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Nothing to Hide: Group-Fantasy and the Politics of Unreality

Dan Dervin
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 2, Fall 1998

Now, I just keep standing up. I'm like one of those Baby Huey dolls that we have when you're a kid. You punch em and they come back up, so I'm fine. But it's bad for the country.
President Clinton (Washington Post 26 Nov 97)

Following the collapse of the Evil Empire and the impasse of the Persian-Gulf War, the country has spent most of the 90s positively wallowing in peace and prosperity. With the stock-market continuing bullish despite the occasional stumble, with both violent crime and teenage pregnancy declining, one wonders how long can our psychic economies stand prosperity.

If history's seething cauldron of psychodynamically-charged elements periodically diverge into victim/hate groups keyed for delegated leaders to emerge and locate externalized containers when the necessary boiling-over occurs where then, psychohistorians ask, is the group-fantasy currently enlisted to facilitate these operations? Is it dormant, diffused, and splintered, or simply fizzling out? Monitoring the media for clues, I found some sputtering, but few sparks. A back-page ad in The Nation (7/7/97), proclaiming "Hillary Hangs by a Thread," stirred sacrificial fantasies of St. Hillary as being stoned or burned at the stake as well as being part of an unlikely, Jewish spider-conspiracy stemming from her associations with the Rose law firm. But despite such media-driven wishes for hunting down the witch or hanging the spider-woman, the First Lady remains at large. In mid-November, at the onset of the Iraqi minicrisis, Saddam Hussein flashing on the cover of the New York Post with the ominous caption, "TOXIC," and Time's cover with an evil-eye "Showdown" proposing a replay of the 1991 iconography, it looked like da'ja vu all over again.2

But despite much nudging from the media, prospects for military fireworks to cloak the blood-letting have fizzled, and the only domestic bad-guy the group-fantasy has cooked up is the IRS, depicted in one group-fantasy cartoon as a living-dead Count Dracula in an open coffin with a spike through his heart. "The corruption, the cancerous evil of the IRS must be rooted out of our government," runs a recent letter to my hometown newspaper (Free-Lance Star, 10 May 98); the "last remnant of that KGB minded group" must be totally eradicated, for "reform will only result in business as usual, more of Sodom and Gomorrah." But such ranting is more the exception than the rule, and Clinton with his usual dexterity detoxed the issue by aligning himself with reform.

Is Clinton wimping out, or succeeding as another Teflon president? Most obsessively on his case, pundit Michael Kelly was himself recently fired from the New Republic for being overly zealous. Concurrently, much of the animus toward national leaders has been deflected onto former figures Kennedy and the so-called "Dark Side of Camelot" in Seymour Hersh's trumpeted expos, which also seems to be backfiring and Nixon, whose recently released Watergate tapes had once set the outer limits for treachery, but now elicits only knee-jerk outrage. At best, Kennedy and Nixon currently perform as leaky poison-containers, and Michael Kennedy, who died while playing the legendary family sport of touch football on the ski slopes, may have performed a sacrificial enactment.

On the other side of the spectrum, DWEMS, those Dead White Males chosen as delegates for a discredited patriarchy to be pilloried in left-wing fantasy, have been rescusitated as Promise Keepers and are wistfully depicted by academic feminists as latterday Nazis oh, for the good old days of the Third Reich.3 Positive evil has a capacity for making muddles turn crystal-clear, but Promise Keepers, with their intriguing motto from Ezekiel (22:30-32), "Stand in the Gap," was forced in late February (1998) to release all of its paid staff (though most were reinstated).4

Lacking any commensurate evil, the country presently seems to be suffering from a severe case of unreality. Reality-loss can either be dangerous and disruptive (future historians may name our recurring malaise the Weimar-syndrome), or chronic and customary (conveyed in the negating prefix post-this, that, or whatever).5 The pointman for this postmodern position is Jean Baudrillard, who construes all contemporary events, including the Persian-Gulf War, to be simulated (i.e., media-generated).6 Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida's rhetorical theory that destabilizes accepted textual meanings, has been so indiscriminantly appropriated by the media that anything constructed may be instantly deconstructed, and Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry has cashed in on the zeitgeist.7 Now you see it; now you don't. In effect, today's national ennui seems analogous to our watching a skilled magician, whose adeptness in making objects disappear and reappear does not so much elevate him in public esteem as cast doubts on our own perceptual abilities and thereby further lower levels of our already passive participation.

