October 28, 1998

TRIPP advised that LEWINSKY has a nineties view on sex. TRIPP stated that LEWINSKY'S moral code allows her to behave the way she does. (1)
--Linda Tripp FBI Interview

In the event, it turns out that the Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr has an "eighties" view of sex, as in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"'You are the dead,'" Gene Lyons began his first column (2) following President Clinton's August 17 admission. "'Now they can see us,'" he continued, quoting the scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four wherein the Thought Police reveal their monitoring of Winston and Julia's affair. "Outrageous exaggerations!" Starr's supporters wrote back.

Hardly. The 8,000 pages of documents subsequently released manifest the totalitarian precision with which the OIC examined the Lewinsky matter, including technology Orwell never dreamed of, from pager and phone records through credit card and ATM receipts to the recovery of deleted computer records. The OIC's exploitation of Tripp's intimate treachery recalls Orwell's hapless Parsons's betrayal by his little daughter.

"As this is America," Lyons wrote, "there are no sinister Thought Police prowling the alleys." But Lyons was too kind: The OIC was not like the Thought Police, it was a Thought Police. In the end it was not criminal acts that concerned Starr, not even the criminal words that constitute perjury, but the inmost recesses of Monica Lewinsky's soul, her beliefs, her feelings, her thoughts, her consciousness of self. Her offense was thoughtcrime; her punishment was--well, we've all seen enough Letterman "Top Ten Lists" with the word "Monica" in them to understand the punishment.

The OIC's project was not to find evidence of a particular act, not even what literary theorists call "speech acts" (something like an oath, which is simultaneously both an expression and a behavior), but to coerce Lewinsky into adopting a definition which she had previously rejected. In the Ritz-Carlton lunch she said:

LEWINSKY: Mm-hmm. Hey, look, for me, I never had sex with him. That's a sexual relationship.
TRIPP: What is--what is the definition of sex?
LEWINSKY: Intercourse. (3)

Two weeks later Lewinsky's handwritten proffer (4) again denied that the relationship was sexual, admitting only "physically intimate contact" that "included oral sex but excluded intercourse."

True, the conversation and the proffer might be dismissed as self-serving attempts to deflect perjury. But Lewinsky truly believed that definition, as Starr's own evidence demonstrates. Before the Jones attorneys even knew Lewinsky existed, Tripp and Lewinsky discussed the men with whom Lewinsky had sex:

TRIPP: Well, I guess you can count the big creep in a sort of half-assed way.
LEWINSKY: Not at all. I never even came close to sleeping with him. ...
LEWINSKY: Having sex is having intercourse. That's how most people would--
TRIPP: Oh, so blow jobs and all of that don't count?
LEWINSKY: They don't count.
TRIPP: Oh? Well, see? You have to inform me--
LEWINSKY: Those are guys that you just fool around with. (5)

That Lewinsky was sincere at the time can hardly be doubted. She proposed a definition of "sexual relationship" and defended it, even denying that the President influenced her thinking: When Tripp accused her of adopting the President's "rationale," Lewinsky objected, "That's--well, that's my--then I've had sex with a lot more people."

That "most people would" agree is debatable, but that Lewinsky believed they would is unquestionable. Her distinction between "fooling around" and "sexual relationship" emanates from a perfectly reasonable impulse. She did not want to think of herself as promiscuous. Whether her definition was "true" is entirely irrelevant. What WAS true is that she sincerely believed it. Tripp even acknowledged Lewinsky's distinction when she "guessed" the sex was "sort of half-assed."

Attitudinal studies among young adults have demonstrated that there really is a "nineties view of sex," captured beautifully in the conversation. In Linda Tripp's salad days, oral sex was indeed much more personal, frequently moreso than intercourse ("What? You want me to put THAT in my mouth? Yuck!") But times have changed: Blow jobs "don't count" for the young as much as they used to. Rather than being the ultimate intimacy, oral sex is seen as a mediate act on the way to a full relationship.

The consensus among my Freshman Rhetoric students (6) (intriguingly, notwithstanding some of them's harsh judgments of the President's honesty) is that Lewinsky is correct as a matter of FACT regarding current sexual mores--parents may wish to avert their eyes: Oral sex now rates somewhere around second base, maybe a little past, although sometimes, as one student claimed, "It's the first thing."

For all the criticism of the President's "massaging" of language, it was Kenneth Starr who did violence to words, reminiscent of Orwell's fictional lexicographer, Syme: "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it."

In effect, Tripp won the argument about defining sex ten months later because she had a Federal prosecutor willing to force Lewinsky to concede. The OIC demanded that Lewinsky narrow her range of thought, that she adopt for herself a definition of "sexual relationship" that dispensed with her previous notion of "fooling around."

