The Bill And Michelle Show

It’s August. Dog days. Holiday time. Offices of state close down and decisionmakers cut and run. It’s a time when a good family man ought to be taking to the countryside, or the sun and sand. Buckets and spades. Picnics. Casual clothes. Sunburn. Cleaning children’s cut knees. More beer, gin and tonics and sex than usual. Barbecues. And so on.

An American president might think of the foamy seas of New England – get away from the muzzy swamp that’s Washington in late summer. And of a long-promised round of golf in Ballybunion, Ireland’s capital of bachelors and beaches....

Yeah, he might. But US president Bill Clinton finds himself with a whole lot of hassle to deal with first. There’s the personal stuff which has been jemmied into the public by the extraordinary, unbelievably intrusive and prurient inquiry of “special prosecutor” Kenneth Starr. There’s the attacks on the American embassies in Africa. There’s Saddam Hussein pissing about again. Never one to miss an opportunity.

It’s tough at the top. But Bill seems like a good guy. Big, friendly, easy with people, a motivator and a leader. He’s been good for America (and not in the same way as Reagan) and he’s been good for Ireland. In particular, he’s been central to the peace process.

He’ll be here in a week or two, so let’s take his tribulations one at a time.

Well, maybe Bill’s not the family man he claims but, still being together with his wife and apparently a good and caring father to his daughter, he’s a long way ahead of many. So he’s got a penchant for big hair and/or full figures and makes a careful distinction (on biblical grounds) between oral sex and carnal congress. The latter is sexual relations, the former is not.

O-0-0-0kay. We’ve all got our little foibles and Bill’s are pretty innocent as these things go. Let’s be clear about this – Kenneth Starr is supposed to be enquiring into the so-called Whitewater Affair, the Arkansas scandal to which Bill and Hillary Clinton were allegedly linked and which was going to bring them down.

Many millions of dollars and years later, apparently Starr hasn’t found any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. What he has done is dig up all the other menial and irrelevant shit that hung around their lives. In this he has been aided by a large group of absolutely anti-democratic and racist right wing extremists and by media in which the right to freedom of speech is abused and butchered by demagogues and maniacs.

These are people who would nuke Iraq in the morning. They would have vaporised Cuba, and anyone else who intimated a contrary position to theirs. They believe completely in their own freedom, at the expense of everyone else’s. They are linked with the Ku Klux Klan. They believe that whites are superior. They are very bad people.

I’m not saying that Starr is one of them, nor that he supports their cause. But in his pursuit of Clinton he has transgressed every tenet of decency and discretion.

The invasiveness beggars belief. We’ve heard all kinds of allegations, down to moles and twists in his penis. It’s appalling. We wouldn’t even get this in a trial of a mass murderer. Starr may convince himself that he’s totally thorough. He may imagine encomiums praising his forensic approach. Well, he’s wrong.

He has contributed greatly to a cancer in American life – viciousness as a basic way of relating. Yeah, it was there already. The OJ trial helped it along a good deal. And the horrible bigots who seem to be so popular.

Who cares if Clinton boffed Lewinsky? Or anyone else for that matter. All adults. No harm done. Private matters. None of our business, or Starr’s. And not, insofar as anyone can see, relevant to any inquiry into the effectiveness or financial probity of the American president.

I can’t believe that Americans have no sense of decency. Most of those I meet exhibit a clear sense of the boundary between private and public, even if they have an unhappy knack of talking about the former in the latter.

But we shouldn’t feel too superior. The Irish media is not immune to this ugliness, this invasiveness, this prurience. Far from it, and not just in the gleeful reportage of Clinton’s troubles. No, we’ve our shits as well.

So far, at least, Clinton has been able to get away from trouble, The more Starr flings at him, the more popular he gets. Has he something to teach Michelle de Bruin? Or will the due process get him in the end as well? Time will tell, but right now Bill is doing better than Michelle.

I don’t know what to say about her. When you listen to her, she’s very very convincing. If she’s not telling the truth, she’s one amazing actor. There are aspects of the case which are imponderable. On the one hand, the idea that the international swimming authorities, or someone else, would tamper with the sample because of their hostility to Erik de Bruin is fanciful to say the least. On the other, the evidence against de Bruin of drug taking is extremely thin on the ground.

Particular reservation must be entered against the idea that only drugs could explain de Bruin’s continuing development to a much later date in life than other swimmers.

Anyone with even the slightest passing interest in athletics, football or weights training will tell you that a revolution is underway in all these areas and that performances are improving as a result. Moreover, sports-persons are continuing and improving until much later in life.

Look at the changes which Arsene Wenger has instigated at Arsenal. Look at Tony Adams. If he was a swimmer, training in the old repetitive ways, he’d have been done for years ago. And you can see this across the entire sporting spectrum. Look at Linford Christie. Wasn’t he the oldest Olympic gold medallist?

Traditionalists decry the changes – all sportsmen and women are becoming athletes now. No room for characters or Corinthians. And maybe they’re right. But this is how it is.

New approaches to diet, to speed training (those fast-twitch muscles!), to endurance, to power as well as exercise, weights, running, sleep and diet are all involved. Precisely the cocktail that de Bruin described.

Go on. Write to Wenger yourself, if you don’t believe me. (You can never eat too much broccoli is one of his guidelines!) And the net effect is that athletes are training smarter – they’re getting scientific, they’re getting faster, and they’re improving until much later in life.

But that doesn’t explain the adulterated urine samples, which brings me back to the beginning. I just don’t know what to think. Nor, I suspect, do most people.

I just hope for the best.

• The Hog