While its distractions buy time, the gamesmanship out of Washington may be ultimately self-defeating; still, being the only game in town, it warrants an effort at understanding. It is all the more worth the effort, however, when fueled by elusive but nonetheless potent sexual dynamics. The magician's sleight-of-hand, which so deftly undermines our sense of reality, has its counterpart in the "MacGuffin" of popular mysteries and thrillers: a term invented by Alfred Hitchcock for the ever-receding goal whose quest animates the plot, and so in psychological terms the elusive object of desire. Quintessentially, it is the black bird (Maltese Falcon) that everyone pursues but no one ever quite gets which is just as well, since in itself it is often valueless, and getting there is all the fun.

Yet, as an absence that produces multiple presences, the thing is highly symbolic and also highly sexualized, as seen in Jacques Lacan's famous contribution to the subject in his reading of Poe's "The Purloined Letter."8 Lacan's selective and intricately rhetorical reworking of Freud can be off-putting, but its arduous ingenuity has its payback. What Lacan suggests is that desire, being predicated on lack, is profoundly implicated in castration; the subjectively-enhanced lost object is represented by the phallus. Not surprisingly then the quest for the "bird" in popular narratives is ridden with conflict and ambivalence. Since this highly-fraught desire is routed through cultural modes, it becomes readily displaced or floats almost randomly among nominal males and females; it thus readily lends itself to fetishism and attendant perverse scenarios.9

The political dimensions of this discourse of lack/desire appeared in the early days of the Clinton presidency when doubts arose over his sexual adequacy. These were not so subtly expressed in the rapidly heated-up issues of gays in the military, and who wears the pants in the White House he or Hillary? As these concerns adhered like latent thoughts to other more legitimately manifest issues, it grew clear that the underlying anxiety has he got it? with its backpedaling corollary, don't ask, don't tell persisted for future enactments.

In all the scandals plaguing his two terms Travelgate, Whitewater, campaign financing, sexual harassment suits, hanky-panky in the Oval Office the common denominator has been the assumption that there must be something there which he is hiding. Clinton has adroitly intuitively, inadvertently, who can say how? played into and played out this feint-and-bluff game. Like the purloined letter, records that were missing or non-existent suddenly turn up in an office, in an abandoned car, in overlooked FBI files, or in forgotten, homemade videos. But none of these ever quite turn out to be the long-sought bird or the MacGuffin (politically dubbed the smoking-gun). Periodically, Clinton will insist that he has turned over all he has; his adversaries will insist he's holding back. When he testified in the Paula Jones suit, was it testimony to his testes (the common etymology is intriguing)? A CNN poll reported on January 26 (1998) found a majority believed Clinton was "hiding something." The dialectical script is being endlessly repeated: see? there's less than meets the eye; no, there's more than meets the eye. It is the dance of the Seven Veils which, always stopping before the final secret (castration) can be revealed, preserves the fetishized body (the maternal phallus) and its perverse rituals.

So effectively has this now-you-see-it-now-you-don't game been played out that public officials and most of the country were divided accordingly (evenly so as well, according to a poll reported in the New York Times, 10 Dec 97). On the one side are those who believe there's something there (he's got it): these include Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, Senator Fred Thompson (whose hearings were fueled by this assumption that blew up in their faces), the Republican Congress, the conspiracy-mongers of talk-radio, and most of the conservative media. On the other side are those who claim there's nothing there: the Clintons, the White House staff, Janet Reno, and a slightly more skeptical liberal media (e.g., the New Yorker).

