Tina Brown
Monica Lewinsky's Vanity Fair
article reluctantly plunges us straight back into the frothing world of '90s gossip. It may be painful but it answers so many questions about today's media.The Monica Lewinsky confessional in
Vanity Fair brings back a torrent of unfond memories of the appalling cast of tabloid gargoyles who drove the scandal. Remember them? Treacherous thatched-roof-haired drag-queen Linda Tripp, with those dress-for-success shoulder pads? Cackling, fact-lacking hack Lucianne Goldberg, mealy-mouthed Pharisee Kenneth Starr - the whole buzzing swarm of legal, congressional and gossip industry flesh flies, feasting on the entrails. And, of course, hitting "send" on each new revelation that no one else would publish, the solitary, perfectly named Matt Drudge, operating in pallid obsession out of his sock-like apartment in Miami.
A once-in-a-lifetime cast! Or so we all thought. But what we didn't know at the time is that they were not some passing cultural excrescence. They were the face of the future. The things that shocked us then - the illicitly taped conversations, the wholesale violations of elementary privacy, the globally broadcast sexual embarrassments, all the low-life disseminated malice - is now the communications industry as it operates every minute of every day.
Monica is right when she writes that "only a few years later, with the advent of social media, the humiliation would have been even more devastating." Or maybe not: When the feds pressured her to talk that fateful night in the Ritz Carlton bar in Pentagon City, she'd have pulled out her iPhone and called her mom, who'd have told her to say nothing without a lawyer present. She just might have walked away from the hell that followed.
Monica is actually right about a lot of things in this piece, even as her vision is fogged by habituation to a culture she helped midwife. She is right that, for some, the stain of humiliation can indeed be irrevocable. Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton. Scandal on the web leaves the shame a click away, forever. True, when you've been burned by the press it's strange to keep applying for (as she writes) "jobs that fell under the umbrella of 'creative communications' and 'branding.'"
Comment: Collective punishment is an international war crime and it shows once again that these terrorists aren't Syrians and have no support in the population. If they were truly Syrians caring for the Syrian people and for the betterment of conditions in Syria, then cutting off the water supply and the electricity would not be an option.
Cutting off the water supply and the electricity supply is the kind of treatment that Israel uses all the time in the Gaza strip, so one should not be surprised to learn that Israel supports the terrorists in Syria.