For days people have been saying one word about Bill Clinton. The word is . . . "why". Why did he do anything so stupid? Why did he not come out and say he didn't do it earlier? Alternatively, if he did do it, why did he not just admit it and say it was possibly regrettable but also lovely, thank you? Why did he not realise he had powerful enemies gunning for him and gun them down with equal fire?
It's not just because it was such a prurient spectator sport that the world was glued to television for hours on end, it was because of that unanswered question, why? And the other phrase that hovered in the air was "Wouldn't you think?"
Wouldn't you think that with all that going for you, and ruling the Western world, and getting in so easily last time and the State of the Union speech upcoming and with a nice, bossy, supportive wife and a young, impressionable daughter . . . and knowing the minefields out there . . . wouldn't you think? But when did anyone ever stop to think? Answer me that.
Would there have been any adventures, dramas, sagas, weepie movies, marriages, divorces, elopements or reconciliations if people had stopped to think?
Some of the greatest love affairs, unlikely parenting, career changes and political upsurges have occurred because people didn't stop to think and work it all out.
Some of the most upsetting, distressing and heartbreaking events in people's lives have also been a result of someone not stopping to think of the Niagara-type floods that may be released. But that's the human condition.
IT'S astounding that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary we should still expect everyone to behave like a cute hoor and watch not only their backs but every single step they take. What's amazing is our amazement, not the event itself.
People often do things just because they can. Like climbing Everest because it's there. In the film The Stepford Wives, in which a consortium of men change their wives into Barbie-doll robots, one angry wife asks why, and the answer is: because we can.
People got away with things before in the White House; ladies were brought in and escorted out. Wives knew they didn't rock boats, and if the press knew, it winked and said nothing. For generations men in the British Royal family got away with having mistresses. Wives kept going to things called Three-day Events and talking seriously about horseflesh, and the press winked and said nothing.
There are whole blocks of apartments built in London for mistresses. I know one block in Battersea which had nothing but mistresses at the turn of the last century, and apparently everyone knew and it suited everyone. It suited the wives in the country estates who didn't really like too much of That Sort of Thing and the mistresses who had each other for company and a nice little investment for when they got old and flabby and unable to exert their charms.
But everything changed and a lot of people didn't notice it changing. That's what all this is about. It's as if somebody came in and moved the goal posts overnight and those who went on with the old ways are now totally bewildered.
There's no reason why anyone should be stunned by what Bill Clinton did or did not do. Unless you live the most sheltered life in the world you only have to look around you to realise how many people you know have done the most amazingly foolish and woefully misguided things all over the shop.
I know a woman who must have gone out last night, because she has gone somewhere every Friday night for decades, spreading disaster. She will have headed like a heat-seeking missile for the most unreliable person in the room, restaurant, theatre or night club. She has an unerring instinct to hit on the wrong person: the hostess's husband, somebody who might have been about to give her a job, or her daughter's boyfriend. I don't know, I haven't heard yet. It has even stopped being interesting because of its very frequency. And yet we still ask: Why? The answer is because that's the way people are.
Those of us potatoes who have practically taken root in the couch for Coronation Street ask each other why Jon led such a double life and betrayed poor, poor, Deirdre so desperately. The answer, of course, is that he did it because he could, and that's what people all round us here or in Coronation Street are doing all the time.
I heard a man in Dun Laoghaire saying a fond goodbye to his wife and sons who thought he was getting on the Stena Sealink, but he actually got on the DART and went to a pub in Dalkey where he stayed until closing time.
A friend heard a nice young woman whom we know to be married with two toddlers saying to a man at an art gallery that she was a student in Trinity and had no attachments.
Now that's in middle-aged middle class south Co Dublin, for Heaven's sake, and we are meant to be aghast at the way people carry on in Pennsylvania Avenue. None of this makes lies any more excusable, but it does make them less surprising.
Hurt and betrayal are unbearable in our own lives but we wallow in it a bit when it happens in the public arena, because like the bullet that misses us, at least it isn't heading our direction this time.
But I do think we have overdosed on the shock-horror "why, oh why", and "wouldn't you think" elements of it all. Anyone who has kept their eyes open would realise that there's no explaining what people do, and anybody who says "Wouldn't you think?" has hardly ever had a real thought at all.