Then, by way of returning these displacements to their presumed sources, are on the one side Paula Jones, whose insistence he did it (exposed himself and sexually harrassed her) affirms that he has it; on the other side, White House lawyer Robert Bennett, whose defense denies that he has it (telltale mark in the genital area). Kathleen Willey's account of an unwanted encounter with Clinton in the Oval Office when he allegedly fondled her breasts and wanted her to handle his penis has been circuitously reported (John Palmer on NBC Nightly News, 13 March 1998) as "in the area of the groin" or "around the genitals" (only Public Broadcasting used the word "penis"). As one woman after another comes forward to testify against Clinton, de-realization results as their testimony is called into question. Putting one's finger on the organ in question has become as problematic as coming to grips with the nature of Clinton's scandals. Lamenting an equivalent Watergate, the media have struggled over an array of "-gates" for Clinton, for, as a semiotician notes, "the sound of a word is of enormous importance...the lubricant that gets the signifier and its meaning into our consciousness." But "Monicagate" doesn't work, and Clinton seems to be winning the linguistics games as well. When "you've got a lot of names for something, none of them euphonious, then it's as if you don't have any name. And then if you don't have a name for a thing, as far as most people are concerned, you don't have the thing at all."10 By this logic, if you can't name it, he doesn't have it, and if he doesn't have it, he didn't do it or does he and did he? By late February confusion had reached critical mass when Clinton had effectively turned the tables on Kenneth Starr. "We are not sure from day to day who or what is on trial," writes Richard Harwood. "Is it the president or Kenneth Starr or Lewinsky or Tripp or the press or the legal profession or the political system itself?"11

Supposedly, with the Clinton and Jones parties unable to reach a compromise, the truth would eventually come in a trial set for May, 1998; but on April Fools Day, a Republican woman judge in Arkansas dismissed the case.

The truth wouldn't have come out anyway, partly because the issues have become so overdetermined by unconscious and perverse scenarios that no answer can ever be fully satisfactory, partly because Clinton may have mastered the game thoroughly enough to stretch it out for the duration, and partly because we the public, despite all the lip-service to the truth, don't really want to know. We prefer to be entertained, and insofar as the game delays our perception of nothingness, we prefer the game.

In this context, the game of now-you-see-it-now-you-don't returns to haunt us in the international arena, for Saddam Hussein has shown that two as well as one can play the politics of unreality. The pas de deux between him and UN Inspectors is precisely along the lines of he has it (nuclear arsenal, chemical weapons); see? there's nothing there. With bold captions of SADDAM'S STRATEGY, NBC Nightly News (11/97) could only call it a game of "hide-and-seek."

An unlikely venue may clarify the perverse gamesmanship in current U.S. politics. In Paris Is Burning, a 1989 documentary film about Harlem drag balls, contestants aspire to become "Legendary" by an inspired blend of costume, image, and pizzazz style. To be seen as successfully "vogueing" is literally to win trophies in the phallic masquerade. Gays and/or transsexuals one is never certain of the transformation's point of departure flaunt their stuff as Marilyn or Marlene, or as some super-male stud in military regalia or Wall-Street decorum, and, with all the daring extravagance of illusion, they strive to seduce the wannabe crowd and the judges. In these performances, not seeing the genitals is not only hindrance to believing but a sine qua non.

Under this kind of perverse spotlight, only a select few presidents have achieved a transcendent Legendary status FDR, JFK, Nixon, and Reagan. As for Clinton, his coping-strategies have salvaged his political career; but his maneuverings, where he has often proven more adept as a Republican than as a Democrat, have blurred and scaled-down his image. The Party-fetish apparently still counts for something; but all the same, political transgressions being less momentous than those of gender, such trade-offs and an apparently benign kind of splitting between private and public roles buy him time but only further de-realize him in the public gaze.

