Here we are.

We have the most corrupt presidential administration in American history, its Commander-in-Heat happily anticipating serving out the remainder of his second term. When he leaves office, he will be eligible to collect a generous pension, have lifelong Secret Service protection, and field plenty of cushy offers from his friends in the Hollyweird Left. Undoubtedly he will be in great demand as a political fundraiser for Democratic politicians. According to the latest polls—as spun by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—opposition to congressional impeachment proceedings is at record highs. (Never mind that the poll question is, “do you approve of the way Congress has handled the Lewinsky matter?” I want the sleazy SOB impeached, convicted, and sent to prison for life—no parole—and I disapprove strongly of the way Congress has bungled the Lewinsky matter. How much you want to bet a sizeable portion of those poll numbers reflect similar sentiments?)

We have arrived in this predicament for many different and easily identifiable reasons, including a Republican-led Congress that—upon being slandered by its political opponents—threw away its compass and furled its sails, content to drift on the current rather than try to get from where we were to where we wanted to go. But by the time that happened, where we were was already pretty bad, else why would America have wanted out badly enough to kick the Democrats out of their congressional featherbeds in 1994?

Another reason we are where we are is, more Americans get their news from network television than from any other source. Which means that after 1994, millions of Americans have been persuaded by distorted presentations of the news that where they thought they wanted to go, back in ‘94, was a worse place than where they already were. But an electorate whose emotions can be played like violins by Left-leaning network TV spin merchants, doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, some of the reason for Ronald Reagan’s electoral successes in 1980 and 1984, I’m sad to have to acknowledge, came about because of this very fact, and the fact that Reagan, even while appealing to the hearts and minds of those of us who still had them, was also using state-of-the-art techniques guaranteed to appeal, however subtly, to the glands of the mindless. It was all for the good, but it was still manipulation. And it showed the way for even an oafish boob like Bill Clinton to overcome the more intellectual campaigns of George Bush and Bob Dole.

Let’s face it. The majority of Americans are ignorant about matters of public policy, and they like it that way. We should have figured it out from the way voter turnout has been dwindling over the years. And if anything, the non-voting majority seems smarter than the majority of those who do vote, because at least the non-voters are tacitly admitting they don’t know enough to vote the right way. Most voters decide how to vote based on things that have nothing to do with the qualities they say they want (and that informed voters do want) in elected leaders.

You can probably guess where I’m going with this.

Post-modern America is a country completely separated from its history. It is a new regime, built on the manipulation of unfathomable volumes of information by unscrupulous people and institutions with their own political axes to grind—and those axes almost always cut sharply to the Left. Rush Limbaugh? Rupert Murdoch? Mere afterthoughts, capable of flourishing on the hunger of millions of Americans for real news and information, but unable to effect change because their audiences are a large but increasingly irrelevant minority. As for the screed that Big Media is owned by corporations whose CEOs, being capitalists, must be conservative, that’s all just so much hooey.

Although conservative by temperament, the typical corporate critter is sufficiently worldly to realize that the status quo in the 1990s isn’t ideologically conservative (film at 11). And since change can be bad (just ask the genius who dreamed up the New Coke), ideological conservatism is to be shunned except when the status quo starts to look worse. It wasn’t Reagan’s conservatism, nor his pro-America optimism, nor any of that, that brought corporate America to support Reagan in the 1980s—it was that huge misery index caused by Carter-nomics. It hit the bottom-line hard enough that corporate inertia had to give way to the need for change. Today corporate America gives generously to causes (including Bill Clinton) that are avowedly hostile to capitalism precisely because, as the Four Horsemen keep saying, the economy is doing passably well under the status quo. Corporate CEOs ideologically conservative?? Where do you think those “blueblood country-club moderate Republicans” come from? Happy Acres Trailer Park?

Post-modern America is a new regime, occupying the space formerly occupied by the constitutionally governed federal republic established by the Founding Fathers and defended to the point of civil war by the Great Emancipator. Somewhere in our recent past the America they lived in was overthrown and replaced with the present one. It wasn’t done as a result of a one-worlder conspiracy or some kind of deliberate scheme, but it was done. Don’t blame it on the Bilderbergers or the Rockefellers or the Queen of England. They’re just scapegoats trotted out every so often to distract us from the real culprit. If you want to know who did this, every adult man and woman in America, from the GenX slacker to the AARP footsoldier, needs only to do one very simple thing.

Look in the mirror.

Even those of us who don’t think we’re responsible, even if we’re sure we have done everything right and opposed every scheme that promised to turn our nation into this mass of wreckage, we all have to accept a share of the responsibility. After all, by living in post-modern America, we’re certainly reaping a share of the consequences.

We sent our kids to public school and just assumed the education they got would be right. We bought a TV and just assumed it would always be a wholesome influence in our homes. We let it babysit our kids. As teenagers, we went along with the gang when they went hunting for sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, and joined in the catcalls against anyone who admonished us not to be so wild. To this day, we make fun of churchgoing women who always do their top collar buttons.

