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As the impeachment drama slouches toward its final curtain, it is time to take stock of the contribution it has made to our political lexicon. To do so, we must wade through the mixed metaphors, illusory allusions, shameless hyperbole and strained literary references that have filled the third act.
Take Rep. Henry Hyde's (R-Ill.) plaintive announcement to the senators that, as soon as they vote, he and his managers will collect their papers and "go gently into the night." The literary borrowing was from a Dylan Thomas poem: "Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Hyde did just that, raging that he was glad "those people weren't at Valley Forge or the Alamo."
On the defense side, Charles Ruff must have spent the night before his opening speech thumbing through Shakespearean tragedies. "I was reminded of Iago and Desdemona's handkerchief," he said, referring to the prosecution's claim that Vernon Jordan got Monica Lewinsky a job in exchange for her silence. "But let's pass on," he added, perhaps reconsidering his reference to dearly held love garments.
From "Othello," Ruff moved on to "Macbeth," calling the House managers' charges "a witches' brew." "Macbeth`" was, in fact, a favorite of both parties. Hyde warned that the act of swearing an oath threatened to become meaningless, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) quoted an entire passage from Act IV: "I think our country sinks beneath the yoke. It weeps. It bleeds. And each new day a gash is added to her wounds." Double, double, toil and trouble indeed.
On both sides, there were a sickening number of references to poison. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) quoted the first Supreme Court Chief Justice, according to whom perjury "discolors and poisons the streams of justice." Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) went further, asking the senators "to strike down these insidious cancers -- poisoning future generations of children, poisoning our court system and perhaps even poisoning future generations of political leaders." It sounded as if Barr believed that our current system is, by contrast, in the pink of health. On the president's side, Nicole Seligman urged that the `poisonous arrows of partisanship" be buried, while David Kendall castigated the "poisonous partisanship" of the trial, and asked senators to "cool the passions of the moment."
Clearly, ex-Sen. Dale Bumpers was not listening. He accused Starr of "maybe the most intense investigation not only of a president but of anybody ever. Javert's pursuit of Jean Valjean in `Les Miserables' pales by comparison." Last fall, Bumpers indulged in an equally absurd analogy: "You'd have to go back to the Salem witchcraft trials to find anything comparable." The Salem inquisitions took 20 lives and filled prisons with innocent people. But what's a little hyperbole among statesmen?
There was, of course, a stadium full of sports metaphors -- from Pat Robertson's calling Clinton's State of the Union Address a "home run" to Sen. John Breaux' (D-La.) description of deposing Monica Lewinsky as a "Hail Mary pass" and Sen. Bob Torricelli's (D-N.J.) reference to the House managers "swinging wildly for the fence."
War metaphors flew like shrapnel. Rep. Hyde waved the bloody shirt, asking "how we can redeem the debt we owe all those who purchased our freedom with their lives" and invoking the heroes of Normandy, the Arlington National Cemetery and the Vietnam Memorial. The other side fought no less hard in this civil war to claim the spirits of dead heroes for their own, with Ruff promising that if senators did their duty, "those who fought for their country will be proud."
Not only dead soldiers, but dead Founding Fathers abounded. Rep. Steven Buyer (R-Ind.) quoted John Adams' "facts are stubborn things." Clinton lawyer Cheryl Mills mixed Adams with Johnnie Cochran, proclaiming "it's those facts, those stubborn facts that just don't fit." And Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) added his own post-modern twist, offering that the Founding Fathers' "wisdom just knocks my socks off."
But most senators preferred folksy, homespun metaphors over slang. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) concluded "it's time to bury this horse," while Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.) declared that "the ox is in the ditch." Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) called the trial "a pile of dung," and congratulated Ruff for poking "some holes as big as a barn door in the prosecution's case."
Whether you agree with Hyde's "sound and fury," or with Sen. Christopher Dodd's (D-Conn.) Zen koan that the impeachment process has been "the sound of one hand clapping," it's clear that the trial debate has been more clanging cliches than ringing rhetoric. To borrow from the Bard one last time, it's been "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."
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