Is Clinton pursuing the classical perverse strategy in which pleasure is gained not from making love but from making hate? DeMause's analysis of U.S. presidents, notoriously JFK and Clinton who "betray and humiliate their wives with loveless sex affairs," seems right on target.12

The prospect of making hate with an external enemy and producing sacrificial victims is the likely outcome of politically-perverse rituals. But that has not occurred; rather, putting our hate on hold has led to an indefinite delay of gratification. Hence the prospect of other more elusive strategies is raised. What strikes me about Clinton's political behavior in recent months is how these scandalous allegations have been unnecessarily protracted, almost as if, despite all conscious claims to the contrary, they are what he thrives on. Given what we have inferred psychohistorically about the leader's role as delegate for remedying the group's overflowing toxicity, Clinton's reluctance to follow any of the three prescribed solutions is germane: unlike Bush, he refuses to fabricate external enemies and demonize Saddam; unlike Ike and Nixon, he hasn't capitalized on domestic enemies; unlike LBJ or Nixon (again), he is unwilling to offer himself as sacrifice, since so far, despite much prompting in the media, he has not been forced into a scapegoat role as Reagan was able to corner Carter. I wonder then if given all the depersonalizing tasks of the leader, chiefly to find poison-containers at the beck-and-call of group-fantasy, that Clinton-as-delegate hasn't engaged in conspicuous sexual transgressions as a way of keeping in touch with his basic (albeit libidinized) self through public display, while exercising a measure of control through a hide-and-seek gamesmanship.

What we are witnessing then would be a playing out of two incompatible psychologies: that of the delegate, and that of the person. But if they are in conflict in any given presidency, they appear to have found a common meeting-ground in this presidency, and that is in the zone of perversion.

With respect to his personal defense-system, Clinton may be undoing the early trauma of his maternal abandonment, which explains its compulsive character. Though writing in Time's jaunty style, Roger Rosenblatt astutely assesses Clinton's developmental deficits. The "absent mother" experiences, which stimulate romantic quests to recover her, is undermined by an inability to trust: "so he doesn't believe in loyalty any more than he believes in love. On the other hand, he has great faith in rejection, having experienced it when it counted most, thus he seeks and rejects simultaneously."13 If the early loss of his mother as original libidinal object amounted to a collapse or disappearance of his own libidinal self, he has certainly turned the tables on trauma. He has kept the limelight focused on himself moreover on a special part of himself and it seems less and less accidental that the whole country, if not the planet, is talking about his sex life.

We thus return to the phallic discourse that underwrites the politics of unreality. After a week of enormous media hyping, 60 Minutes enacted our national obsession. Ed Bradley, with his nearly shaven head and metal-rimmed glasses resembling a Grand Inquisitor more than a therapist, much less a reporter, subjected Kathleen Willey to a confession of the intimate details of her alleged harassment in the Oval Office. There was a "hug" that "lasted a little longer than I thought necessary," she recalls. "And then he, then he, then he kissed me on my mouth and pulled me closer to him...and I pushed back....he touched my breasts....Then he took my hand and he, and he put it on him." Where? asked Bradley. "On his genitals," she replied. Then Bradley homes in on the question everyone was waiting for: was he "aroused?" "Uh-huh," she answered.

Final word? Hardly. Robert Bennett's jowly features soon appear on the screen to rebut her account. Earlier that day on ABC, he had mentioned "substantial material...under sealÉwhich seriously undercuts her claims."14 The following day Clinton reassures the American people that there was "nothing sexual" in his embrace, and the White House releases letters from the victim proclaiming herself as the president's "number one fan." NOW's president, Patricia Ireland, goes on the morning talk shows to perversely empower the president as a "sexual predator" if it happened, of course. The stumbling-block of that crucial "if" is quickly kicked away by legions of pundits conscripted to construct something out of nothing the perverse phallus and media discourse as its fetish.

The ingenuity of the Poe-Lacan reading of psychic maneuvering reminds us to look for things in full view but hidden only by dint of being out of order, i.e., out of their usual place. That Clinton has used the Oval Office as the stage for a multi-layered sexual enactment, despite Willey's warning that they may be seen, suggests the peculiar way he has intersected private and public rituals of perversion. Like his presidency itself, what began as an overture of love and sympathy has turned into a denouement of hate. Kathleen Willey had come to Clinton out of desperation over her husband's illicit law activities; initially Clinton expressed concern, but, if she is to be believed, sympathy soon turned inappropriately erotic. She was the one negated, as apparently he had felt in the aftermath of maternal abandonment, and her self-negation had to be enacted and undone on national television. Added to all this in a grotesque irony of revenge fantasy while the Oval-Office scene was being played out, Willey's husband, who was also being negated by Clinton's alleged pass, was taking his own life. What presumably began as seduction-plus-revenge against the pre-oedipal mother terminated in an apparent oedipal victory, but more likely the symbolic loss of any father who might have functioned to restrain and repress the child's hostile impulses. Thus the enactment may be perceived as multi-layered.

