a White House intern, and says absolutely
not one word about the Clinton family's financial dealings in the Whitewater
affair in Arkansas almost twenty years ago. But it was precisely that
scandal, real or supposed, that Kenneth Starr was appointed to investigate.
Having found nothing there, Starr went more or less on his own to find
nothing in any of the subsequent complications to Whitewater -- the suicide
of Vince Foster, or the firing of the White House travel staff, or the
paying off of Webster Hubbell, all of them supposedly tied directly to
Whitewater. There is, therefore, no mention of any of these matters in the
report, which, once again, was supposed to have been about only them. We now
know that, over a period of four years, Kenneth Starr and his office have
spent no less than $40 million for their investigation, with no limits or
observable accountability set to their expenditures. As someone who suffers
from leukaemia, I would have wished that those $40 million could have been
available for research on cancer rather than for inquiring into Clinton's
rather boring and tawdry sexual tastes. 

   The main contention made by Starr is, of course, that the President lied
to the courts and the people of the United States: hence the charge of
perjury -- supposedly one of the grounds for the president's impeachment,
which (if it ever occurs) in effect means that the Congress will put Clinton
on trial. There are many flaws in that contention, not the least of which is
that, according to the US Constitution, impeachment of the President comes
as a result of demonstrable "high crimes and misdemeanours", understood
literally here to be an attack on the state and people and constitution of
the United States, an attack and an active intention to harm. Now it would
be impossible to construe Clinton's corridor dalliance with Monica Lewinsky
as an attack on the United States or its people. Moreover, even if perjury
were equated with so grievous a crime, it is equally impossible to imagine
that the entire Congress would turn itself into a law court against Clinton
solely for the purpose of inquiring as to whether he lied about one or two
details in his affair with Lewinsky. Of course, now the various committees
of Congress will spend weeks and weeks "considering" Starr's report, but I
very much doubt whether the result will be impeachment proceedings. In fact,
it seems more likely that the Republicans who control Congress would prefer
to have Clinton around as a very much weakened, embarrassed President --
someone who will present them with little challenge as they go on with their
tax-cutting programmes -- than to see him leave. 

   If impeachment is an impossibility, why is Clinton losing no opportunity
to apologise and act contrite in so desperate, not to say tasteless, a way?
One important reason is that his advisers, lawyers, press agents, lobbyists
-- every public personality in this country is armed with people of that
sort, the president more than anyone -- have told him that the American
people like signs of remorse and religiously inspired contrition. Another
reason is that his first response on August 17 was considered "angry" and
therefore insufficiently contrite, since he didn't really confess to his
misdemeanours and sounded as if he was more anxious to attack Kenneth Starr
than appear sorry about his misbehaviour. A third reason is that, I think,
he feels cornered for the first time in a career that has been dotted with
dubious behavior, slick responses, and political treachery of every kind,
but from each of which he has somehow managed to escape. Now, this time,
there is little doubt that the sheer weight of the immense publicity and
exposure of his weaknesses, mendacity and coarse tastes will follow and
perhaps damn him for the rest of his life. It is impossible, alas, to
imagine that Clinton will ever escape the opprobrium and disgust he has
elicited from so many of his compatriots for his petty and silly behaviour;
but if he is also thinking, like the true politician that he really is, that
things may soon die down, he is also probably right. No one in the country,
even Clinton's most implacable enemies, can for long condone the fact that
Kenneth Starr, the son of a fundamentalist preacher, small-time lawyer, and
obsessed voyeur could have spent four years and $40 million only to uncover
Clinton's sexual encounters with a 20-year-old woman. But what the
complications and consequences for Clinton's career are, no one can now
really say. Certainly his presidency is fatally impaired, but this means
neither that he will resign nor that he will be impeached. The next few
weeks will determine his fate, but at this point it is far too early to tell
what that will be. My own feeling is that he will not resign but will stay
on to finish his term. 

   On the other hand, so powerful has been the national trauma that some
compensatory processes, some attempt to see elsewhere in the national life
an alternative to Clinton's profanity and gracelessness, have already begun.
For non-Americans, unused to the peculiarities of the national culture in
its popular forms, these are hard to discern, but it seems to me interesting
at this point to mention one that has probably eluded Arab and Muslim
observers who may only now see a conspiracy or a Zionist plot.
(Incidentally, I do think that in the Starr Report, Clinton has been the
victim of what Hillary discerned several months ago, namely a right-wing
conspiracy, determined to destroy his liberal presidency: there seems to be
little doubt of that.) Now while it is true that national attention in
America has been focused mainly on Clinton and Monica, it is also true that
another drama, of an opposite sort, has simultaneously been taking place in
the national psyche. This is the one that concerns a baseball player called
Mark McGwire, who plays for the St Louis Cardinals. During the past week
when headlines of papers like the New York Times were about Clinton, a
parallel set of headlines concerned McGwire, on the other side of the
Times's front page. 