As single young men in the 1970s, many of us decided legalized abortion would make it easier for us to “get lucky”. As married men, some of us decided it was good to lie about our extramarital affairs—apparently the possibility of not having affairs never came up.

Trust and respect have become something people demand (and give) sight-unseen, not something to be earned. Self-esteem is cultivated in people who have no self-respect and no reason to have it. Public health policy caters to the hormones rather than the public health.

We are in the wilderness, and we have no Moses to lead us out of it—and too many of us lack any desire to be led out of it. Biblical literalists may be excused for concluding that these are the last days. How will the irreligious explain it to themselves?

Family togetherness during holidays is, I suspect, a phenomenon of the modern world. It’s hard to imagine the ancient Romans celebrating their winter-solstice festival of the Persian war-god Mithras at home, gathering around the idol and singing Mithras carols while little Julius, Jr. looks just too cute for words in his brand new jammies.

Nor were the high holy days of the early Christian church likely much of a family event. Hanging with the homefolks was what people back then did every day, and when they needed an excuse for a reunion of the extended family, usually some elder obligingly kicked off, or one of the newly married-off daughters had a newborn that needed baptizing.

Our use of holidays has evolved with our civilization. Family life is at a premium now, so the holidays give us the opportunity for some intensive “quality time.” This is usually invested through mass excursions to the local mall, whereupon money is doled out to the various family members and they are admonished, “Remember, we all meet again back here by nine o’clock!” Then each scurries in a different direction to buy gifts for one another.

In a thousand years, archeologists piecing together these vignettes of family life in the twilight of the 20th Century will either be utterly baffled, or nod sagely to one another and say, “This explains everything!”

It used to be that when someone stood up to say, “Let’s not forget what these holidays are about,” there was some novelty to the idea that we needed to be reminded. It was a jolt that actually made us stop and think on ... what these holidays are about. Today it’s just one more in a long list of holiday cliches that we’re all supposed to appreciate with a kind of sardonic chuckle. Well of course we have to remember what these holidays are about, it’s part of the tradition! Just like Dad slipping off the ladder while he’s stringing the Christmas lights on the front of the house, or Aunt Mildred overindulging in the egg nog and getting sloppy under the mistletoe with everyone who passes within reach. Animated TV reindeer with incandescent noses, Jimmy Stewart contemplating suicide, and a solemn moment during a rerun of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” while Linus recites the second chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke.

It’s all of a piece. Even when the Peanuts characters decry “commercialism,” it’s between commercials—touting this or that “perfect holiday gift”—that (ahem) are paying for the cartoon characters’ anti-commercialism sermon. The ending of that Peanuts special was so effective that not only is something like it indispensable to every holiday TV special created since then, but it invaded non-holiday culture as well (part of the novelty of “Seinfeld” was that it never resorted to such an ending), and even the presidency of Bill Clinton seems headed for such a “warm and fuzzy” denouement despite everything. All together now: “AWWWWWWWWWW!!!”

Just a few days ago, America sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, which has become sort of a pre-game show for the Christmas get-together. And as with Christmas, our cultural guardians (the same ones who insisted that “Ellen” was a television event of high cultural significance, but I digress) remind us what it’s really all about: that Thanksgiving “is about giving thanks.” They don’t say to whom, but they consider themselves so integral these days to the proper functioning of our civilization that perhaps they fear a possible violation of the separation of church and state. They don’t go so far (yet) as to suggest that we’re supposed to give thanks, as the Pilgrims are now supposed to have done, to the Indians who are supposed to have kept them from starving en masse during that first horrible winter.

Well, of course most of us know that Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to God—but there’s more to it even than that. Those of us who attend church at least more often than twice a year get opportunities to give thanks to God more often than once a year. Thanksgiving isn’t about giving just any old thanks. It’s not just about counting your blessings and saying, “Hey, God, you done right by me after all! Good show!”

The Pilgrims had been through an ordeal the likes of which only the rarest and most unfortunate 20th-Century American has ever endured. Most of them died during that first winter, not just because of foul weather and disease but because of a disastrous experiment in collectivism, the abandonment of which helped ensure, more than any help from the Indians, the bounty they celebrated the following autumn. What they had survived could easily be regarded as a morality play of straying, privation, repentance and reward, and so they did. Under the circumstances, they were right to do so. The thanks they gave at their harvest feast was a big one, for a gift that they had firsthand reason to appreciate more than ever. More than just about anyone alive today can do.

Economically and culturally, our holidays have become cheap—and each year the morals of our civilization become cheaper. Our president has actually set the price of redemption for one of the most fundamental forms of human betrayal, as a few crocodile tears shed in public and a few throwaway comments about private pain, supposedly to make up for all that “private” pleasure. Not that such pleasures have really been private these last few years; even broadcast primetime television has become as explicit as it can be without earning the “hardcore” label. All the more hypocritical then, when the Four Horsemen—Peter, Dan, Tom and Bernie—deplored the “salacious detail” included with Kenneth Starr’s Lewinsky referral.

