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globalization does not mean we will all eat hamburgers; globalization means that a true global field will emerge. I think that the United States will slowly lose their priority. They make few big hits, but even Russia is emerging with interesting major historical spectacles. And Korea and even Romania too. You see, this is what I like to emphasize about the postmodern era.

11
The Public Use of Scandal
    One of the critical analyses about postmodern society is the fact that our private life is being threatened or is even disappearing. Even though the descriptions of postmodern times, like the “Risk Society” or the “Information Society,” are misused as journalistic slogans, it is somehow true that individuals are deprived of their privacy and also of their right to public life.
    SŽ: What I’m claiming is that something strange is happening. In some Western countries and in the United States, you can be a total creep or a complete idiot – there is no limit – but you can still be a leader. For example, Clinton: we all know, or at least surmise, that he did it. The majority of people believe there was something between the two of them; they believe that Clinton was lying when he denied it. Nonetheless, they support him. So everything can be open; there is no limit. You can say all this and everything still functions. In a way it designates the key element of the efficiency of an ideological statement or of a power structure. This power structure is totally cynical. “Say whatever you want! It will happen anyway.” This is also a very dangerous cynical tendency. And all big “public issues” are now translated into attitudes toward the regulation of “natural” or “personal” idiosyncrasies.
    The next step is Berlusconi. He has been accused of prostitution and cheating, but he’s still at the top in Italy. When people claim that everything is open to the media and we no longer have a private life, I claim, on the contrary, that we no longer have a public life. What is effectively disappearing here is public life itself, the public sphere proper, in which one operates as a symbolic agent who cannot be reduced to a private individual, to a bundle of personal attributes, desires, traumas, and idiosyncrasies. The public domain is fast disappearing and we treat it as a private domain.
    I was shocked when a German former Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, an old leftist, after being charged with relaxing controls on visa regulations for Ukraine and allowing illegal immigrants with fake identities, explained his decision on public television. It was like watching some sort of TV reality show like Actor’s Studio . He said, “I had a bad night. I was thinking and I was crying.” My god, we are talking about dignified public decisions. We don’t care about his private traumas and worries. It doesn’t matter.
    Do you know who started this shameless openness? The US President Richard Nixon. I sympathize with him more and more. I think he should be rehabilitated. Forget about the ideology of two journalists overthrowing him. It is clear that there must have been some support in the US establishment. This is the myth of US democracy: “Look what a great country we are. Two ordinary journalists, Woodward and Bernstein, can overthrow a president.” But what I’m saying is that Nixon was the last one to struggle with dignity. He wanted to be dignified, but he couldn’t. He was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions and the reality of his acts, and who thus experienced an authentically tragic downfall. What a tragic case.
    But Ronald Reagan was totally a new model, who shamelessly displayed his deficiencies and weaknesses: a so-called “Teflon” president whom one is tempted to characterize as post-Oedipal – a “postmodern” president. I remember all the stupid liberal media people who, after every speech of Reagan, published a long report enumerating all the mistakes