The Importance of Being a Wild Willy

Did he? Or didn’t he? Did the zipper come down and the pecker come out? Did they do it on the plush carpet of the Oval Office or was it across the desk? And really, what do you think of his taste in sexual partners? A little on the plump side it would seem. And did he do as most men, if not all men, in extra marital relationships do? Did he ask her to keep quiet? Was she to limit herself to smiles and brief hugs in public?

In the closing week of January the American media was obsessed with such details and our own joined in. The headlines on the Turbine read Zippergate, and The Irish Behind The Times gave it prime place on page one on Tuesday (27/01/98), the crisis in the peace process being relegated to an inferior position on the same page.

Meanwhile, life went on in the world, as it tends to do even if the media are not looking or are momentarily blinded by a powerful flash emanating from Washington. In Chiapas the displaced Indians continued to be displaced, still mourning their dead. The wounds not given time to scar before the world’s media focus attention elsewhere on more important matters.

The Turbine hit the streets late on Saturday evening with their forceful headline Zippergate. The implication was clear, here was a cover up of such earth shattering importance that it will go down in the annals of history alongside Watergate. On the other side of the planet another cover up was in full swing. Five bodies lay stretched out in pools of blood beside a military checkpoint, all of them civilians. The killing machine had worked overtime and now it was the task of the lying machine to convince us all that there was a reasonable explanation. Others preferred to wonder how Bold Bill would explain it all away.

Pages were given over to the topic. Masters of the English language consumed dictionaries in search of an appropriate name. Who would coin the phrase that would go down in history? Would it be Zippergate or would Fornigate beat it for wit and sharpness? Nobody sought to define slaughter or exile. Those fleeing the violence of Chiapas do not lend themselves so easily to such wit and humour and in any case Mao monopolised the term ‘Long March’ decades ago. However, the real truth of the matter is that nobody could be bothered losing much sleep over forty-six dead Indians, and how inconvenient of those five Colombians to die just when the world was getting to know the ins and outs of Clinton’s sex life and the women that figure in it

Nobody has ever saw fit to tell us which bloody regimes Clinton jumps into bed with (figuratively speaking). Or who gets their hands on those phallic looking Smart Missiles No, we are more interested in who gets their hands ( at the very least) on the real phallus of the American Administration. One is driven to despair by it all.

Of course, there are those who would argue that what happens in the American Govt. is of paramount importance to the world. So it is, but what we are being subjected to is not an investigation of the Clinton Administration, but the outpourings of an unimaginative media that would prefer to see us titillated by sexual innuendo and would rather we judged Clinton’s record on the basis of his sex life and not on his continued support for the Govt. that made the fields of Chiapas run red or his renewal of military aid to Colombia. Aid that was efficiently pumped into some poor unfortunate’s body at a checkpoint on the main road to Bogot·. Tis a strange world we live in.

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