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A L S O_.T O D A Y
Monica's betrayal
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--------------------Wouldn't it be wonderful if the most famous person
I love Monica Lewinsky. I have no illusions. It's a doomed affair. Unlike a certain Big Creep, I realized from the start that this love could never be. I must be strong. It's for the best this way. I'm not in love with Monica's voluptuous all-American looks or the way she wears those sensible blue suits. I don't dream about her giving me neckties or playing lewd games with tobacco products for my benefit. It's deeper than that, more real. I love her for what she is. Monica Lewinsky is the most famous person in America who has never been interviewed on TV. She's been famous for almost eight months and I don't know what her voice sounds like. I don't know if she has a nasal whine or a scratchy smoker's voice. Does she have a lisp? Does she say she's going to "warsh" her clothes? (Or, famously, not "warsh" them.) Who knows? I don't, and neither do you, and isn't that the greatest thing? We know a few things about Monica from leaked testimony, from interviews with former school friends, from stories about the contents of the Linda Tripp tapes. But the picture we have is sketchy enough that she remains a cipher. Whatever you want to project onto Monica, that's what she is. Think she's a naive kid who got moony over the president and then got in over her head? You're right! Think she's a cunning bitch who connived to bring the Clinton administration to its knees -- from her knees? Bingo! Think how much less interesting Monica would be if she'd sat down with Barbara Walters already, or let "Entertainment Tonight" or E! follow her around for a day. (Or should I say how much less interesting she will be when she inevitably does those things?) Oh, we'd all be thinking, the Monica of my imagination was so much more interesting. We need more famous people who keep their mouths shut. Wouldn't Mark McGwire's pursuit of the single-season home run record have been so much more interesting if he had just shut up and hit home runs? (Not that McGwire was to blame: For most of the season it seemed that he would have liked nothing more.) He would have heroically, silently pursued the hallowed mark of 62 homers while I pretended that he's just like me and you pretended that he's just like you. Instead, he was hounded by the media to say something, anything, and he came across for most of the year as kind of a short-tempered boor with no appreciation for the magnitude of his achievement. "What's the big deal?" he kept asking as he swatted microphones away. Or consider Madonna. Wasn't she so much more interesting when she made great records and you didn't really know much about her? Now that you've heard her yammer on about her artistic integrity and her spirituality and her bucking of convention and whatever else for the last 15 years, don't you just want to tell her to shut up? Don't you want to tell all the celebrities out there that you don't care what kind of tree they want to be, you're not interested in their early, starving-artist days, you really don't value their opinion on matters of global significance? Don't you want to tell everybody whose face is familiar to you but whom you've never met to just shut up, to just be a little more like Monica? My Monica.
Knowing her as I do, I think she'd agree with me on this one.
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