Funny thing about cheapness. It always comes with all those hidden, unexpected, unwanted costs, the ones that don’t hit until much, much later.

There’s a widespread notion in post-modern America, largely thanks to popular culture, that great heroes stand always in opposition to great villains.

I contend that the phrase “great villain” is an oxymoron.

In this century we have towering examples of real-life villains who are supposed to have been “great” because of the magnitude of their crimes—Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin for two examples. Hitler built a third German empire on hatred, ignited a war that would engulf the planet, and inspired his followers to commit murder on a massive scale in a most cold and technocratic—one might almost say bureaucratic—manner. And Stalin ruled Russia (misnamed at the time as the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” which is soon to be no more than the answer to a trivia question) on the basis of fear, his own fear that those around him in the seats of power in his empire were enough like him that his life was in danger at their hands every minute of every day of his 29-year rule. During those three decades, he engineered the starvation deaths of millions of his own people whom he feared would attempt to overthrow him, and sabotaged his country’s war effort by purging the military of those he deemed suspect.

The magnitude of their deeds is profound, but the villainy itself is shallow. Hitler’s evil was rooted in the smallness of resentment, not the greatness of whatever is supposed to motivate a “great” villain. Stalin simply feared for his life, whether justified or not. What enabled them to commit their crimes was a combination of personal charisma on their own part, and a willingness on the part of others to share and reflect the evil traits they bore.

The opposite of great heroism is not great villainy, because there is no such thing. There is only meanness, smallness, crudeness—albeit sometimes on a massive scale. The old saying has it wrong: It is mediocrity that is the root of all evil: the unwillingness of a man or a woman to aspire beyond the levels of conduct, of thought (where applicable), of morality which they already have reached, perhaps were born to. Hitler’s hate and his charisma, no matter how well combined, could never have amounted to anything if thousands of Germans had not been too lazy about themselves to see through him. And this leads to another point about evil.

Whereas great heroes generally are lone figures, rising above the terrain of history to make their mark, massive villainy requires mass support. Heroism is individual; evil is collective.

Yet the charisma of the chief villain in a moment of mass evil often causes confusion, because it enables him to seem to rise above the mob and become the center of attention, even when the true atrocities are being done by faceless members of the mob. We should bear in mind when confronting such characters that they are not the source of villainy, but simply its temporary focus. Eliminating the leader doesn’t eliminate the evil; it will rise again the next time someone of his stripe, suffering his defining flaw, begins to sound the call once more. Crass motivations can never be bred out of humanity, short of a miracle—and shouldn’t expecting a miracle from the government be considered a violation of the separation of church and state?

Hate and fear are only two of the drives that have led to an eruption of evil in the 20th Century. Think of other base reasons people have long had for victimizing one another: greed, lust, pride…

And then there are the truly puerile drives, such as the uncontrollable desire to be the center of attention, whatever form that attention may take. Jack Kevorkian certainly seems to suffer this flaw, given his recent “60 Minutes” performance. In fact, in a civilization where, according to some dead guy who once sculpted a soup can, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, it follows logically that there would be those who would crave more than their fair share. The extreme archetype in popular lore is the guy who stages his own death before a live audience—that way he never has to hear the applause die down. More banal are the shock comics, who go out of the way to say outrageous things just to enjoy the knowledge that people will be talking about it for days. The best thing to do is try to ignore them; if enough people tune them out, consistently enough and long enough, eventually they’ll decide to get a real job. But that’s only acceptable for people who don’t hurt anyone with their antics. A medical doctor who kills cannot be tolerated. And Dr. Death knows it, so he will continue to do it until he is stopped, or until one day he inadvertently administers the lethal service to himself.

What, then, do we do with a President who thrives on being the center of attention, whose entire political career has been based only on his need to be forever in somebody’s spotlight, even if it’s the light the cops used to shine in a suspect’s face during questioning in those old gangster movies. Like Kevorkian, he constantly brings the attention around to himself by doing outrageous things—flashing a state employee in a hotel room and asking her to “kiss it;” baldly lying to the nation, to a grand jury, and to Congress, none of whom are in any remote fantasy going to believe him; using transparent ploys to try to manipulate the process to his own advantage. He keeps doing these sorts of things because he’s sure he can keep getting away with them, but why does he do them in the first place?

For William Jefferson Clinton, it’s not enough merely to be the President. He has to be THE President, every minute of every day of his tenure. He has the charisma to pull it off, and he has a willing audience that consists of more than just his supporters, and not a few of his opponents. He needs the attention, and deep down he can feel the truth: that when people stop talking about him, when they forget about him, get a life, and move on (for real), he will not only cease to be the center of attention, he will, in every way that matters to him, cease to be.

