America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

At some particularly weird moment in the latest installment of the Great American Melodrama, I had a consoling thought: well, at least it can't get any worse than this. Maybe it was when Howell Heflin, playing Senator Beauregard Claghorn, was in the midst of some bloviation, the point of which seemed to have escaped him. Or maybe it was when Orrin Hatch, playing Perry Mason, revealed that a key piece of evidence, a pubic hair, actually appeared on page 70 of The Exorcist and therefore couldn't possibly have been in Clarence + Thomas' Coke.

But then I noticed something on TV for the first time: amid the reporters covering the event were two whom I recognized as members of the foreign press corps, both known for their jaundiced eye and acid wit. My heart sank. It suddenly occurred to me that having spent days watching our politicians make prime-time fools of themselves, we Americans were soon going to have to listen to Europeans lecture us on how immature and naive we are. We heard it during Watergate, and we'd hear it again now: Grow up, America! Start behaving like a superpower instead of a Sunday school.

Sure enough, last week Christine Toomey of the Sunday Times of London wailed, "America has flung itself again into one of the spasms of passionate moral debate that nations more tolerant of human frailty find so hard to understand." In Switzerland the Basler Zeitung concluded that "the most American aspect of the affair" was that "behind the thin dam of wordy morality, puritanical shyness and 'ethics' swirls a sea of corruption, madness and wickedness."

As might have been expected, the French, who tend to be connoisseurs of other nations' foibles, provided the most piquant blend of sneering and scolding. "Since the arrival of the pilgrim fathers," said Le Monde in a front-page editorial, "America has never truly settled its account with sin. The old Puritan heritage periodically surges forth from the collective memory, invading the national life and upsetting the political game. But over time, these resurgences of prudery have grown in cruelty, bordering today on the absurd."

In some ways the distant voices echoed the disgust that many Americans felt about the Thomas matter. But in a critical respect, a number of European commentators betrayed their own obtuseness. They depicted the embattled judge as a villain/victim in the tradition of John Profumo, the British Minister of War whose fling with a call girl, and his lies about it to Parliament, cost him his job in 1963. Fleet Street was none too tolerant of human frailty then, nor was it earlier this month when Sir Allan Green, the chief prosecutor for England and Wales, was caught soliciting a prostitute and resigned.

In short, some Europeans saw the Thomas affair as a sex scandal. Hence all the scorn for American "prudery" and "puritanism."

To be sure, there were some distinctly X-rated moments, especially when it was Hatch's turn to work with the raw material of Anita Hill's allegations. < More than once it seemed as though he was about to summon Long Dong Silver to appear before the Judiciary Committee in person (or worse).

Still, in its essence, Hill v. Thomas had almost nothing to do with what happens between consenting adults. It wasn't about sex at all, except in the most G-rated sense that Hill is a woman, Thomas a man. What most Americans understood -- and many Europeans apparently failed to grasp -- was that there was, if not a saving grace, then at least a mitigating factor in this otherwise bizarre and lamentable business: yet again, American politics was struggling with the shortcomings of American society.

Even though the men in charge of the hearings included several demonstrable buffoons and hypocrites who were under duress from outraged constituents, the fact remains that they were part of a peculiarly American process of trying, ever so imperfectly, to perfect the rules of civilized behavior, to get it right and to shake the bad habits of the past.

At the heart of all the silliness and nastiness was an attempt to address a fundamental question of decency and fairness: How, in the best of all possible worlds, should citizens treat each other? More specifically, how should men treat women? At issue, in other words, was not sin in the eyes of God or in the preachings of Cotton Mather, but rights, as protected by the Constitution and defined in U.S. law.

Granted, a few overseas observers did get the point. The Times of London acknowledged, "The Americans have blazed this new and elusive trail for mutual respect in the workplace, as they have in many other areas of women's rights," and the Economist saw at the heart of a flawed system "a commitment to individual dignity."

Far more typical, however, was the response just across the Channel. Alan Riding, the Paris bureau chief of the New York Times, noted that many French commentators were "ignoring the broader question of sexual harassment." That may be because they had yet to get past the first syllable and comprehend what the phrase sexual harassment really means.

Writing in the New York Times on Friday, the British novelist Fay Weldon nicely diagnosed the divide between the Old World and the New on this issue: "We are well enough attuned to racism; sexism, alas, scarcely upsets us. You in the U.S. have serious thoughts about 'gender' -- we go on thinking about sex."

Which is why so many editors on her side of the Atlantic, in covering the big story out of Washington, got it wrong.