ABSTRACT
Nixon’s Deep Throat told reporters to follow the money, Clinton’s deep throats say follow the money shot. Butch bottoms of the press (and gallery) oblige, and their urge to peep may follow a more general political logic of attention to Clinton’s body-its hair, its flab, its sexual habits. Clinton’s is surely the most pondered straight white male body since Robert DeNiro gained seventy pounds for his role in Raging Bull. And no wonder. Citizens’ relation to the state is always coerced, mystified, imaginary, distant. For much of the nineteenth century, just as Marx was making this clear, reserves of imagined community allowed presidents and legislators of prominence to seal the deal. By now the state stands in such naked, brutal relation to all but the most pleasuredomed of our eminent bourgeois that the only way to find any sort of link to the chief executive is by eroticizing him, if possible (and his wife if powerful). Hence, no one was interested in William Ginsburg’s take on the situation: “if the story is true, then the president is a misogynist [go for yours, Mr. Ginsburg] and my client has been ravaged; if it’s not true than my client has been ravaged by the OIC [Kenneth Starr’s Office of Independent Council].” All too true, though this reading relieves his client of any intentions, desires, or designs of her own. Either way, nobody cares about her. Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers affirmed that yes, it probably was an “improper” thing for a married fifty-one-year-old to be shtupping a twenty-one-year old intern. Anti-choice crusader Henry Hyde talked impeachment (“if the charges are true,” quoth he) as though it were a municipal ordinance regulating sexual behavior, which, in the dark place that is the mind of Mr. Hyde, it probably is. Holding forth
so transparently, the commentators demonstrated the common-sense embodiment of civil devotion that finds men like me sucking William Jefferson Clinton’s cock.
