The rage is not just over the president and Monica Lewinsky. And increasingly in our society those people are Washington lawyers, even when their definitions are sharply at odds with those of the nation as a whole. Like the medieval priests who saw themselves as crucial intermediaries between man and God, she says, the lawyerly minds of Washington increasingly interpose themselves and their mentality between the average American and reality. And the average American beyond the Beltway, like Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, wants them out of the way. However loathsome the president's personal behavior, he was just lying to save his marriage and to save his butt, not to subvert the country.
Lawyers never seem interested in motivation, just the letter of the law.
Bernard Cooperman, who teaches Jewish history at the University of Maryland, notes that throughout history in almost every tribe there has been a tension between the average person and the high priests or witch doctors charged with interpreting the law. One of the earliest Christian attacks on Judaism, he says, was Paul's contention that the Jews' worship of Jehovah had bogged down in a morass of religious laws that had become more important than the worship it supposedly governed. Yet the Christian church soon became famous for pilpul of its own, some of which metastasized darkly from debates over the corporal nature of angels to the horror of religious wars, witch burnings and the Spanish Inquisition. Political pilpul obviously can get way out of hand. In his famous 1978 speech at Harvard, Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned Americans of the stultifying effects of the legalistic culture.