R E C E N T L Y
Free at last?
This land is our land
Dick the Greek
Greasing the wheels
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MAYBE SOMEONE'S SEX LIFE IS NOBODY'S LATE IN HER LIFE, Lillian Hellman was onstage at some campus event and was asked why she had never endorsed gay liberation. Leaning over her cane and peering at the back of the hall through heavy dark glasses, she replied in raspy but lapidary form that "the forms of fucking do not require my endorsement." One had one's disagreements with the old girl, but this time, it would be nice to think, she spoke for us all. Half the pundits and windbags in the continental United States have been rushing to say, with less wit and less courage, that William Jefferson Clinton's "private" life is, or should be, his own affair. We're all adults, let's get on with the nation's business, the media should be concentrating on the "real issues," and so forth. Indeed, on the day that the fragrant Monica Lewinsky broke cover, I had been much more interested in establishing the identity of the "senior Republican," cited in the New York Times, who had told the South Korean dictators to go ahead and execute opposition leader (and now President-elect) Kim Dae Jung in 1980. I still am more interested. That doesn't make the Clinton libido irrelevant. If the recent freshet of JFK books has made anything plain, it is that there may well be a connection between machismo Mark 1 (Kennedy's disgusting admiration for Ian Fleming's fiction as it related to women) and machismo Mark 2 (Kennedy's even more repellent admiration for Fleming's James Bond solutions in the political sphere). Between power and the aphrodisiac, as the clammy Henry Kissinger was overfond of saying, there is a well-understood connection. You don't have to be a Reichian to propose that a sick libido may connote, or may lead to, baseness in politics. And/or vice versa. N E X T+P A G E +| Clinton's college girlfriends |
