c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _”Stop writing about Clinton and Monica,”said my wife.”Write about the man who hit a pedestrian in the school parking lot and then got out of his car and yelled at the man for getting in his way.” I can’t.

I feel like a war correspondent who wakes up every morning to the same war that he is tired of reporting. Now that we have read their words and heard their voices, we know just how deep is their pettiness.

We hear smarmy prosecutors delighting in sex talk. We hear opportunistic politicians trashing an opponent. We hear a desperate leader playing with words. We read the sad delusions of a young woman craving attention.

The more we know of them, the more we are forced to see of ourselves.

The fascination with dangerous sex, the mean and selective moralizing, the disrespect for privacy when privacy gets in the way of profit, the tendency to lie as long as lying works, the abandonment of any sense of the commonweal _ this goes beyond groping.

We are seeing deeply into a system that is not only sick, but is a reflection of us. We aren’t watching the royals at their dim-witted play; we are watching ourselves writ large.

Bill Clinton, for example, looks more and more like a person addicted to sex, an addiction that is more about power than about pleasure. He shows all the signs of addiction: out-of-control behavior, self-destruction, a cycle of remorse and misdeed that leads to self-loathing, compulsive over-achievement, grandiosity, a downward spiral of progressively worsening behavior that begins to endanger job and family, empty promises to reform, and a panicky determination to hold on to the job which feeds the addiction.

The disturbed behavior of young Monica Lewinsky looks like a variation on that same addiction. She flashes the president, she offers her body, then she demands respect. Meanwhile, the Miss America Pageant celebrates women as sexual flowers, Redbook magazine teaches the art of seduction, female golfers are photographed in full breast-thrusting pivot, mothers dress daughter like dolls _ and we hear the age-old counsel,”Be pretty, dear, for this is where your power will come from.” We see the self-righteous antagonist Kenneth Starr and the chorus of moralizing he has unleashed in Congress and American pulpits, and we see that dark side of American religion which uses morality-talk to compel obedience, which judges harshly in the name of one who didn’t judge, which revels in turning political disagreement into good vs. evil, at the expense of true morality.

We who watch cannot confine these events to the tidy boundaries of video display. This is our addictive system, too. We are enablers, we are fellow addicts. We elect these people and reward their compulsive behaviors. We teach flirting and stalking in pursuit of power. We project our own moral failures onto others and then denounce them. We created this culture of blaming and denial, binge investing, credit-card wealth and thoughtless drivers blaming victims for getting in the way.

The paradigm of addiction might seem hopelessly soft to those gunslingers who want a showdown. But once this current macho scene is over, we’ll still have a mess on our hands. In addiction, truth goes far deeper than documenting the latest bender.

I have no idea whether our president is close to that dark night of the soul when reality comes crashing down and the addict’s world seems populated by people one has hurt and consequences one has brought about. My guess is not. My guess is his powers of self-delusion aren’t yet exhausted.

Congress, meanwhile, is just getting wound up in its binge of remorseless moralizing. Newt Gingrich got caught in a shady book deal, and adulterers Dan Burton and Helen Chenoweth were forced into candor. But shame hasn’t tamed their invective.

In facing addiction, however, we can only look inward. Like the co-dependent spouse who escapes one addict and marries another, we keep rewarding the same compulsive personalities. Bill Clinton looks more and more like Richard Nixon without the glower. Ken Starr looks like Joe McCarthy.

We’ve been here before. And we’ll stay until we put down the Starr report and examine ourselves.

DEA END EHRICH