So even if he is impeached, and convicted, and removed from office, rest assured that this man will not go quietly. All the while complaining of the media circus that his trial would be (assuming Al Gore wouldn’t be even more stupid than he usually is by pardoning him), he would do everything in his power to make it that way, the judicial event of the millennium, with him as the star. Even before opening arguments end, people would be saying, “O.J. who?”

“Put it all behind us”? That’s the last thing he wants. And maybe he’s not really hurting anyone except those whose reputations are trashed by the faceless members of his mob, but the American people have not yet begun to see the ugly face of scandal fatigue.

That boy’s just getting started.

When I first became interested in learning about my heritage, I knew next to nothing about McGehee lore, but had a decent respect for historical fact and the relationship of events to one another in time.

As I sought out knowledge of my ancestry, I discovered that a large number of amateur McGehee genealogists were in the reverse predicament—knowing much about family lore but having little or no concept of how events in history relate to one another in time. I was told that our presumed common ancestor, James MacGregor, had been a supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots, who had in fact died in 1587, 58 years before the Scottish Civil War in which James actually fought as a very young man. I was told that the MacGregors were outlawed because of their involvement in that war, when in fact the proscription on their name dates back much earlier, to April 3, 1603—just two days before King James VI of Scotland—Mary’s by-then grown son—left Scotland to take the throne as James I of England. And those are only the most glaring errors.

As usually happens as a century comes to its end (and for reasons I don’t fully fathom, even though it happened to me too), people become more interested in genealogy. With the help of the Internet, the late-20th-Century upsurge in interest is accompanied by a greater potential for success than ever before—yet this potential for success comes at a time when regard for history is at an unprecedented ebb in America. The post-modern mindset denies the importance of learning from the mistakes and successes of dead people; the only experiences worth learning from, supposedly, are our own. “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But the guy who said that is dead, too.

Many post-modern amateur genealogists are into the pursuit for the same reason many of their counterparts 100 years ago were into it: to find famous people in their ancestry. And so those who merely discover, for example, the McGehee lore of 100 years ago and look no further, find Robert the Bruce and Charlemagne as their direct ancestors. That they take pride in these findings (which are based on inaccurate information, by the way) is odd, since these personages are also dead. But at least people they know have heard of them, and if the Bruce’s reputation was tarnished slightly by the movie Braveheart, at least he was a character in a movie that people they know have seen. That way, he’s not really dead; he’s a celebrity, albeit a minor one because Mel Gibson didn’t play him.

It’s as though, instead of history infusing amateur genealogy with its positive influence, the reverse has taken place. Now we want history to be filled with celebrities, not real people who lived real lives and had a real impact on events. That’s what history means today, when it means anything at all: not heroism, not romance, not overcoming harsh conditions and building a civilization. It means a whole crop of dead celebrities who can be portrayed by living celebrities in movies or on television—people whose names we can bandy about as though knowing their names means we know something about them, their times, and their deeds.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many regard the upcoming change of century with so much superstition? The road maps of the past, which could tell us so much about the present and help us to prepare for the future, have been locked away and become dusty and brittle, with no one willing to re-copy them for later generations. One of the great benefits of civilization, the availability of vast amounts of stored knowledge in written form, has been cast aside as irrelevant to our own lives. If it’s not about the latest music, the best place to shop, or some other means of self-gratification, it is guilty of the most heinous crime imaginable: it’s boring.

These are the horns of the dilemma on which both sides in Washington, D.C. now find themselves. The Republicans appeal to history, to the founding documents, to truth and right—and the people don’t care. Yet now as the House Judiciary Committee sends articles of impeachment to the full House, the Democrats find that (as has been pointed out in the past week) apathy cuts both ways. Even history in the making, before their very eyes, is too abstract for post-modern America. Whether the President is What’s-His-Name, or Does-He-Have-a-Pulse, or even Look-at-the-Size-of-those-Ears, the music still plays, the shops stay open, and the pizza still tastes good. What’s-His-Name has apparently been doing such a great job as President that most Americans wouldn’t even know he was gone.

As horrible as the situation has seemed for those few who still believe in truth, there is some cold comfort to be had in the thought that the First Fondler, one of the foremost history-haters of our time, may very well be hoist on the First Petard.

But I’ll believe it when I see it, and not a moment sooner.

He is, officially, the 42nd President of the United States.

He is the 41st man to hold the office, but only the 36th to be elected to it. Four presidents succeeded upon the deaths of their respective predecessors and never won election, including Andrew Johnson; a fifth, Gerald R. Ford, succeeded upon the resignation of his predecessor and failed in his 1976 election bid. And Grover Cleveland, who served two non-consecutive terms, is counted twice in the official tally.

Like all of his predecessors, he has achieved certain firsts. He is the first Arkansan ever to become president. He is the first ever to have been born after the end of World War II. He is (I believe) the first left-hander ever to be elected to a second term. In this half of the 20th Century, he is the first president to see his party gain seats in the House in off-year elections during his second term.

