I wrote the following as a wild and crazy satire of events in the midst of the Clinton scandals. I reprint it here for a little levity at a dark and sinister time, when the Ralph Nader and various left-wing parties are spinning their own fantasies that 'Kerry is a greater danger than Bush' and that Bush’s return to power in 2004 will bring about the collapse of capitalism.

The Original pre-Bush II Satire

When asked to explain why he quit performing in the 1970s, political folk singer and progressive satirist Tom Lehrer remarked that 'when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, who could do satire any more.' But this was a generation before the Lewinsky affair, which, with all of its sinister underside, makes Wag the Dog seem like Social Realism.

Think of the creative possibilities. First, Hollywood could do a contemporary version of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which has more than a little similarity to the present disaster. For the Bubba market, Dolly Parton might play Paula Jones. For general viewers, Vanna White might play a physically improved Lewinsky. Charlton Heston, combining art and politics, might play Clinton as a heterosexual Michaelangelo, and Michael J. Fox, reprising his Family Ties role for the youth market, would make a great Kenneth Starr. For football and courtroom drama fans, O.J. Simpson might revive his mutilated acting career by playing Linda Tripp.

But, before there was Hollywood, there was history. The History Channel might seek to present history before it happens, (a great marketing strategy) and hold a forum of historians in the year 2020 debating the effects of the Lewinsky scandal on World Depression 2, which began with the World Stock Market crash of 1999, following Clinton's resignation and appointment by Gore as ambassador to Monaco. The economic slump led to the sweeping Republican victory of 2000 AD under the leadership of Texas’ own George Bush II. Historians now debate whether or not it was the depth of the economic crisis and the threat of social revolution, or simply the discrediting of all political establishments by the Lewinsky affair, that led Bush to move the Republican party in a socialist direction, nationalize high tech and other basic industries, establish a national health service and socialized day care in the name of family values, and create an international economic war criminals tribunal which tried many ex-Republicans, free market economists, moral majority preachers, ex-British Tories, ex-German Christian Democrats, and others blamed for World Depression II. Certainly historians in 2020 believe that the US is far better off today than it was twenty years before, as the new Social Republican Party and its opponent, the Democratic Labor Party, debate with each other over how to best coordinate efforts to continue to upgrade the full employment economy, advance the new garden city-suburb complexes, improve education (80 percent of the population now have quality college degrees) and advance health care (life expectancy reached 95 last year in the 18th year of the national health service). As George Bush II said in 2009, before turning over the presidency to his handpicked successor, Ralph Nader, 'those who want the luxuries of the old capitalism can go to Russia,' which is exactly what his father, the last old Republican president, did, losing the family fortune in Siberian oil speculation. Clinton also ended up in the new capitalist Russia, with its infamous credit card debtors gulag, and was last reported to be the governor of a small province in Southern Russia, inviting peasant girls to his condo-dacha for political chats.
Finally, many old conservatives, who the History Channel reports, meet in theme parks where smog and homeless people surround old Ronald Reagan movies and old Rush Limbaugh radio broadcasts, still believe that the last 22 years were part of a vast conspiracy, pointing to Kenneth Starr's 20002 defection to Iran and Linda Tripp's 2003 marriage to Alan Greenspan as evidence (actually, Tripp used her trusty tape recorder to marry many prominent men in the early 21st century, after the economic war criminals tribunal stipulated that wives cannot be forced to testify against their husbands).

There are other possibilities for satire beyond Hollywood and the History Channel though. A Moral Majority version of 1984, where Big Celebator loves all the chaste and has his eyes and ears in every bedroom, is also not out of the question. But, as we approach the year 2000, our politics have come to resemble 1884 America rather than Orwell's 1984. Then, during the presidential election which centered on Grover Cleveland admission that he had fathered an illegitimate child, Republicans chanted 'Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa,' and Democrats replied (after Cleveland's victory) 'Gone to the White House, Ha Ha Ha.'

There were other issues in 1884 of course – great urban and rural poverty in an age of new industrial wealth, the federal government's betrayal of the Southern Blacks who were now 'free' from slavery, but the parties and the politicians, then as now, had no desire to upset the political apple cart by addressing them. And that may be the most important lesson history can teach from the Lewinsky affair

PostScript

As we approach the last week of the election of 2004, we are somewhere between Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, about a Fascist victory in America in the 1930s and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Monica Lewinsky is long gone politically, Republicans are trying to keep Blacks and other minority voters away from the polls as the KKK did in the South during Reconstruction, and the election next Tuesday is probably the most important the nation has had since 1940. 1964 and 1980 were also very important but in those elections, the winners, Johnson and Reagan, were pretty certain by election day.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.