It could not have been much more than a matter of days after reviewing Tripp's tapes and receiving Lewinsky's scribbled proffer that Starr realized the predicament he was in. The physical behavior was admitted; the sworn testimony was on the record. Starr's task was clear: Impose on Lewinsky a "view of sex," that would allow him to accuse the President of serious criminality. In the end, Starr got his way. As Lewinsky might put it, in the "meaty paragraphs" from her July 27 interview (8), her debriefings (9), and in her August 6 testimony (10) she repudiated her earlier definition.

But all the OIC proved was that Monica Lewinsky committed a particular type of thoughtcrime, as Orwell explained (7):

[S]exual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practiced for its own sake.... [The ordinary citizen] knew what was meant by goodsex--that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman; all else was sexcrime.

The crucial point is that between October 3 and July 27 neither the relationship nor Lewinsky's beliefs about it changed. She never refused to relate the objective facts of the behavior; the February 1 proffer and the July 27 proffer do not factually contradict. The sole contradiction is in how Lewinsky THOUGHT about the relationship.

Now, is there anyone in the world familiar with this case who does not believe that the THOUGHTS Lewinsky had about the relationship changed because of the coercive threats of wielded by the Independent Counsel?

Since Lewinsky's relationship was not goodsex, by definition it had to be sexcrime. The trick was to convince her of that. Notice the difference in her description of her feelings. In her written proffer, she felt "comfortable" that she could "justify" her claim; later, she felt she "rationalized lying." In fact, when she attempted to use the word "justify" in her testimony, the prosecutors corrected her:

A But I did some justifying in signing the affidavit, so--
Q Justifying--does the word "rationalizing" apply as well?
A Rationalize. Yes. (11)

Allowing Lewinsky to feel "justified" would have destroyed the regime's control over her. Her belief that she was not a slut -- according to my students a core belief of most normal young adult women -- founded on a distinction between "sex" and "fooling around" was deliberately demolished by the State to serve its purposes.

And that is totalitarian.

None of the preceding is intended to defend President Clinton's definition of "sexual relations," (anyway, by conventional wisdom he has a "sixties" view of sex), although he too evoked totalitarian literature. Sidney Blumenthal quoted the President:

I feel like a character in a novel. I feel like somebody who is surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out. I feel like the character in the novel Darkness at Noon. (12)

The Beltway punditocracy lampooned the allusion, under the impression that the reference was inapt. But the reference could not have been more appropriate, for Arthur Koestler's character Rubashov was guilty. What the totalitarian regime claimed Rubashov did, he did: He betrayed the State; he dissented from the Party line; he progressively confessed, at last to treason (13):

Covered with shame, trampled in the dust, about to die, I will describe for you the sad progress of a traitor, that it may serve as a lesson and terrifying example to the millions of our country.

All that remains for the President to complete the analogy is for him to surrender to such apparatchiks as The New York Times Editorial Board by confessing outright that he lied under oath.

The profound terror of totalitarianism is not oppression of the innocent--that is mere tyranny. No, it is the oppression of the guilty, for the totalitarian impulse is to declare criminal ordinary aspects of human life: Memory, family loyalty, intimate confidence, sex. It destroys people like Rubashov, who display a taste for "humanitarian weakness and liberal democracy," or like Winston and Julia, who gratify simple human desire, only to be crushed under the Iron Heel that could not tolerate "LEWINSKY'S moral code."

1. 1/14/98 OIC-302 of Tripp, p. 3.
(1) http://cnn.com/icreport/report2/suppt/suppt47.html
2. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, August 19, 1998.
3. Tape 30, Body Wire Tape, p. 216.
(3) http://cnn.com/icreport/report2/suppl/suppl533.html
4. GJ Ex. ML-1, p. 1, 8, 10.
(4) http://cnn.com/icreport/report/volume4/volume4511.htm
5. Tape 18, October 3, 1997, p. 48-51.
(5) http://cnn.com/icreport/report2/suppl/suppl406.html
6. Sections 94 and 96.
(6) http://www.usl.edu/Departments/English/courses.html
7. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt,
1949, p. 308.
8. 7/27/98 OIC-302 Proffer Interview of Lewinsky, p. 15.
(8) http://cnn.com/icreport/report/volume4/volume4703.html
9. 8/2/98 OIC-302 of Lewinsky, p. 6.
(9) http://cnn.com/icreport/report/volume4/volume4792.html
10. 8/6/98 Lewinsky GJ, p. 204.
(10) http://cnn.com/icreport/report/volume4/volume4224.html
11. 8/6/98 Lewinsky GJ, p. 205.
(11) http://cnn.com/icreport/report/volume4/volume4225.html
12. 6/4/98 Blumenthal GJ, p. 50.
(12) http://cnn.com/icreport/report2/suppb/suppb181.html
13. Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon. New York: MacMillan,
1941, p. 245.