He is not the first president to have had his name changed—in his case, from William Jefferson Blythe to William Jefferson Clinton when he was adopted by his stepfather Roger Clinton. Leslie Lynch King, Jr. was adopted and renamed after his adoptive father, Gerald Rudolph Ford. And Ulysses S. Grant’s real first name was Hiram; his name was changed in a clerical error at West Point.

He is only the third president ever to be the subject of articles of impeachment placed before the House of Representatives. With the House today approving two articles, he becomes only the second ever to be impeached.

That presidential impeachment has occurred only twice in the 209-year history of our Constitution, is encouraging. That impeachment articles were generated twice in just the last 25 years, is not.

Regardless of whether this exercise forces him from office before his term expires, Bill Clinton’s presidency must be seen as a symptom rather than a cause of what has gone wrong with our country. Just as abuse of power wasn’t ‘cured’ when Richard Nixon resigned, it will not pass into oblivion with Clinton’s departure. It is axiomatic to say these days that Clinton’s legacy will be a negative one, but that would be an oversimplification because it’s not entirely his own.

The negative legacy that many will attribute to Bill Clinton was not created by him. It was allowed to create itself during this century—and to a great extent that phenomenon occurred before he was even born.

Members of the “Baby Boom” generation aren’t altogether to blame for the generation’s faults, only for the evils each of them has committed. Nor were the radical 1930s socialist college professors altogether to blame for twisting the Boomers’ world view into such a mess—after all, the Boomers’ parents allowed it—but the profs are guilty of teaching falsehoods to millions of young skulls full of mush. At every step in the process that created this sad moment in American history, men and women made choices of their own free will, and in nearly every case it was a choice to trade what was right for what was easy, convenient, or personally beneficial.

This is what it means to be created in the image of God. Each of us chooses between salvation and perdition. Nor is it a choice made in some kind of tremendous, earth-shattering moment, what has come to be referred to as “a religious experience.” The choice is made in the smallest of ways, with the wrong choice being easily rationalized: “I need it more than he does.” “It’s such a trifle, it won’t make any difference.” “I’m too important to take the consequences for such a small thing.” “It’s not sex if she keeps her clothes on.”

On the very eve of the President’s impeachment, support for impeaching him was found (in a poll) to be still less than a majority. It’s almost certain that the margin of victory in the House consisted of members who did the right thing only because they found that, politically, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. If there is any lesson to be drawn from this, it is that sometimes people will do the right thing even if they don’t want to. Even if they’re afraid. Even if, given the chance, they’d do the wrong thing if it’s easier, more convenient, or more personally beneficial. This is what it means to be born of ashes and dust.

Bill Clinton is not a self-made man. His place in history may fit him like a glove, but he didn’t create it without help.

If he continues to make wrong choices and do wrong things, the Senate should convict him of at least one of the two articles under which he was impeached today. They should remove him from office and ban him forever from holding the public trust that he has so grievously abused. They should add to Bill Clinton’s list of firsts: First president to be removed from office through impeachment.

The Senators have the choice: do the right thing and make history, or…

Shortly after winning the 1996 presidential election, Bill Clinton told a gathering of fellow Democrats that his opponents constitute a cancer on American politics, and swore to excise them from the political scene during the next four years. Before that, he claimed that our Constitution is “radical,” and that its authors may have set aside too many freedoms and rights for ordinary American citizens.

On the evening of Dec. 31, 1998, a reporter for CNN Headline News named Candy Crowley was talking about the dimming prospects for a Senate censure of the recently impeached Clinton, in the face of insistence from “conservatives” that the Constitution requires that the President stand trial. Crowley bemoaned the fact that censure, “a popular, mainstream idea,” was going down in flames on Capitol Hill.

Political discussion (and “reporting”) throughout 1998, and indeed since 1992 by some odd coincidence, has been brim-full of such indictments of conservatives and the things we hold dear. We’re “extremists,” they say. We revere a “radical” Constitution and use it to shoot down “popular, mainstream” ideas.

One might be excused for getting the impression that those speaking don’t like us much. Indeed, they despise conservatives and conservatism. They hold the Constitution in contempt as an obstacle to their imposing on us uneducated, unenlightened, unwashed masses the kind of shining bureaucracy on a hill that they believe will bring about Heaven on Earth. So much for the separation of church and state.

But what’s most disturbing to someone like me, someone who though young at the time nevertheless remembers quite well the message of the New Left in 1968, is that the price of one Summer of Love seems to be a decade-long Winter of Hate from the same bunch.

Of course, the Summer of Love was only one face of the Boomer Left—that same splinter of American society also gave us the terrorist Weather Underground, the thuggish Students for a Democratic Society, and the murderous Black Panther Party (ask David Horowitz if you don’t want to believe me). The gentle, dope-smoking hippie popularized in those songs by the Mamas & Papas, or in “Hair,” was simply the benign face that the movement’s darker elements found useful to win acceptance of their agenda by once-mainstream liberals and their successors, the moderates.

