Tastes Great/Less Filling

Tastes Great/Less Filling Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan, Editors. Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest. New York: New York University Press, 2001. What are we to make of the Clinton impeachment affair? Of that motley group of characters who hurled us from shame and outrage to smirks and scorn? Of the countless bad jokes that Leno and Letterman never tired of cracking? Of the hand-wringing by conservatives and liberals alike over the fate of our nation, our Constitution, our morals? If Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan's edited collection Our Monica, Ourselves is any guide, the whole thing can be viewed as a portal into the collective unconscious of the American psyche. From the editors' perspective, "it" is so big an affair, so bizarre and so rich for analysis, that their cultural reader is positively needed to sort out the madness. This, then, is no simple book cashing in on Guy Debord's society of the spectacle; it regards itself as selfless in spirit, in fact downright altruistic. At the core of Berlant and Duggan's collection is politics, or more accurately, a politics designed to persuade the reader that the Clinton affair was not just a tawdry story about sex and its discontents. "It is our argument that many readers have not been able to receive the Clinton affair outside of the conventions of the corporate news media, with its particular notions of what an issue is and who is an authority" (3), they announce in their introduction. However cutting edge this statement may seem, their efforts echo Walter Lippmann's 1922 argument in Public Opinion that elites must "manufacture consent" about American politics by garnering broad public support for their foregone conclusions. The real difference here is that Lippmann championed that process as a way to maintain a proper decision-making expedience within the feverish contours of a democracy. Berlant and Duggan, meanwhile, consider themselves postmodern muckrakers, exposing how elites are supplying us middling sorts with nothing but bread and circuses. The title of the collection is worthy of note as well. With the explicit nod toward the feminist sexual politics introduced by Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), Berlant and Duggan portray their work as part of a critique of the media's tendency to ensure "the continued humiliation of anyone who is publically sexualized in the United States" (4). Given that so many of the "women involved in the Clinton affair seem to have positively reveled in publicizing their purported trysts with Clinton and then in marketing themselves for every last drop of their allotted fifteen minutes of fame, the question of who engineered the publicity blood-bath seems open to debate. In fact, the women of the Clinton scandals continue to make news. The New York Times ran a glowing profile of Gennifer Flowers in 2002, describing her as "the golden-haired woman with the drowning pool eyes" and helpfully noting that she had "just finished her escargot, pasta and assorted miniature tarts" before she began to sing in a saloon in New Orleans (Bragg). Monica Lewinsky reappeared in an HBO special, "Monica in Black and White," in March 2002 to answer any and all questions, and in spring 2003, she was the host of "Mr. Personality," a Fox TV reality show that had her helping a woman pick "Mr. Right" from among twenty contestants. Also in March 2002, Paula Jones boxed (and lost) to Tonya Harding on Fox's "Celebrity Boxing." Linda Tripp continues to hawk her legal defense fund; supporters may contribute at www.lindatripp.com. Yet the editors do have a point: the American people in general, leaving aside Clinton's many and varied critics, spend a great deal of time thinking, worrying, and fantasizing about his sex life. This national obsession explains in a nutshell how a book like this comes to be, and why it has made such a splash in cultural studies circles and was excerpted in the New York Times. Of real interest here is the entire publishing phenomenon of creating an instant cultural studies reader to capitalize on an event that everyone knows about. …