Outrage!

Impact of the scandal involving President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

By Annie Murphy Paul, published on January 01, 1999 - last reviewed on September 28, 2009

THE CLINTON SCANDAL PUTS THIS INFURIATED -- AND INFURIATING -- EMOTION UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.

When the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is over and done with (oh, let it be over and done with!), we'll no doubt be left with a few lasting if shabby remnants: we'll think twice before we share the details of an affair with an apparently trustworthy friend. We'll make sure our extramarital amours launder their clothes. We'll never look at a cigar in quite the same way

And, perhaps, we'll think about the emotion of outrage a bit differently. Outrage has taken a star turn in this scandal, basking in its sweaty spotlight, speaking for sound bites and posing for photo-ops. Everyone, it seems, is talking about outrage, spinning it, polling it, analyzing it, deflecting it.

Or even demanding more of it. According to William Bennett, national scold and author of The Death of Outrage (Simon & Schuster, 1998), the public's collective shrug over Clinton's sins demonstrates that a "morally exhausted" U.S. is no longer capable of feeling righteous indignation.

But a glance at the newspapers quickly proves Bennett wrong: American outrage is in full flower, though not, perhaps, where he's tried to plant it. Widespread revulsion greeted the story of James Byrd, a black man dragged to death behind a pickup in Jasper, Texas. Universal loathing has been directed at David T. Cash Jr., who ignored his friend's assault and killing of seven-year-old Sherrice Iverson in a Primm, Nevada, casino. And fury over the fatal beating of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, has led to candlelight vigils across the country and a 4,000-person march through the streets of New York City. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of outrage's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Outrage also lives on in the public's reaction to the Clinton-Lewinsky matter. Here, however, we trade the crystalline purity of outrage felt on behalf of the weak for a motive that's distinctly muddier. This outrage is full of irony and paradox, of incongruities and inconsistencies. Its aim is scattershot, triggered by the violation of laws and the ,violation of privacy, by the betrayal of marriage and the betrayal of friendship, by the partisan excess of outrage and the public lack of it. And its ends are varied: it leads some to line up at the polls, and others to stay at home; it makes some tune in for the details, while others tune out in disgust.

Though our outrage undoubtedly tells us something about ourselves, it's not clear just what that something is. When we give credence, or at least air time, to the outrage of a moral crusader, does that mean that we value virtue and integrity -- or that we reward showmanship and self-promotion? When we express outrage at the media even as we avidly watch, when we denounce Clinton's actions even as we maintain his approval rating, have outrage and apathy become this scandal's strangest bedfellows?

The very vehemence of outrage makes it a warped mirror, a roiling reflection of our values, exposing our contradictions as often as our convictions. To name a few:

There's too little outrage. Bennett has been joined in his complaints by leaders of the religious right like James Dobson of the organization Focus on the Family, who writes that "the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President's behavior" means that "our greatest problem is not in the Oval Office. It is with the people of this land." And before Bennett and Dobson, there was Bob Dole, who wandered through the 1996 Presidential campaign wondering, "Where is the outrage?" Its scarcity, they say, signals a dangerous slide into moral laxity.

There's too much outrage. It was just a year or two ago that "civility" in public discourse was all the rage among America's pundits and pointy-heads. More recently, linguist Deborah Tannen's book The Argument Culture (Random House, 1998) has observed that we can't have a public conversation anymore without each side becoming outraged on its own behalf. This reflexive animosity, the author maintains, trivializes the issues under discussion and precludes negotiation and compromise.

Those who are outraged are pure. Moral purity is the new prerequisite for outrage, it seems: get too indignant over someone else's sins, and you may have your own outed by vengeful opponents or a scandal-hungry media, and get called a hypocrite to boot (see politicians Henry Hyde, Helen Chenoweth and Dan Burton, whose own sexual peccadilloes have been exposed). Those who live in concrete bunkers are the only ones allowed to throw stones these days.

Those who are outraged are prurient. More than one observer of the outrage over Clinton's indiscretions has detected in it a certain sexual frisson. Response to Independent Counsel Ken Starr's report to Congress, in particular, seemed equal parts outrage and arousal, with each reaction feeding off the other. In this view, indignation might be merely a convenient cover for titillation, or it might be something more deviously Freudian: the expression of sublimated sexual desire.

Outrage is for real. An eruption of outrage is often reported in the slightly awed tones used to describe a force of nature: as a rising tide or howling wind of emotion that can't be controlled but only allowed to run its course. Those who cower before outrage's terrible thunder are convinced that we can't feign it, or subdue it, any more than we can whip up a tornado or tame a hurricane.