My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #30, February 22, 1999

CROSSING THE WIDE SEMANTIC

"Thou hast committed fornication--"

"But that was in another country
And besides, the wench is dead."

Christopher Marlowe. The Jew of Malta

At last, our long national wet dream is over. And after 13 months of Monica, we find to our surprise that this has not really been about perjury or obstruction of justice, not even about sex or lies or videotape, but about--are you ready for this?--semantics.

Not, I would note, "mere semantics." People always act as if semantic issues are nothing but ridiculous quibbles. Judging from the moralizing of politicians and journalists, you would think that truth is something real and solid, that everybody can see it, measure it, agree on it. But our understanding of our actions is always filtered through our defenses, which give us every possible credit for the purity of our motives. Language is all we have to explain our actions to ourselves, and truth ends up being a matter of semantics, of how we define our terms.

To all those people sniggering over the president's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," I say, "You weren't around in the 1950's, were you?" Those were the heydays of the "technical virgin," when no "nice girl" had sex, but any number of nice girls did everything just short of it in the back seats of their boyfriends' cars. The boy who could satisfy himself without corrupting a "good girl" could consider himself a gentleman.

If you think this is an outmoded standard, consider the study reported in JAMA in January, which said that 59% of the college students surveyed in 1991 did not think, when they indulged in oral sex, that they had really "had sex."

Let us also consider all the sniggering that went on during the state of the union address, when Clinton spoke of the First Lady and said, "I honor her." "Yeah, right," said the chorus of critics. And yet I'd bet you money he believed he had made great personal sacrifices to keep his promise to her to refrain from sex with other women. You can imagine him feeling genuinely put upon, thinking about all the women he had NOT slept with, and getting pilloried anyway.

And then we get down to the question of his weaseling testimony in the Paula Jones case. The grand inquisitors loudly insisted, "He lied under oath." But did he? You can't help notice how very careful Clinton was, before he answered any question, to check out the definitions of terms. This was not a man engaged in flagrant lies, but a lawyer engaged in telling only the most hedged, restricted version of the truth. Did his testimony defy every common sense definition of truth? Of course. Then again, we don't pay lawyers to tell the common sense version of truth, but to make our version of the truth sound plausible and convincing.

Is our president a liar, then? Well, yes and no. Because to lie requires that you understand the difference between truth and lies, and knowingly speak untruth. What has driven his enemies bonkers is the utter imperviousness of his self-esteem. When you are your own best customer for your lies, and you believe them utterly, what you are telling may not be truth, but it isn't exactly perjury either.

Lest anyone think that Clinton is the only one engaged in this kind of redefinition of reality, I'd like to mention a few of the other players in this little drama, all those Congressmen apparently unaware they were living in glass houses until Larry Flynt started dropping hints about who might appear in the next issue of Hustler. One by one they trooped to the microphone to confess their sins and explain that they were nonetheless not as bad as Clinton's. Henry Hyde, for instance, announced that he shouldn't be held responsible for the acts of his mad youth. Which is to say, when he was in his 40's.

Newt Gingrich harrumphed at great length about Bill Clinton lying under oath and obstructing the investigation, while declaring that the numerous ethical offenses the House Ethics Committee found him guilty of were the merest technical violations, simple misunderstandings of the law.

Was Ken Starr overzealous, out of control? Did his staff illegally deprive a vulnerable young woman of her right to legal counsel for hours while interrogating her? No, Starr said, they were treating her to ice cream. And besides, since she was a felon in the act of committing a felony, his men were acting as officers of the court, preventing further crime.

Are these all signs that folks in Washington are unusually self-deceived? Is there a semantic ocean between them and us? Not necessarily.

Self-deception is fostered by being human. Psychologists tell us that because it's critical to us to think well of ourselves, we cannot handle large differences between what we believe we should do and what we actually do. That difference, which they call cognitive dissonance, requires us to readjust either our actions or our beliefs, OR to find some way to excuse our actions, to redefine them in some more flattering way.

When we fail to return the money we borrowed from a friend, we're not taking gross advantage of a friendship, we're merely forgetful. If we cheat on exams (as 63% of college students admit to doing), we say the cheating doesn't really count, because exams are just one of those pointless hoops you have to jump through to get the degree. When we drive way too fast, we're not a hazard to life, just preoccupied. If we said something rude and hurt somebody's feelings, we were simply offering constructive criticism.

And after all, why keep beating a dead horse? That's all water over the bridge. It was a long time ago, and in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.

Clinton and his enemies are a warning to us all because they have been caught in public doing what we all do: caught between their principles and their inability to live up to them, they have not changed their behavior--that would be morally demanding and difficult. Instead, they have redefined it.

Mere semantics? I think there's nothing mere about it.