In the long run, however, the better Clinton succeeds in his endless sleight-of-hand performances, the more he suffers loss of presence. Such a decline may paradoxically signal his Legendary rise. Played in Primary Colors by John Travolta, himself Legendary from the Brooklyn version of drag balls in Saturday Night Fever, Clinton's good-ol'-boy philandering has been memorably objectified and fetishized as well. The hugging, humping dionysian figure of Jack Stanton seems a peculiar merging of Travolta and Clinton, reborn into a third entity whose imaginary status threatens to overpower any real-life sources. Public opinion polls seem to support a similar splitting: Clinton's public performance is highly approved (65%-70%) along with equally strong doubts over trust. Whether achieving or falling shy of Legendary in the political drag-ball, he portrays his resilience as that of a pop-up doll, and his residual images on television as a pop-up pol arouse only mild interest. Wavering on the screen and signaling a seal of silence or uttering ephemeral messages, he suggests a moderately talented actor given a mediocre part. No longer associating him with issues or causes, we identify him with the transgressive sexualities of daytime serials, and we patiently await his passing into memory, where, of course, he will be continually reconstructed and deconstructed until we get what we want from him whatever that may be.

The politics of unreality running through the Clinton years, which is making the work of psychohistorians so arduous, also challenges us to question our paradigms, models, and schema (especially that of sacrificial cleansing). If history is founded on a presence of action, psychohistory is constructed on a presence of unconscious motives and fantasies; to some extent both may perform defensively against primitive anxieties about absence and ultimate nothingness.

We are here only insofar as there is a there there. It may not be productive for us to revisit the debates within psychoanalysis in the 1970s between Narcissus and Oedipus, that is, between Heinz Kohut's self psychology and classical drive theory, which pivoted on questions of changing patient populations as reflecting larger shifts. Nonetheless, changes in family structure notably the number of one-parent households, the prevalence of both parents working, the deferring of childbearing to the late thirties and and early forties, and ever-greater exposure to media messages have necessarily had an impact on childrearing practices.15 These, combined with racial and ethnic demographic changes, have fostered a multiplicity of parenting modes unconducive to coalescing cohesive group-fantasies. To whatever degree we as psychohistorians have foregrounded guilt as the trigger for aggressive enactments, we may be inclined to entertain narcissistic and perverse paradigms which could be more implosive, diffuse, and less given to political transformations as formulated in psychohistory.

Dan Dervin, Ph.D., teaches English at Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, VA 22401, and is author of Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1996).

footnotes Below

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footnotes:

1. Lead editorial, Washington Post (2 Dec 97), on Iraq's hidden weapons capacities.
2. See "From Oily War to Holy War," and "Group-Fantasy in the Media," in my Enactments (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), pp. 239-40.
3. Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
4. Christopher Hitchen, "Another March, Another Prick in the Wall," Nation, 27 Oct 97, p. 9.
5. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
6. George Walden, "Flaming Optimist," New Statesman (30 May 97), pp. 22-3.
7. Jon Wiener, "Deconstruction Goes Pop," The Nation (7 April 97), pp. 43-4.
8. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, editors, The Purloined Poe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
9. Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
10. Marshall Blonsky, quoted by Adam Lehner in "Daffy Dictionary Dept.," New Yorker (11 May 98), p. 38.
11. Richard Harwood, "A Tragedy Turned Farce" (Washington Post, 28 Feb 98).
12. "The Clinton Scandal and Attacking Iraq," unpublished paper.
13. Roger Rosenblatt, "What's Sex Got to Do with It?" Time (9 Feb 98), p. 61.
14. Washington Post (16 March 98).
15. Selma Kramer, The Colors of Childhood: Separation-Individuation Across Cultural, Racial, and Ethnic Differences (New York: Aronson, 1998).

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