You know what some folks may do in hotel rooms in strange cities. Me, I watch television.
I saw Larry King cozying up to Monica Lewinsky like she was Claire Boothe Luce having just written “The Women,” and not some one-note Knee-Pad Queen telling and re-telling her sad, sorry excuse for a story again, and again, and again. Somebody, anybody, give this pathetic woman an enema – and quick.
Shoot, at times like this, Monica Lewinsky reminds me of Honeysuckle Divine.
Long ago and far away, toiling in the City of Otherly Love as a magazine journalist covering the Important Stuff, I encountered this peculiarly popular striptease artist named Honeysuckle Divine, whose claims to fame included various oddly arresting activities she could accomplish with her nether region, including lobbing ping pong balls into an audience of slavering, drooling m-e-n.
See the parallels with Monica? Read on.
Certainly Honeysuckle Divine – the intrepid stripper – was infinitely more entertaining than Eve Ensler’s excessively acclaimed, yet profoundly banal, theatrical homage to female victimhood and gender metonymy, “The Vagina Monologues,” elevated lately to an annual and increasingly sacred Valentines Day tradition guaranteed to widen the already gaping – or is that yawning – chasm between any two sexes.
Seems like Honeysuckle the headliner might have inspired presidential cigar receptacle Monica Lewinsky too. The audience drools. She lobs. Pure Pavlovian conditioning.
OK, Monica didn’t run off with Osama. Wishful thinking.
So Monica has again resurfaced most recently with her dreary, deadly dull Repetition Compulsion, peddling her presumably reformed prurience on television, repackaged (as Monica-Barbie, doll-crotch and all) in a massive media barrage for that inane HBO pseudo-documentary on her – promoted from Larry King to Paula Zahn to East Japip, her manic-depressive media tour nearly coinciding with increased U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, as well as the comforting revelation DUH-Bya, our putative president, has established a so-called Shadow Government which will function at a secret, safe location in the event of catastrophic attack on our Nation’s Capital.
Except, of course, since GWB’s not saying who exactly comprises this Shadow Government – The Military-Industrial Complex? The Illuminati? The Bilderbergers? Mid-level civil servants? – and Congress seems to be out of the informational loop as well, what a devious way to really seize control of the USA’s government and bypass our system of checks and balances, when hijacking an election isn’t sufficient.
Which matters most to you?
It pains me to see Monica still getting serious air-time, post-9/11, but that’s the nature of this nation’s addiction to deeply meaningless blather. This woman – as I’ve written before – single-handedly manages to make the racy and somewhat fascinating institution of mistress-hood downright boring. She’s been stretching her Warholian 15 minutes into a rubbery Daliesque wristwatch-worth of interminability.
“There,” the New York Times’ Caryn James writes of Monica’s HBO special, “sitting casually on the edge of the stage in a black pantsuit, Ms. Lewinsky tries to project the image of a well-adjusted, forward-looking person, who was treated badly by Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp and the media. She actually projects the image of an emotionally distraught person trapped by her past, who was treated badly by Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp and the media.”
And we can’t take our eyes off that face.
Otherwise we have to think really unpleasant thoughts, how GWB already is – says once and future alternative presidential candidate, Tennessee community activist Stephen Gaskin – even more awful than Richard Nixon.
Or else swallow toxic jingoistic bilge like this, by About.com’s resident political apologist John Aravosis: “D.C. At Risk of Nuclear Terror Attack – U.S. officials have just admitted that a nuclear terror attack on Washington, D.C., is a real possibility. That fact explains a lot about why President Bush is taking the war on terror so seriously, and why VP Cheney has been in an ‘undisclosed location’ so many times over the past several months. This new threat, now made real, explains volumes about why the war on terror must be incessant and without mercy.”
What’s “real”? Whipping the populace into a frenzy of fear – like with those so-called Terrorist Alerts – so Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Bush, and company can continue to play smash-and-grab with our personal freedoms?