This insane business in the US is not about Lewinsky at all. The issue is something altogether more serious; and that is why we outsiders have been so astonished and uncomprehending. The issue is Vietnam, the great American civil war of this century, the issue around which the US divided then and has remained divided since. But since there was no outright civil war, merely the symbols and the banners of war, it has not lodged in the history books as a civil war.
War it was and war it stays, in the mind. The Vietnam war was a double war: the war that was actually fought in South-East Asia, and the other war, between the two Americas, which define themselves with a discreet passion and certainty of identity every bit as powerful as did Fine Gael and Fianna Fail after our Civil War, as once did Tory and Whig after the English Civil War and the "Glorious Revolution."
Though the war began under a Democratic president, today no Republican president could have been a draft-dodger. It is unthinkable. The two parties of the US are cogent expressions of tribal identity, around which gather notions of loyalty to the nation, freedom of conscience, and the rights of the individual.
Tribal values
These are tribal values, supported by intensely tribal historical perceptions; the Republican tribe places more importance on the citizen's duty to the republic than on the citizen's personal scruples.
No value system is without contradiction, and the contradiction within the Republican ethic is that although it cherishes individualism and personal freedom, in matters of duty to the state the latter has an almost theistic primacy. Democrats are more corporatist in their notion of the duty of the state towards the individual; and they tend to be a little hazy or a la carte about the duties of the individual to the state. It is an old argument, older than the Union; as old as Hobbes and Locke, the founding fathers of the twin American political philosophies.
What an outrage it must be to people who raise the US flag by their front porches each morning, who served their country in war and who are faithful to the marriage bed in peace to have this serial adulterer and draft-dodger as president, and worse, be in commander-in-chief of armed services which they revere just this side of idolatry. Tens of thousands of young Americans who didn't have Clinton's connections or his deviousness died serving their country; what else but enraged would the families of those people be that the man who didn't do his duty is now Preident of their country? What else but blind with rage would such people be that this man is now having sex with young women in, what is it called? The Ovary Office? The Oral Office? Whatever.
You don't have to understand these people fully, any more than you have to understand the passions of Shia Muslims or of Taliban: you just have to know those feelings are there. Their mythology of identity is real and powerful and sacrosanct - and as Shia can detect betrayal so too can these Americans; for betrayal is never as vile as when it occurs at the very top. Lewinsky must have seemed a perfect opportunity for that America, the America we never see because it hasn't got passports, to get back at Clinton because of Vietnam.
Ghost of Vietnam
Vietnam, Vietnam, the ghost which will not go away. I made an odd discovery when I hitchhiked around the US during the Vietnam war.
The people whose company I sought out were, like me, antiwar. But the people I found I actually liked best, the people who were simplest and most honest and most decent, were ones who backed the war. Their hospitality was unfeigned and warm; their courtesy enormous; their tolerance of my opposite opinion far greater than mine of theirs. They were good people, among the best I have ever known. They didn't like the war, but thought it a necessary evil.
Their world view was simple enough: communism had to be fought, and they supported their country, right or wrong.
Honest simplicity
These are not sophisticated opinions. They are not meant to be. It is their honest simplicity which is so winning. And while millions of young Americans from that culture of duty were conscripted, millions of others avoided the draft; yet one day the latter were able to elect one of their own to be president. Is it so surprising that the other America, the one that dutifully trooped off to boot camp, that buried its dead teenagers at Arlington and that fought a long, losing war, should nurse a grievance against the America which not merely got away with not doing its duty, which did not go through the horrors of Vietnam and did not experience the trauma of defeat, but in the long run triumphed politically?
Lewinsky is a poor vehicle for their rage, yet that is the very measure of that rage - that it should settle for such cheap and unworthy opportunism, with the dreadful Starr as their weapon. The poorness of the case is probably one of the reasons why the majority of American people are backing Clinton. But who cannot have sympathy for those who did go to war and who now see a draft-dodger in command of the very armed forces he declined to serve?