Why I'm Still Angry
Forgive? Forget about it! After Clinton's show of contempt, I still want to shake him
By LANCE MORROW

Asian epigraph to The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald used an oddly charming snatch of verse:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"

Behold Bill Clinton: still wearing the gold hat, still bouncing high. What do we say about the lover now that he's in midair again, performing his gaudy twirls and flips? What do we say to ourselves as we watch? What do we do with the emotional residue of this business? The great 65%--Clinton's invincible bodyguard--are they happy? Relieved? Or merely exhausted? What do the rest of us do with our anger?

I find that I feel an unwholesome fury. I try to talk myself down from it by thinking good thoughts about Clinton--his complexity, his political gifts, his good heart, as I used to believe. It cannot be good for my own heart to harbor these toxins--frustration, a sense of outraged justice, contempt.

Mine is an outrage uncontaminated by ideology. I voted for Clinton in 1992, and basically agree with his instinct for the commonsense center of American politics. I am not a vast right-winger, and I do not hate Arkansas. My contempt wells up from an irrational, nonpolitical source. It reciprocates something that I sense at Clinton's core--what must be an essential contempt for the American people.

Surely such contempt is validated and deepened now when he sees how unfailingly his tricksterism gets him through--a lechering Bugs Bunny who, at the end of this ghastly cartoon, flourishes a cigar instead of a carrot. (Henry Hyde, having taken over the Elmer Fudd role from Ken Starr, slumps off, looking perplexed.) I tell myself to get beyond this miasma--to think of the future. I will get over it ... but not for a while. I try to think about forgiveness but am brought short by the knowledge that it requires repentance, and Clinton is congenitally unrepentant. Fish gotta swim; birds gotta fly.

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