In the end, they will say, democracy killed America. It was a good thing, for a while. A great and successful experiment
back in the twentieth century, for a while. Certainly the most prosperous society of humans, up to that point. But, in the
end, it got an overdose of the very premise it was founded on – and it was over.

This, I submit to you, will be the judgment of history on the American events of 1998. How strange to be living in a time
when the very citadel of democracy is being threatened by something that is democratic in the extreme - the
unfettered pursuit of, and unchecked access to, information. Founded over two hundred years ago on the ethos of
upholding the will of the people, America is now approaching near-perfection in giving the people exactly what they
desire. Which is to say, of course, that it has successfully managed to reduce everything to the lowest common
denominator.

Kenneth W. Starr, the Independent Counsel who is anything but, wants America to impeach its President for putting his
penis in the mouth of Monica Lewinsky and for later lying about it. This argument, and the 445 pages of pulsating
erotica in which it has been articulated, appeals to our most primitive urges and therefore has the potential to distort all
reasoning and logic. And now that technology has finally outrun democracy and there is no moderation between what
the public needs to know and what it desires to know, a hysterical chain reaction has been set off in the arena of
public debate that promises to divest America of all common sense.

The lowest common denominator in human societies, it turns out, is simply a desire for titillation. By tuning in to show
after show and interview after interview on Washington’s most memorable sexual scandal (and thereby ensuring a
steady stream of advertising revenue for those miscreants called the electronic and print media), the people have
resoundingly voted to know not just the facts of the scandal but its most rancid details. Richard Nixon said that the
People deserve to know if their President is a crook, but by current standards he was clearly being far too naïve. The
modern expectation is that the People must not only know if their President is a crook but also whether he put his penis
in the mouth, and/or a cigar in the vagina, of a woman not his wife. Evidence ? The People flock in droves to listen and
watch wherever the most smut is on offer. I don’t mean to be critical, just accurate. And I don’t blame the People, either.
Humans, as we all know, have vulgar appetites. Prediction: the video of Clinton’s testimony will establish new ratings
records, exceeding the viewership of the O. J. Simpson verdict and the funeral of Lady Diana, even as the People
uniformly oppose its release. (Confession: Much as I abhor the release of the video, I have arranged to stay home and
monitor it; I, too, am human.)

Like a virus disabling a software application, the Clinton scandal is disrupting the very core of American democracy by
condemning it to an inevitable and morbid endgame in which there will be no winners. What locks the destructive
sequence in place is the intense (and natural) appeal of the scandal, the partisan motivation and limitless budget that
help Ken Starr to pursue it, and the news networks’ instinct to ferociously preserve their own business interests. I am
not, and have no desire to be, an American. But I feel for America today more than ever as I see the grand and
glorious scheme of the United States brought to its knees by something as pathetically trivial as sexual indiscretion.
One would expect other issues, such as Clinton’s moral compass, the definition of perjury, and the motivations of Linda
Tripp, to also be factored into the grand equation, but the specifics of the case do not inform the calculus of public
opinion and cannot influence the events of 1998. It’s about sex and, as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recently
told Jim Lehrer on Public TV, once you pull the covers off, it’s still about sex.

A variety of damaging consequences are bound to follow from the current national overdose of fornication. I doubt
many people of any stature will be motivated to run for what is regarded as the highest office in the land, or even for
any public office exposed to the national spotlight. Any future President will be held to impossible, superhuman
standards and will be examined by a microscope to ensure that he or she measures up. Worse still, the nature of
political dialogue in America has been forever corroded. Because even the most well-meaning of politicians still remain
vulnerable to partisan temptation, Democrats will consider it their job description to drink the blood of Republicans and
vice versa. No good can come of this. We might as well be watching gladiators in a fight to the death.

Those struggling with the merits of Starr’s case are looking in the wrong places. The real question at the heart of the
American democracy today is not whether Clinton is innocent or guilty but whether pulsating erotica should be fed to
whoever seeks it. So long as the People want it, no TV producer, radio talk show host, newspaper columnist or
magazine editor can afford to back off on their coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair; doing so will cost marketshare
and amount to business suicide. And the People, being human, will always want it. Herein, then, lies the tragic glitch in
the otherwise flawless design of the democratic ideal: sooner or later, the People will want something that’s not good for
them and, by the rules of the democratic game, it will have to be given them. Admittedly, Clinton’s unhinged moral
outlook catalyzed the process, but it would have happened eventually, if not with him then with someone else.
Certainly could have happened earlier. Had modern information technology existed in the time of John F. Kennedy, for
example, Camelot may have been remembered as Armageddon.

We are close to the point – and it is coming, for sure – when the only reasonable option for arresting the current
countdown to the short-circuiting of democracy will be to regulate the output of the electronic and print media by
governmental fiat. When that point is reached, however, any further maneuvering will be precluded by the limits of the
American constitution. Checkmate, in other words. Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg that ‘government of the people,
by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ But he may have spoken too soon and, like the US
Constitution, given too much credit to We The People.