Clown Makeup Plus Slut-Shaming Monica Lewinsky

The fabulous Jessi Hoffschildt wandered by for lunch yesterday. I picked her up at the train station, took her to the American Pie Café, and dropped her off at the rental car place – she was off to Vermont to lead a workshop at Circus Smirkus.

I generally don’t like circus clowns. I find them the most tedious part of any circus performance. Boring, formulaic, and not funny.

Jessi’s act was the exception. It approached Chaplinesque levels of brilliance. She is very, very, very talented.

Every clown has his or her unique makeup and clown face. Righteous clowns never plagiarize from one another. Here’s Jessi in full Jessi Wonderfool regalia:



“See you down the road,” Jessi told me as we took our leave.

See you down the road, is what circus people say instead of saying, Goodbye. It could mean you’ll be seeing that person the very next day; it could mean you’ll be seeing that person in 20 years.

Hearing those particular words again gave me such a pang.

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I read this story about Monica Lewinsky in Cannes and realized that much of my extremely visceral dislike of Hillary Clinton might actually stem from the fact that Hillary found it more politically expedient to humiliate Lewinsky than to dump the husband who humiliated her.

I don’t give two shits about Presidential sexual “misconduct” -- or any politician's sexual conduct, for that matter, so long as it involves consenting adults. I didn’t care about it in 1998, and I don’t care about it now.

I do care about the way such scandals are handled, about the ripples they make in otherwise impermeable political facades.

And when the Clintons threw the full weight of their political machine into making bloody chum out of this poor, plump, big-haired fangirl, I was outraged on her behalf. I saw her as a victim.

Not a passive victim, certainly. But then I’m of the extremely politically incorrect belief that victims frequently become victims because they make questionable choices. (And, no, the Africans did not choose to take a cruise on those slave ships, and the Jews did not choose to get on those trains to the death camps! Now that we’ve settled that…)

Lewinsky certainly made questionable choices. She was not the only one, though, who made the choice about that particular sexual relationship – a sexual relationship that, as I say, was not a particularly big deal to me. Hillary Clinton's relentless and vicious (or so it seems to me) response to that sexual encounter is really what victimized Lewinsky. To the point where otherwise intelligent and sensitive people who support Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency because they’re invested in maintaining some apocalyptic fantasy of a binary political universe in which the Forces of Light (the Democrats) are massed against the Armies of Evil (the Republicans) keep nudging each other and smirking, “Presidential kneepads.”

At least, that's what my Facebook feed tells me.

There’s no real proof that Lewinsky ever boasted about her “presidential kneepads,” by the way. That meme comes from hearsay provided by her former high school drama teacher who – by today’s increasingly Puritanical codes of political correctness – was not above sexually exploiting Lewinsky himself since he slept with her while she was still a teenager.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see otherwise intelligent and politically correct individuals indulging in this kind of wholesale slut-shaming because they want a woman to be President.

Nothing on the face of the earth could get me to vote for Hillary Clinton. Not that it particularly matters to Hillary Clinton whether I vote for her or not: I live in New York State, and New York State is a foregone check mark in the Clinton column.

Right now, though, I keep right on giving money to Bernie Sanders.

And looking for Hudson Valley Bernie Sanders Meet-Ups where I could do some canvassing or phone calls. Only there aren’t any.