Among the many pleas for “civility” with which the media pullulates, one ought occasionally to insert a small caveat by way of mentioning the important purpose served by civility’s supposed opposite, namely “partisanship.” In fact it is perfectly possible to be a civil partisan. Indeed, it is partisanship which created the whole notion of civility, since partisanship without it is war. Not “war” in the way that James Carville or some of the more ink-thirsty of our culture warriors use it, but real war. War that kills people. Yet if civility is necessary, as the expression seems to suggest, for the existence of civil society, so is partisanship, since it serves the vital social and intellectual function of exposing humbug. And it is because the American media, drunk with the conceit of its own high calling, feels constrained to hide its partisanship that humbug in our national life is so seldom exposed to cleansing laughter and stays around to poison the system.

So during this last month, one could not but regret the absence of those gales of partisan laughter which should have greeted what some have called President Clinton’s “contrition tour” of Africa, during which he apologized (or sort of apologized: Clinton’s characteristic lawyerly hedging always made it somewhat doubtful) for (1) American slavery, (2) American complicity in the evils of the former Apartheid regime in South Africa, (3) American support for brutal African dictators who took a pro-Western position during the Cold War, and (4) American