ONE WAY MIRROR
No one, not even seasoned actors and politicians, are comfortable living under the camera-as-microscope. Hollywood stars are notorious for assaulting 'paparazzi' who invade their private life. Clinton recently voiced his frustration, saying he sometimes felt like a character out of the Arthur Koestler novel, 'Darkness at Noon' : "I sometimes feel like somebody surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me, and I can't get the truth out." Whatever the 'truth' is, this is very much the stuff of 'The Truman Show', where Truman one day finds all options --planes, buses and streets-- shut when he decides to escape to Fiji. Clinton knew fully well the implications of having to inhabit the glass bowl they call the oval office. The White House is literally studded with surveillance devices, not to mention the secret service guys who ensure the president is never alone --though the definition of 'alone' is debatable, in Clintonspeak. To take this whole affair to its logical conclusion, lawmakers might as well set up motion sensors and WebCams all over the property, sponsored, of course, by networks. Like airbags, the incumbent president would be free to turn off the 'passenger-side' camera, especially if he's planning on doing something that he wouldn't want our children -- and the first lady-- to know about.

But with the steady stream of excruciating, irrelevant detail that has been pouring into our living rooms, the media assumed that our appetite for graphic detail must have grown. They were wrong, as the sudden disinterest in the 4,000 page sequel reveals. A whopping 61% of people in the same TIME/CNN poll, say they do not want to see it, making Kenneth Starr and the media --not Clinton-- look like sleaze-balls. In making public the infamous Nixon tapes that brought down that administration, the newspapers at least contained themselves with 'expletive deleted' mentions wherever the language was too salty. Publishers and the electronic media can hold Congress responsible for forcing them to wade in the squalor. In a supreme act of irony, while a senate sub committee was voting to restrict pornography on the Internet, the Senate voted to publish Starr's 445-page report studded with sexual details that would make webmasters of some alult sites blush. TV stations and newspapers, and even family-friendly magazines like Newsweek and TIME, printed it verbatim, albeit with warnings and disclaimers. There are too many reporters with too many cameras out there. Even we, are trapped, led to believe all this is of national importance. Oliver North, who was publicly arraigned before another grand jury, but narrowly escaped treason charges must be chuckling.

In one closing sequence of 'The Truman Show', a somewhat paranoid Truman Burbank, now convinced that he is being set up, scoffs at his invisible producers on the other side of a one-way mirror. Writing on the mirror with a piece of soap, he declares his world 'The Republic of Trumania'. His handlers are baffled, because Truman Burbank is not supposed to know of the world behind the sheet of glass. He is not supposed to know that his life is, well, pure Soap. When he tries to escape in a sailboat, knowing fully well he's being watched, his 'owner' --the show's producer--then orders the studio to bring up a storm, including huge waves and lightning. Surviving drowning, Truman stares into a camera he cannot possibly see and taunts his producer: "Is this the best you can do?" Many people believe Clinton, dubbed the 'comeback kid' for very good reason, comes out strongest when in a crisis. Complete with gripping footage. When he put himself in front of the Grand Jury cameras on August 17th, was he asking his persecutors if this was the best they could do to bring him down? This wasn't just a lawyer-lawyer face-off, this was the protagonist trashing his script with the cameras rolling, making the screenwriters look equally stupid. His ability to force a debate on the word "is", seemed to mock the Grand Jury's distraction with body parts, and that famous line of questioning as to whether he wore a particular necktie as a coded message to Monica. It's as if Clinton was saying, "OK, we're all actors here. Let's see which of us can provide better entertainment." But they just didn't catch the subtlety. The country's lawmakers thought they were doing the country a favour by releasing Clinton's videotaped testimony. But the camera sets its own agenda. As editors know only too well, impeachment, like adultery, is only photogenic for a while. You've got to quickly cut to a new camera angle. Keep these cameras rolling, and it will give terrible meaning to the phrase 'recorded history'.