Friday, September 11, 1998

Cursing the sheer waste of it all

By Ellen Goodman

CASCO BAY, Maine - The sunflower in my garden has chosen this morning to finally bloom. The sole survivor of a planting lost to birds, rain and wind, it stands alone like a punctuation mark at the end of the summer sentence.

The flower's arrival mocks my departure. It is that time of year. Bags packed, I am waiting for the ferry that will take me back to the mainland and mainstream.

For a minute, I stand beside this late bloomer, trying to decide whether to take it home with me as a solar companion, a souvenir to tide me over the water. But surely, the sunflower would be as out of place in my sealed urban environment as high heels on the beach.

This has been a scattered, uneasy summer. It was hard to get to that open, quiet space in life, that piece of peace of mind. The world has been too much with us. A missile-heavy and money-low Russia on the verge of collapse. A stock market soaring and diving. The crash of a jet that carried familiar names on its roster.

And always in the background, the relentless static of The Scandal that we feel collectively, all too personally.

Before leaving this place, I break my news diet - not a fast but a diet free of the junk-food political talk shows. Once again, I sample the chattering classes. The "experts" are, astonishingly, still at their TV posts - greenroom chums arguing sex and politics, Bill and Ken, today's legal tidbit, tomorrow's poll, having a grand time reporting their dismay.

They fill the airwaves with explanations of why the public doesn't want to talk about "it." They deconstruct endlessly the meaning of our desire to close our ears and mouths. In this babble about silence, of course, they get it wrong.

Most Americans are not deaf and dumb. We are numb.

Outside of Washington, people return to the sex scandal repeatedly like a tongue feeling for a sensitive tooth and then darting away at the discomfort. "I just want to ask one thing," the conversation begins. Heated, unhappy minutes later, someone breaks in: "Could we talk about something else?"

On television, they book people of great certainty who choose up sides and duke it out. But in the real world, the collision course is internal. If many in the public still wish they could wish this away, it is not because they feel too little - but because too many conflicted emotions add up to numbness.

We are still in a state of gridlock. A blocked intersection of powerful and nearly balanced furies. Fuming anger at the president who would risk everything. Fury at the independent prosecutor who would pursue anything. One immobilizing the other.

Many who voted once, twice, for Clinton have trouble now looking him in the eye. Along the hairdresser grapevine comes the story about a Cabinet member who offers to bring an 11-year-old friend to the Oval Office to meet the president. The girl, startled, says, "You aren't going to leave me alone with him, are you?"

Apocryphal or not, it tells you how far we are from the man who ran for office as First Dad. Indeed, when focus groups are asked which family member Clinton reminds them of, women now say "the teen-age son."

But if the president's private life is a public disaster there is something - equally - horrific about the invasion of this privacy. The obsessive pursuit of the president by a prosecutor in search of every salacious detail is grotesque.

We are told by a news magazine that the Starr report reads like pornography. Soft core? Do we blame the actors (Monica and Bill) or the producers (Ken & Co.) or the distributors (the media)?

A friend describes the two-handed, evenhanded ambivalence I hear everywhere: On the one hand, she doesn't think a president should be forced from office for sexual behavior; on the other hand, she wishes he would just disappear. She puts the two hands over her ears.

So this is how the fall term begins. It sounds more like study hall than the chattering classes. It begins with absolute dismay at the personal behavior of this president. With absolute dismay at the invasion of his innermost privacy.

Edgy at the news of the stock market, the Duma, the elections, we wait to see which way the balance shifts, the grid unlocks. All the time cursing the sheer waste of it all.

The Boston Globe Newspaper Company