Monica Lewinsky attends the Kitchen Spring Gala Benefit 2014 at Cipriani Wall Street on May 22, 2014 in New York City. (2014 Getty Images)
Almost 20 years ago, a boss took advantage of an intern. That’s all I need say right? Immediately, you presume what media analyst and philosopher Marshal McLuhan calls a ‘visual script. That picture in your head looks an awful lot like Monica Lewinsky, doesn’t it? We can’t help it.
That’s the point that Lewinsky made this week when she came out from behind the curtain to remind us that she had fallen “in love with her boss” who just happened to be the president of the United States.
She also referred to herself as patient zero. (No, she doesn’t have Ebola.) Timely play on words though. “I was the first person to have their reputation completely destroyed via the Internet,” she announced.
She wants us to take the blame squarely off of her exploiter-in-chief, while placing it on the media. In other words, the president was no more than a character in her bizarre drama.
That’s where she lost me. I get the part about her being bullied by Bill Clinton. There’s no question that a young, impressionable woman in the presence of an unscrupulous man can be taken in. Especially, if that man is powerful and what’s more, is willing to use his power for the sake of pure sexual exploitation. We get that.
But that’s not what Lewinsky wants us to get. She wants us to take the blame squarely off of her exploiter-in-chief, while placing it on the media. In other words, the president was no more than a character in her bizarre drama. He wasn’t the antagonist. He wasn’t the bully; no, somebody else gets that distinction. I’s the Internet, the cyber world.
Sounds to me like she’s resorting to playing that all too familiar ‘blame the media’ game.
I’m not a big fan of buzzwords, those trendy topics that overpower all other issues for reasons unknown to most of us who live in the real world. We know that as trendy buzzwords go, ‘bullying’ tends to top the charts. Therefore, because it’s useful language, she’s using it. Whether it really fits, though, that’s debatable.
Lewinsky says she wants to speak out on behalf of others who’ve ended up in her predicament, which begs the question: who? Sounds to me like a pretty small support group. How many people have been involved in and extramarital relationship with a world leader? Hmm.
Then there’s the question of whether she was really the victim of ‘the Internet.’
As I recall, though the story broke on the Drudge Report, it exploded everywhere and continued so for years. Thus, I agree with Monica Lewinsky. She was a victim who deserves an apology, but from whom?
The answer is simple. It should come from the two entities that simply could not control themselves in her presence: an immoral boss and a runaway media.
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