The Summer of Love icon remains strong with many in politics and media who have rationalized the devastation caused by their “ideas,” and by their constant suppression of opposition, on moral grounds rooted in the presumption of their own moral unimpeachability. After having gained ascendancy preaching that “the end does not justify the means,” they have come around 180 degrees to the certainty that any means, however foul, are justified if they help to keep themselves on top and their opponents in the gutter. After all, their opponents are, by definition, evil; they want to stop The Anointed from carrying out their mission, which would be divine if there were a god, which of course there isn’t, but it’s still a moral imperative that brooks no dissent.

Thus their slavish devotion to The Impeached One.

In their view, he stands like a colossus, between us e-e-e-e-e-evil conservatives and the people at large, blocking our message with an unprecedented talent for distraction, and co-opting any ideas that threaten to be popular with the hoi polloi on whose goodwill his power depends. His interests may have nothing real in common with those of the true Boomer Leftists, but he frustrates us conservatives, and that’s enough. Since we have no claim on the Summer of Love heritage that he and his supporters have wrapped themselves in, we are by definition hateful, and therefore fair game for their own hate. At the same time they tut-tut over the vengefulness of capital punishment, and argue that “an eye for an eye” is an outdated ethic, in politics they return real hate for perceived hate, real evil for alleged evil. And when the bombs are being dropped by their guy, and promise to derail efforts to punish him for his crimes, suddenly it’s a “good” war.

They don’t want Albert Gore, Jr. to be president before 2001—and many of them don’t want him at all. They know that he does more damage than good to the Green agenda with his lack of knowledge, his rhetorical clumsiness, and his lackluster persona. They know that as president Gore would be unable to carry off the kind of hate campaign on which Clinton has thrived. Where Clinton comes off (God help us!) as a good-ole-boy trying to do right, Gore would be perceived more accurately: as a hack politician trying to manipulate public opinion for his own benefit. Where Clinton has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest nightmares, Gore would be the conservative commentator’s dream. And with Clinton no longer in the spotlight to distract the people, Gore would be recognized instantly as the reality that is the flip side of Dan Quayle’s reputation.

And so they are afraid. And fear is a primal emotion, far more basic than love. The modern face of the Boomer Left is that of a prince past his prime, soured on life and bereft of his ideals, blaming his misfortunes on those whom he once claimed to love—and plotting their destruction in revenge.

And that is where the love went.

It’s hard not to think malicious thoughts about some of the players in this impeachment business, but it’s a temptation to be resisted at all costs.

Everything we’ve tried in hopes of overcoming the cult of personality surrounding Bill Clinton, has failed. The Omnibus Broadcasting System—with its subsidiaries ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN—has made use of its influence over the passive majority in our country to keep his popularity high despite everything. Truth has made no impact on the people largely because it hasn’t been told to them. And even if we had the means to reach them, they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they would refuse to listen to it, rejecting it as propaganda rather than truth.

Clearly if there is to be a happy ending to all this, we’re not capable of writing it into the script.

We are faced with a test of forebearance, a lesson in the folly of pride. All through the century that is about to end, we as a civilization have convinced ourselves that we can understand all that needs to be understood—that we can learn all that is to be known. We’ve decided that we can set our sights on any goal and achieve it through the determined application of will and know-how. And this is where it has gotten us.

Having been warned that the Devil can quote Scripture to suit his purpose, we are nevertheless eager to debate him when he reminds us about turning the other cheek, judging not lest we be judged, and not casting stones if we are not without sin. We forget that Jesus also said, “Cast not your pearls before swine.” How can we make sense of this without judging the character of those to whom He referred? The point of His comment was that there are some whose hearts we can never hope to turn with words, and that it would be a waste, not to say a sin of pride, to preach to them rather than to those whose hearts and minds are open. In our Information Age, words fly like bullets and bounce off the Kevlar that OBS has thoughtfully placed over the ears of the narcoleptic majority. Having placed our faith in The People, we find they have feet—and heads—of clay.

Faced with such futility, we are tempted to give in to malice. That part of ourselves inherited from long-dead pagan ancestors whispers to us that if we can’t persuade them, we must destroy them, or at least wish them ill. After all, the voice points out, we already are seeking to punish their leader. Why not also wish to punish those who support him, for their work in trying to shield him from justice?

When the hogs trample the pearls into the mud, do we get angry at them? Do we blame all hogs everywhere, and campaign to have them all slaughtered?

The matter is beyond our best powers of persuasion. We can’t turn the hearts of those determined to avoid doing the right thing. God alone can move them, and if He chooses, He will. It’s out of our hands. Maybe it always was.

Who can predict the ultimate outcome of current events?

It may have been fairly simple to predict that the Denver Broncos would win the Super Bowl (he wrote, with the game still being played), but who can say how events will play out surrounding, say, the approaching reckoning in Washington? Pundits and Democrats have been saying for months that without 67 Republicans in the Senate there would never be a guilty verdict in an impeachment trial. But before that they were saying there would never be an impeachment trial in the first place—and before that, that there would never even be an impeachment, much less a trial.

