What is bred in the bones remains in the bones no matter how old those bones may be; and in the United States of America, hidden deep in the marrow and erupting in times of stress, is the virus of that ancient Tudor device, the court of the Star Chamber. The Star Chamber was the great instrument of inquiry and execution under the control of Cardinal Wolsey, who used it to implement royal prerogative at the time when Henry VIII was laboriously severing England from the rule of Rome.
The Star Chamber coexisted with and was superior to the courts of common law. It had plenipotentiary powers and was immune to the ordinary rules of evidence. The Star Chamber's inquisitors could inquire into any matter they thought fit, with unlimited power of questioning over whomever they chose to call before them; and their executive powers were both absolute and absolutist, as the Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, discovered. She had been having hallucinations about the ah, inappropriateness (shall we say?) of the relationship between Anne Boleyn and Henry. Brought before the Star Chamber, which was now the instrument of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's terrifying political hatchet man, she initially held fast to her declarations; but finally she broke, and admitted what the Star Chamber wanted to hear.
Death at Tyburn
She was, together with five priests, sentenced to death at Tyburn, where she was executed by hanging without a drop, the hangman killing her by tugging on her legs until she was dead. The priests, being male, faced a far worse end. Each was half hanged until unconscious, and then revived so that he could watch as his genitals were cut off and placed in his mouth. His stomach was then sliced open and his entrails thrown into boiling water so that he could smell his own mortality. His heart was then cut out and held before his face, just in case he might be conscious enough to see it.
Thus the powers of the Star Chamber.
It came to be detested by Puritans when the Stuarts turned it on them early in the 17th century, at precisely the time when so many of them were fleeing to the Americas and starting colonies there - Maine (1606), Virginia (1607), Massachusetts (1620), New Hampshire (1623).
But much as the Puritan immigrants detested the Star Chamber, a court of law above the law, it nonetheless had insidiously become part of the political and legal culture of the colonies; and when, in 1692, Massachusetts experienced its version of the Maid of Kent - yet another tale of female hallucinations at a politically difficult time, now involving a slave named Tituba - the colony re-enacted the savage rituals of Thomas Cromwell's court a century-and-a-half before. Nineteen people were executed before the frenzy abated and the Star Chamber virus passed into remission.
Moral superiority
The symptoms of this Star Chamber virus run thus: an enquiry in which special laws are invoked above and beyond the rules of common law; plenipotentiary powers for an inquisitor chosen for political purposes; a mood of declared moral superiority among politicians, even if only feigned; a suspension of the normal rules of evidence; and a ferocious self-righteousness which can justify almost any punishment.
And now the Star Chamber virus again is erupting and again contaminating the body politic - though now, of course, the name has mutated to Starr. The details of the revelations from yet another woman brought before the Chamber don't matter, though of course the men-hating school of WAVE - Women Are Victims Everywhere - here in Ireland has, with its witless and wearying predictability, managed to identify Monica Lewinsky as a victim. This is pathetic, and also it degrades her, for she is an adult who made her own choices. But to spend any time rebutting this or that is to accept the moral and legal authority of this Starr Chamber, when it has none. It is merely a coercive tool of political will which causes the weak, the cowardly or the opportunistic to seek advantage by loud declarations of moral superiority.
What Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky is not my business or the American people's business. What is my business is that confessions were extracted from Lewinsky under duress, as they invariably are in Star Chambers. What is my business is that evidence which could not be acceptable in any court anywhere - unauthorised bugging of private conversations - has been used to destroy Bill Clinton. What is my business is that a weekend to celebrate President Clinton's very great contribution to the peace process has been corrupted into a self-righteous orgy of sanctimonious prurience and priggish voyeurism.
Hypocrisy
Coming from anybody, such posturing is pretty disageeable; coming from journalists, Irish, American or whoever, it is odious in the extreme. Truly, until this sorry affair I thought I understood the meaning of the word hypocrisy. Wrong again.
We know that journalism and politics are properly held in low esteem by plain people everywhere, and most us thought we knew why; but it is only the virus of authorised humbuggery from Starr's vile chamber which fully explains that contempt. The two trades have seldom sunk to such contemptible depths as they have during the US presidential visit here.
It is time to become an estate agent.