August 12-18, 2004

naked city

fineprint

BULL CLINTON: Details of the ex-president's cavorting, like grooving in gay bars with Kevin Spacey, were, alas, pure fiction. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Less words, more story.

by Joey Sweeney

My Other Blog Is a President

Sometime back in June, a curious thing seemed to happen on the Internet. Bill Clinton started a blog. Updated daily — at least until the Democratic National Convention a few weeks back — Clinton chronicled the various legs of his worldwide press tour promoting his autobiography, My Life, as he bounced from interview to interview and city to city. The tour — and indeed, press reactions as often as not — were grueling. Suddenly, for Bill Clinton, every day was cigar-and-blue-dress day all over again — even more than every other day, it can be safely assumed, already was.

As a marketing tool — to say nothing of a glimpse into the often very guarded life of an ex-president — it would have been a stroke of genius, a running epilogue with, by all counts, far more immediacy and life that critics slammed My Life for lacking. But somewhere between the chronicles of dancing in gay bars with Kevin Spacey and the accounts of Roger Clinton's crying jags, one problem emerged: None of this shit on www.billclintondailydiary. blogspot.com was true.

Whether it was planted by some tech-savvy Republican wonk looking to further discredit Clinton's presidency, morality, taste in music, authority as a father, sexuality and so on, or just the work of a sly and subtle speculative fiction writer, one thing was clear: When you shook out the salacious bits that popped up from time to time, what was left resembled something that could indeed be a lot like the truth about Clinton's life during the summer of 2004.

Deposed but still loved from a distance, demurring from the spotlight as often as not in an effort to make good on a debt to Hillary and just feeling generally kinda useless, the Clinton on the blog looks a lot like the Clinton in what we can only assume is real life.

For this reason and a lot more — it's always weird to hear ex-presidents ramble on about books and movies and their daughter's lame-ass boyfriends — I kept going back to the Clinton blog. For one, after a month or so of reading regular entries, I wound up feeling what a lot of blog readers start to feel when their narrator seems to be falling apart at the seams: I was getting worried for the guy.

And when convention time rolled around, and the stories surfaced of Clinton showing up at parties stating just how much he felt like he was fixin' to die, that feeling only grew, along with a new, slightly sick one: I preferred Clinton's blog to whatever the truth was, if only because, like in so many other things these days, the truth is simply not available.

So I went back to the blog, and the wash of honesty and melancholy that came from it did me in like a Smiths' record.

Bill's uneasy relationship with his flirty publicist, Bobbi Lamoon (that name!).

His accounts of the still-frosty relationship with Hil ("I don't know what I did, but I guess I'm in trouble again").

His numerous (but ultimately empty unless you count, strangely, Spacey) friendships with celebs.

In my ultimate fantasy of a Clinton monarchy — don't even act like you're not considering the possibilities at this very moment — the fact of the matter is, this really is just how it would go down. Like Tony Soprano hemmed in by wiretaps and women, a dismantled Clinton off his throne is a big, lovable mess of positively Shakespearean proportions.

It's no wonder then, that in this age of printed myth and legend, I've come to the only conclusion my times could lead me to: If every other moron out there can believe Fox News is real, why can't I believe Bill Clinton is out carousing in the gay bars of Berlin, carving out what may be the last stolen shards of happiness he'll ever know?