Who could have anticipated two years ago that a casual act of presidential perjury, committed in casual contempt of a citizen’s civil rights, would lead to this decidedly un-casual point? Back then the buzz was about campaign corruption and abuse of executive orders to benefit Chinese and Indonesian interests at the expense of companies owned and run by U.S. citizens.

Who could have guessed back then that a television network would elevate an impassioned and openly avowed pro-Clinton partisan to host two separate regular shows on which to defend the President? Who could have guessed back then that this same network would record, and then spike, an interview with a woman who claims that the President raped her when he was Arkansas’ state attorney general? Who could have guessed that the sleaziest man alive would become the most visible defender of the President’s morality—by airing innuendos against his critics? Who could ever have guessed two years ago that William Jefferson Clinton, then newly inaugurated as President after his 49-percent popular vote re-election victory (a record for him), would sink to such depths?

Who among them would have been believed?

Those who claim that Vince Foster was murdered, are frequently dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theorists. Those who circulate the lists of people close to Clinton who have died under mysterious circumstances, are laughed off as fanatic Clinton-haters taking a vacation from their surveillances of Area 51. And perhaps rightly so. But aside from those types of people, who would have foreseen the spectacle that Clinton 1999 would degenerate to? After all, these are the ones who have made the most noise about those purloined FBI files. These are the ones who have followed the Clinton scandal front since 1992, who believed Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones the instant their stories broke.

And these are the people at whom Clinton’s defenders point in this hour of desperation, to explain why they stay with him. As Andy Rooney put it, they like Clinton’s friends more than they like his enemies. His enemies, therefore, cannot be allowed to be right, not even when the evidence actually comes down on their side of the story. It’s as though Clinton called up all of his high-profile supporters in Hollywood and the media, and demanded, “Who are you gonna believe, me or a bunch of right-wing facts?”

In their hyper-politicized world view, even truth has a political spin to it, and when the spin goes against their way of thinking, it has to be denied, disparaged, demolished and despised. To the rest of the world, truth and facts are neutral, and only the actions and words of men and women carry a spin. If the facts say that Clinton is a felon and unfit to hold office, the bad reflection is not on the facts, but on Clinton. And people to whom this is clear, have a hard time understanding those for whom politics, and especially Left-wing politics, is more important, and more pure, than the truth.

The recent past, up to about this time last year, seems in hindsight to have been as easy to anticipate, seven years ago, as the outcome of today’s football game. After his 90-percent post-Desert Storm approval ratings blew over, President Bush suffered from the more durable memory of his “no new taxes” betrayal, and from the unprecedented partisan spin of television news reporting surrounding the 1992 election campaign. Bush ran a lackluster campaign, and tried ineptly and belatedly to pander to his base—which only played into the spin of the hostile media while offending the Right (which unlike the Left does not appreciate being pandered to).

Meanwhile Clinton’s character issues were passed off by the same media as being irrelevant to the campaign. Character didn’t matter, we were told. Today these same media voices allow that maybe character does matter after all, while more die-hard Clinton partisans argue that policy lip-service matters more than the trustworthiness and mental stability of a man whose finger rests on the nuclear button. (Perhaps that button seems less dangerous today than ten years ago, but what of North Korea? What of Saddam Hussein? Can we afford to keep a President who makes Saddam look positively sedate and predictable?)

But today, no one can guess what will happen tomorrow. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr has concluded, rightly I think, that he can indict a sitting president—but he hasn’t decided whether he will. The pundits having assured us that witnesses would never be examined in the impeachment trial, perhaps we could have guessed at what has proven to be the case: there will be witnesses. The Juanita Broaddrick story is said to have influenced wavering House members to vote for impeachment in December, and now it reposes like a powder keg on the shelf at NBC News. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Events of the past have been converging on this point, from long before the 1960s. Historical trends set in motion by occurrences before the Vietnam war, before the Kennedy assassination, before the birth of Billy J. Blythe, have developed a momentum that will contribute to an unfathomable crescendo some time between now and the end of the century—and even lifelong observers of the political, cultural and social scene are at a loss as to what to expect. We are entering into terra incognita, where all the lessons of the past seem useless in preparing for what is to come.

If there we find dragons, who will be surprised?

[I expected a crescendo before the end of the century—was I only off by nine months?]

As I write this, it appears that the impeachment trial will end with either no verdict, or an acquittal largely engineered by gutless members of the Senate’s Republican “leadership.”

Clearly those members, along with a sizable proportion of the populace, believe that once they can “put this behind us” everything will return to whatever they think things were like before the Lewinsky matter first arose.

Like all nostalgia, this is rooted in fantasy. Bill Clinton has been proven to be nearly as horrible a human being as his most extremist critics have been saying for years. The four major divisions of the Omnibus Broadcasting System, or OBS, have demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt among persons with better than a room-temperature IQ, that they are devoted to the preservation and perpetuation of the Clinton presidency, if only because its well-deserved early termination would constitute a victory for those e-e-e-e-evil Republicans who swarmed over the walls of the citadel in 1994.

