Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)

Global warming, anyone? Anyone? Just as I thought, so let's get to Condit-Levy.

This is the first time in the ten years I have been lurking back here that I have written on the same subject twice in a row, but there are reasons for my fixation.

The simplest reason is a nostalgic one going back nearly 60 years. I've been in Gary Condit's love nest. It's a condo now, but in my childhood it was an apartment house populated by sherry-sipping Southern widows who made up my grandmother's circle. She took me along with her to train me in the ladylike art of paying calls, and I remember that top- floor corner window they keep showing on TV. I used to gaze out of it with longing while Granny and Old Miz So-and-So gossiped euphemistically about some ailing woman they knew who had "never been well, never," and her invariably "considerate" husband, who "never bothered her."

The case is provoking visceral reactions everywhere, ripping away that thin veneer of verbal prudence known as the civilized response, and shedding light on the national psyche. The most significant outburst so far has come from my favorite blonde-former-federal-prosecutor, the gorgeous Cynthia Alksne, who lashed out at Condit's "little shirt and little tie and little hair, and his little jacket over his fingers!" It had nothing to do with the evidence but it was dead-on, a compendium of the reasonless reasons Condit repels people in a way that Bill Clinton never did or could.

Alksne's heated words recall the scene in Doctor Zhivago when the happily amoral, self-indulgent, luxury-loving Komarovsky compares himself to Pasha Antipov, the puritanical, ascetic, dedicated revolutionist whom Lara wants to love but can't. The world pretends to disapprove of men like himself, says Komarovsky, and to admire men like Pasha, "but in fact it despises them!"

America needs the Levy case because it lets us tell ourselves that Clinton wasn't so bad after all, and lets us forgive ourselves for electing him twice. Thanks to Condit, Clinton has once again landed on his feet, rejuvenated in our collective subconscious as the unabashedly sensual rogue the world secretly likes under its pretense of disapproval. Our instinct warns that it is better to have about us men who are fat, and yon Condit has a lean and hungry look that makes Clinton seem safe.

The purists who say they are offended by the media's wall-to-wall coverage are like men who say they buy Playboy solely for the articles. This is as close as we have come to a murder rap in Congress since Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner nearly to death in 1856. The only people who honestly believe it isn't newsworthy are the bigwigs at CBS, but not for the reasons they gave. I will bet anything that the real reason they wanted to keep it off the air was to prevent it from falling victim to Dan Rather's medical problems.