I've skimmed the headlines enough to know that there will be, or may already have been, a vote on dismissing the articles of impeachment.
I also happened to notice a poll on CNN Interactive Monday, indicating that 67 percent of those polled want the charges thrown out.
I'm with that 67 percent, because I'm tired of feeling guilty about not caring about what's happening to my government. I'm tired of living like an ostrich, buried neck-deep in the Web, waiting for it all to go away.
If it does go away today, I'll probably find out about it in email. I stopped watching TV news months ago.
I tuned out around the time I heard the phrase "semen-stained dress." I cared about the dress for a moment, when I heard it was a hoax. Then I heard there really was a dress. I tuned out again.
I brought my head up when the Starr Report was posted to the Net. You couldn't avoid it. After feeling insulated from the mass-media spectacle for a couple of Web-heady years, suddenly our representatives seemed to get a clue that the Net was good for more than just downloading kiddie porn and bomb recipes.
I read the Starr Report in The New York Times because it was about the president of the United States, and I grew up reading about our president in the newspaper. This was serious, they said. I didn't want Matt Drudge telling me what to think.
It was serious. Reading the report, I felt both aroused and terribly sad, because I've been all three of those people in past relationships: Bill, Monica, and Hillary.
The only person I couldn't sympathize with was the report's narrator, and this was his show. I couldn't do anything about the show, which seemed to have its own juggernaut momentum.
So I stopped watching it. I felt ashamed as I became less and less informed about the concern that took over every media outlet -- though many people I knew seemed to feel the same way. When my favorite webzine, Salon, kept churning out article after article about it, I stopped reading Salon. Then I heard their hit counts had gone through the roof.
Of course, they went through the roof. But it was like hearing that some Michael Jackson album had outsold the Beatles and Bob Dylan combined. It mattered only if you stopped really caring about anything.
There have been some other news stories in the past -- is it a year now? -- but I either missed them in my eagerness to avert my eyes from the torments in the center ring, or they barely made a dent in my thickening armor. Something about a place called Kosovo and people who were killed there. Something about a frail young man who was beaten to death.
Every now and then I'd catch sight of President Clinton as I was flipping channels. I kept hearing that he was not being sorry enough. I didn't presume to judge whether the man had been sorry enough, but he sure looked demoralized. Demoralized, instead of sexy and bright and still-alive-in-there and game -- traits I thought we'd voted for.
I thought we were tired of presidents who looked like they apologized after sex, who read scripts about the state of the union wearing visages suggesting they smelled cauliflower cooking somewhere. I thought we wanted to vote for that lanky, grinning kid who shook Kennedy's hand; grew up to enjoy spicy, fattening food, raucous sex, and loud music; and probably snuck in a little toke every now and then. It didn't escape me that Bill had given Monica a copy of Leaves of Grass -- a book written by a man fired from his job at the customs house for writing about sex as a redemptive force, rather than a corrupting one.
For months, I've been fantasizing about putting together a time capsule for the benefit of future archeologists. It would not contain a DNA-splattered shred of the dress. It would not contain excerpts from the Linda Tripp tapes.
It might contain a note that read, "The Monica thing -- we knew it was something like mass insanity. Don't judge us by it. Most people didn't even care and went about their business, trying to do good in some small corner of the universe. There was a warm glow at the end of the millennium that most Americans felt, even if it was invisible under the glare of the television lights."
When I picked up a paper again last week and read that Senator Arlen Specter considered the impeachment proceedings "the most important trial in the history of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence," my ostrich head sank a little lower in the sand. Now it was the entire history of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence I'd have to learn to live without.
I hope those senators make the whole impeachment thing go away soon, because I may need a government, and a president, again sometime. When those Y2K-wacked planes start falling on our heads, for instance.
But I've started filtering all that Y2K spam to the trash, anyway.