Worse, a number of Republican Senators (and a handful of their brethren in the House) have been proven beyond a doubt to lack the fortitude God gave pond scum. Even though OBS has portrayed the House managers as fanatical witch-hunters, the queasy “moderate” wing of the Republican Party has made itself look worse by fleeing from even the slightest chance of short-term political difficulty, no matter the demands of long-term public duty.

A few years ago I predicted to an acquaintance that history would label the 20th Century as the Era of Nonsense. In 1999, my prediction is given credence that I could not—and certainly would not—have expected back then.

Every aspect of our lives is beset by bureaucratic idiocy—rules and regulations having no basis in achieving any public good. The law is subjected to a series of twists and knots that look less like George Orwell’s vision than Lewis Carroll’s. With all the information at their fingertips that they could possibly need to be informed members of civilization, the vast majority of Americans prefer to concern themselves with the grim future facing the profession of supermodeling.

[...or, “Never Mind”]

Okay, let’s get over it.

William Jefferson Clinton, the quintessential American frat boy, has happened to take over the leadership of Upsilon Sigma Alpha just after a stunning victory over its rival, the Hammer and Sickle Society—a victory engineered by his Republican predecessors.

Naturally, being the quintessential American frat boy, he has been dipping into the hard-won resources left for him by those predecessors to celebrate. For the last six years he has been presiding over the longest and least exclusive “kegger” of all time. And while us accounting majors in the house next door have been losing sleep over the noise and the debauchery, we should take solace in the knowledge that eventually this party, like every other, will eventually come to an end. And although there will be the Mother of All Hangovers the next morning, we’ll all get back to the serious business of being America.

This is not to say that we should regret having called the cops—only that we shouldn’t despair over the fact that the cops were unable to collar the ringleader because certain august “pillars of the community” were in attendance and blocked the arrest.

It has long been a truism in the popular culture that people in high places are not to be trusted. In reality it’s been only among committed activists within the two major parties that this belief has not been shared for many years. Leftists trust fellow leftists in power because they believe—as recent events have made plain—that leftists are incapable of doing wrong. Conservatives have lately been inclined to trust elected officials since the Reagan years, utterly failing to grasp the fact that Ronald Reagan was the exception that proves the rule, although Henry Hyde managed to look and sound vaguely like an unsmiling, duty-bound version of the Gipper—for a while. Newt Gingrich forsook the agenda in pursuit of media approval. Trent Lott deferred to his Senate colleagues’ dread of actually having to work for a change; obviously the post of “leader” in the Senate is bestowed upon the man who best knows his place, the least inflated ego in a chamber crowded with ego-shaped balloons. And if he can keep the chamber from being diverted from its business of self-adulation by an unwelcome risk of accomplishment, so much the better.

So although those of us who still place some value on trustworthiness are and ought to be deeply disappointed by the outcome of the recent business, we have no right to be surprised. The great mass of the people have been aware of this all along, and have progressed so far beyond telling us this that they actually snicker at us when we make it obvious that we don’t get it. This is why the Republicans who pursued the impeachment of the quintessential American frat boy have apparently failed to earn the vicious rage that the leftists forecast for us. The same masses who opposed Clinton’s removal—because they have never expected elected officials to be trustworthy (better to be pleasantly surprised than deeply disappointed)—have been watching us for the last several years not with dread or outrage as the left would have it, but with cynical, tolerant amusement. They look upon us as naive but basically okay.

It isn’t that the American people do not care about character. It’s that they have concluded that sterling character is too much to expect as a consistent trait in elected officials. So they make their voting decisions (when they vote) based on other factors, and if the winner proves to be of good character, so much the better.

We would have the issues to win elections, if we bothered to put forth an agenda. We used to be able to do that, as demonstrated in such years as 1980 and 1994. And although we didn’t manage to motivate the people to oust a known felon from the most powerful office in the modern world, we have established ourselves as being serious enough about honesty and trustworthiness that we’ll risk their ire by challenging a popular president. If the GOP presidential nominee in 2000 has a solid reputation for integrity, I am confident that nominee will have a definite advantage going into the campaign. Let that nominee talk credibly about tax cuts and furthering the cause of freedom here at home as well as abroad, and he (or she) will surely win.

We also need to get over the idea that Clinton has co-opted the Republican agenda. No. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Republican agenda has co-opted Bill Clinton.

I readily admit that I have been among those who have predicted that the legacy of an acquitted Clinton would be one of profound hazard to this nation and to the civilization over which it now presides. Well, life is full of hazards. But one goofball of an overgrown frat boy, destroy the greatest nation in the history of mankind?

Get real.

[I remain convinced, in May 2007, that thanks to such eminent Republican Senators as Trent Lott, Ted Stevens and Arlen Specter, what was conducted in February 1999 was not a trial but a pantomime. So what? We took our shot, and lost. That’s life.]