Presidency myth used to tarnish Clinton

Years ago in Texas, Kenneth Starr's father, a fundamentalist preacher, noticed some of his cows had strayed. While searching for them, he wandered into the barn of a neighbouring farm. There he witnessed an abomination against the Lord. His neighbour's wife was milking a cow. And the Jezebel was wearing shorts.

The next Sunday, the Rev Starr preached a hellfire and damnation sermon against the woman and against the satanic practice of wearing immodest clothing in your own back yard. The sins of the fathers should not be visited on the sons, but it is clear the special prosecutor inherited some of his father's righteous outrage about what people do in their own barns.

The fascination, as well as the horror, of what Kenneth Starr has done is that he has brought to a head a conflict deep in the heart of American culture and therefore of modern culture in general. America's great significance for the development of democratic politics lies in the way it moved beyond its Puritan origins and embraced the idea of a public realm in which people could function as citizens rather than as saved or damned souls.

It transcended the culture of early America, where membership of the community was fundamentally dependent on conformity to religious laws, and instituted the rule of secular laws.

But it was a close-run thing and the old Puritan impulse has retained its power. If you live in America for a while, as I've just done, you are struck by how religious a society it is. It is much more so than, for instance, the supposedly church-saturated culture of Ireland. Partly because political and governmental institutions remain relatively weak, churches still define, for many Americans, their primary sense of belonging.

If you go to a Presbyterian church in the suburbs or the countryside on a Sunday morning, you get a very strong sense that the congregation thinks of itself as being the community. If you are not in the church, you are not quite within the civic and social pale.

It's this potent if subterranean American habit of mind that Starr has tried to summon. His indictment of Bill Clinton is couched in terms of secular law. But the pretence is pretty transparent. In terms of legal process and of legal argument, Starr's investigation and report would not stand even the briefest scrutiny.

The revelation this week of what he chose to leave out of his report - basic pieces of evidence like Monica Lewinsky's testimony that "no one ever asked me to lie and I was never promised a job for my silence" - shows how little it has to do with judicial fairness. It really draws on something else, on an essentially religious force - the power of the godly community to denounce, shame and ostracise the sinner.

The more one studies it, the more clear it becomes that Clinton is not being threatened with impeachment. He is being threatened with excommunication. In the mentality of Starr and of his right-wing allies in Congress and elsewhere, it doesn't matter whether or not Clinton is a good president. What matters is whether he is, in their terms, a good man.

It doesn't matter if he was milking the cow properly but whether he was wearing the right clothes while doing so. Appeals to legal norms of fairness and impartiality are irrelevant. The preacher's job is not to be fair to the sinner, but to root him out before he taints the congregation. Impartiality in the face of sin is mere weakness.

Starr's challenge to secular democracy is rooted in the literal-mindedness of fundamentalist Christianity. Fundamentalism is characterised by its refusal to accept that certain basic stories are poetic metaphors.

In its world-view, whatever Darwin says and whatever the sciences discover, the world was created in six days. The story of Adam and Eve is not an evocative creation myth, it is history. It's the way things really happened. The story of the resurrection isn't a beautiful image of rebirth and renewal, it is a journalistic account of actual events.

The Starr report is what you get when you try to fit modern politics into this frame of mind. It arises from an insistence on the literal truth of one of the great modern myths, the myth of the American presidency. The story of the presidency goes something like this: the president embodies the nation, contains all its best qualities, excludes all its worst aspects, incarnates its pure, innocent aspirations to virtue.

This is not necessarily a bad myth to cling to. Political leadership does, or should, have some symbolic qualities. A president or a prime minister should try to embody the collective aspirations of the citizens. But it works only as a myth. You have to know all the time that it is a metaphor.

If you don't, you end up at best with the vaguely comic folly of a de Valera looking into his own heart to discover what the people think, at worst with the totalitarian nightmare of a Fuhrer who thinks he is the people and that his whims and psychoses are the collective will of the nation.

One aspect of the current outbreak of political dementia is the manic literalism of the American right wing in insisting that the presidential myth, like the story of Adam and Eve, must be true.

Since the president is really and truly supposed to be an embodiment of the nation's virtues, a man who defiles those virtues by his unclean conduct cannot, by definition, be president. The evidence that Clinton was elected to the office twice and is regarded as a capable president is as irrelevant as Darwin's evidence on the origin of species.

But the other aspect of this weird business is that Clinton himself has played up to the fundamentalist myth in two potent ways. One is that, instead of sharpening the difference between a religious and a secular view of politics, he has often blunted it. His nauseating repentant sinner act at the recent White House prayer breakfast was pretty much in keeping with the way he has tried, when it suits him, to surround himself with a religious aura.

The other way is that through his brilliant use of television he has taken image-making to new heights. Instead of arguing his case, he has often relied on the persuasive power of the small screen, seeking to enthral the citizens by visual magic rather than persuade them by argument.

Yet, and this is the one cause for optimism in the whole debacle, there are strong signs that, in spite of both Starr and Clinton, a majority of Americans understands perfectly well that the myth of the presidency is no more to be taken literally than is the myth of Adam and Eve.

Notwithstanding the overwhelming weight of media obsession with the story, the outrageous conduct of Starr's inquisition, or Clinton's many follies, most people in America have grasped the distinction between the man and the office. It may be a strange cause for celebration that 220 years after the American revolution people still think a president should derive his power from being elected and not from being holy. But in these bizarre times we have to be grateful for small mercies.