Non-Signifying Fury:

The Near-Tragedy of Bill Clinton         
by Chris Floyd     
Recently we had a piece here about the intelligence of George W. Bush. It proved to be somewhat controversial, with some readers denouncing me as a fool for taking Bush as anything other than a fool, but my main points were simple and, I still think, indisputable: that Bush is not as stupid as his public persona would suggest and, more importantly, that he is certainly aware of the true effects of his policies, both in their present horror and in the risks they pose for the future.

None of this absolves Bush from being a thug, a goon, a barbarian, a gangster or indeed an idiot from the point of view of morality or rationality. In fact, the awareness and intelligence I attributed to him only compounds the guilt he bears for his criminal policies and their murderous results.

To regard him as merely the dull-witted dupe of sinister manipulators would render him a tragic figure (or at least a pathetic one): a plain, dull man pushed into mighty currents beyond his control and against his will. (Against his will because, being so stupid, he could have no way of realizing what he was getting into when he agreed to seek power.) Tragic or pathetic, he thus becomes an object of pity.

 

 

In this, we would show the humanity that he himself has discarded, and not be dragged down to his bestial level. But all of this is just a fantasy, of course; Bush will never face any sort of justice – equivalent, compensatory, rough or merciful. Like Franco, he will die peacefully in his own bed, after a life of luxury and privilege.)

The post on Bush's intelligence was sparked by (but not solely based upon) an anecdote detailing a personal encounter with Bush, quoted in an article in the London Review of Books. Now, the LRB's American cousin, the New York Review of Books, offers an anecdote of a personal encounter with another president, Bill Clinton – a glimpse that does hold a few possible glimmers of genuine tragedy. And although some readers quite rightly questioned the underlying credibility of the source of the Bush anecdote – his obnoxious ex-speechwriter, David Frum – the veracity of the narrator of the Clinton encounter is unimpeachable (pardon the pun): Stephen Greenblatt, arguably the premier Shakespearean scholar of our day.

In Shakespeare and the Uses of Power, Greenblatt tells of attending a literary function at the White House in 1998:

"On this occasion the President gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. "Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."

In writing about Bush, I said that although he is fully aware of the consequences of his ambitions, it is obvious that "the premises he acts upon, the policies he pushes, the worldview he embraces are all devoid of any intellectual rigor. But that is chiefly because they are devoid of any genuine humanity, any interest in moving beyond the confines of our very limited selves and engaging actively and constructively with other minds, other mores, other points of view."

But with Greenblatt, we see that Bill Clinton did possess this extra dimension of intellectual rigor. As Greenblatt notes: "I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler." He continues:


I asked the President if he still remembered the lines he had memorized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patiently waiting to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Macbeth's great soliloquies:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th'inventor.

Now this recital may be more of an example of Clinton's lifelong propensity for school-boyish showing off than any tragic element in his character. But his ability to cut straight to the heart of the play's essence, offering an even more nuanced perspective than the great Shakespearean scholar had managed in his question, is indicative of an intense awareness of reality, and an ability to see beneath the surface to the dark, insoluble complexities and mysteries that drive human behavior. And this degree of awareness is astonishing in a leader whose public actions in power were concentrated to an overwhelming degree upon manipulating surface realities, through spin, exaggeration and outright falsehood, in order to enhance his popularity with various constituencies.

Clinton was able to pose as a champion of the downtrodden – "the first black president" – at the same time that he actually championed unbridled corporate power, ended welfare, slashed domestic programs while gorging the military-industrial complex – including Halliburton – with ever-greater helpings of government gravy. He was able to pose as some kind of anti-Establishment figure (helped in this by the Republicans' demonization of him as a "Sixties radical," etc.) even as he presided over and helped produce an ever-greater redistribution of the national wealth to the elite. He used the same lies and manipulations of the United Nations to kill people in Iraq that Bush has used. (I was tempted to say that the effects of Clinton's Iraq adventures were on a lesser scale than Bush's – but then I remembered that an estimated 500,000 children died needlessly in Iraq as a result of the sanctions that Clinton so rigorously enforced. So surely the total death toll of the sanctions surpasses the 600,000 to 900,000 innocent Iraqis killed in Bush's war.) Clinton too destroyed cities from the air, in Serbia, in yet another war that was based on an over-hyped casus belli that was later proven to be false (the mass ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that did not actually begin until after the war began). In fact, as I noted here a few weeks ago, "the House of Clinton and the House of Bush are deeply entwined, in their policies, their philosophies, their politics, even their personal lives." (How the Bushes and Clintons Took us to Hell.)

How to reconcile the depth of insight that Clinton obviously possesses with his actions in office? It can only be that in describing Macbeth he was describing himself: "someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object." And the inadequate object of Clinton's immense ambition and immense intellect has been the aggrandizement of his own personal power (and that of his wife) at the expense of the national interest – and the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

This is indeed meet food for tragedy – and yet there still seems something lacking in Clinton to elevate him to such a level, and evoke the necessary "terror and pity" of the tragic.

 

One thing missing, of course, is the comeuppance factor; Clinton has never faced the catastrophe that would strip him to the bone and leave him with nothing but the ruination spawned by his hubris. (And no, being impeached over a blowjob doesn't count – he came out of that spot of bother smelling like a rose, more popular than ever, his marriage intact, his very marketable global celebrity enhanced immeasurably, and a $10 million book deal in his hand. Not exactly Lear on the heath or Oedipus at Colonus, now is it?) The fact that Clinton could be so perceptive yet roll blithely on with his lies and self-delusions, now pushing the ethically inadequate ambitions of his wife toward the White House, with no apparent aim other than the pleasures of exercising power for its own sweet sake, and no larger vision of the common good in view, is indicative of a spiritual shallowness that could never attain to tragic redemption.

If there is a tragedy associated with Bill Clinton's case, it is not his, but ours: that a man with the insight and intellect that he has often displayed should reach the pinnacle of national power, and do nothing with it but serve the rich, serve the masters of war, and serve himself. But then, if Clinton had been other than what he was, he never would have reached that pinnacle.

 

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