Ends Justifying Means, To An Extreme
The local radio guy hosting a sneak preview of “Primary Colors” at the multiplex the other night had a question for the packed house.
“How many of you think Bill Clinton is a womanizer?”
A few whoops, a couple of muted whistles and the hands shot up.
“And how many of you think that’s a stupid question?”
Another eruption of snickers and guffaws before the lights go down, the flick comes up, and the real-life joke gives way to deadly serious fiction.
On the screen, a black man sells out his race. A gravely disillusioned campaign worker kills herself. A candidate’s wife, betrayed by her husband’s compulsive infidelities, dies inside. Characters cry. They throw up. They bleed. They anguish. They agonize. They suffer consequences that alter their lives, and history.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, The Bill and Gennifer and Paula and Monica and Linda and Kathleen Show feels no more weighty than a daily episode of “Montel.”
It’s weird: We’re all getting a titillating kick out of the flood of sexual tales from the White House, and it takes John Travolta to interrupt the national gossip fest long enough to remind us just how profound are the issues at hand. That little matter of good and evil, for example. Right and wrong. And, ultimately, the real pain of real people who have nowhere to turn but their government for hope of a decent wage for their hard work, decent medical care for their disabilities, a decent education for their kids.
Medicare reform? Managed care? Tobacco regulation? Famine in Africa? Hunger in America? Who cares when we can collectively fixate on Kathleen Willey’s descriptions of his hands on her, and hers on him?
I saw an old film clip on The History Channel recently in which a college professor explained to a reporter, circa 1968, that the definition of morality was fundamentally shifting. Being moral - being “good” - no longer hinged on whether you had sex outside marriage; the moral debate now focused on war, civil rights, injustices of class and race and gender.
The message I got from “Primary Colors” is similar. The film version of Joe Klein’s thinly fictionalized account of Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign serves up all the salacious sex scandal stuff now obsessing the White House and the media. The underlying theme, though, is that the real moral dilemma of American politics isn’t sex at all. It’s the way little people - citizens, voters, fathers, daughters, the disabled guy who scratches out a living making doughnuts - get hurt, or at best overlooked, by a process that puts winning above all else.
Is digging up sexual dirt on your opponent an unfortunate requirement of the game? Is it, however repugnant, just one of those things you’ve got to endure to get to where you can do some good for the masses? Does the end justify the means, or do the means corrupt the end? Do you even know, by the time you get elected, what’s good for average folks when you’ve indulged in so much evil along the way?
Jack Stanton, the Clinton character in “Primary Colors,” shrouds his every act of immorality in pathos for the little guy - so much so that when he has sex with a librarian he meets at a campaign stop, he actually seems to think he’s advanced the cause of literacy.
And when the Hillary character whacks him across the face for sleeping with her hairdresser, he just hangs his head and stares into space like a pathetic, chubby baby.
“Primary Colors” is a cold shower on an audience so drunk with sexual rumor and graphic little tidbits about who pawed whom that we’ve forgotten what really matters.
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