   The national American sport is baseball, and the oldest, most famous, most
hallowed name in baseball is that of Babe Ruth, who established a record for
60 home runs in one season in l927. In baseball, the ball is thrown to a
batter from the opposite team by a pitcher; the pitcher's aim is to make the
batter miss or ground the ball, whereas the batter's aim is to hit the ball
as far as possible. The furthest possible hit is for the ball to be driven
outside the stadium: that is called a home run. Babe Ruth's record stood at
60 home runs until 1961, when it was broken by Roger Maris, who hit 61 of
them. Curiously, though, Maris's achievement was never celebrated as much as
Babe Ruth's; it was as if the country resented him taking the Babe's record
from him, Babe Ruth being, along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,
one of the greatest popular heroes in American popular culture, adulated,
almost worshipped, never equaled. For that reason, his record number of home
runs per season was, and still is, the most famous record in American sport,
and hence in American psychology. It has become nothing less than a symbol
of heroic triumph, unequaled, powerful, solitary, upright, public. Then,
after Maris, there has come McGwire to break the record with 62 runs. The
importance of this cannot be underestimated, since it has taken place just
at the same time as the other pinnacle of American symbolic life, the
president, has been debased and devalued, despite the macho military strikes
against Afghanistan and Sudan. (Note also that the elevation of Osama Bin
Laden to the position of number one devil for America is part of the same
process of sanctification and demonisation, redemption and damnation, that
is so essential to American life. America, after all, is the most religious
and ideological country on earth). 

   Consider McGwire's attributes. He is 6 foot 5 inches tall, muscular,
blond, good looking -- more manly and physically impressive than Clinton. He
was married and has one son, but his marriage broke up some years ago. Ever
since then, McGwire has been having psychological counseling. Why? Because
he is convinced that he was to blame for the break-up of his marriage. He
has donated one million dollars to establish a foundation for children from
broken homes, a fact of his contrition that makes the president's attempts
to appear sorry for what he has done seem hollow and unconvincing. Each time
McGwire gets up to bat is like a religious occasion -- the good man
confronting danger with courage and simplicity. When he actually hits the
ball and scores still another home run, he is in effect symbolically making
up for Clinton's shortcomings and sins. That, at least, is the way this
momentous progression of breaking and re-breaking the record works itself
out in the American psyche. It doesn't do much for Clinton or lessen the
constitutional crisis in any way, but it does begin to explain what the
governing framework of American popular opinion is. Just as Clinton is now
beginning, through his lobbyists, lawyers, and spin-doctors, to transform
the sleazy mess revealed by the Starr Report into a drama of sinning and
confession, followed by forgiveness and redemption, so too the
almost-as-powerful drama of a truly good man, a hero, overcoming all odds to
set new records in a uniquely American sport is part of the same framework. 

   It is in this context also that Kenneth Starr and his supporters can be
understood. Outside America, they would be considered snooping, deranged
people, willing -- in Starr's instance -- to spend hours and hours "going
after the truth" (a phrase he has used all along), whereas in fact he has
been combing through a man's private life. What Starr has done has nothing
to do either with criminality or with a threat to the US, anymore than
Castro's Cuba, a tiny, basically poor island that is no match for New York,
much less the US military, has anything to do with the threat of communism.
What operates in these cases is an ideological passion creating excesses and
exaggerations virtually unimaginable in most other countries. There was an
article about Starr's father in one of the newspapers recently: he was
described as a fundamentalist preacher who delivered a sermon once on the
evils of a woman in shorts milking a cow on Sunday. It was in such an
atmosphere of inflamed, and repressed, passion that Starr himself was
raised, and it is no wonder that for him the profligate, easy-going and
promiscuous Clinton came to symbolise not just a bad president but evil
incarnate. That Starr's ideas have many supporters in this country suggests
the extent to which even baseball, and McGwire's heroic role in the national
game, can also be seen as a cosmic drama between good and evil. 

   I have often said in these articles that one cannot understand American
policies abroad without some knowledge of the peculiarities of American
culture at home, which is very different indeed from cultures like those of
France and Britain with which, as Arabs and Muslims, we have had more direct
experience. There is an element of irrationality in American culture -- as
evidenced in the Lewinsky case -- that refuses individuals the civility of
privacy because "larger" issues of good and evil take precedence. Looked at
rationally, what Clinton has done is tasteless indiscretion, and what Starr
has done is to violate his privacy with a vengeance. And all Mark McGwire
has accomplished is to hit a ball for about 400 yards. But in the American
popular imagination, amplified millions of times by the ubiquitous media, we
have been watching a cosmic drama of vast proportions. A dangerous business
indeed.  

___________________________________________________________________________

Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
Issue: 395 | Date: 17 - 23 September 1998
URL: http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/
Email: weeklyweb-AT-ahram.org.eg
Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 14:11:00 -0400 (EDT)
___________________________________________







     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---