Sex and death in Washington.

The Progressive's late editor Erwin Knoll once told me he got terribly depressed as a reporter in Washington, D.C., during the dark days of Watergate. I.F. Stone told him to snap out of it. "This is the greatest show on Earth," Erwin remembered Stone saying. "And you have a front-row seat."

I wonder what I.F. Stone would say about the media frenzy in Washington today. In this era of 'round-the-clock news, everyone has a front-row seat. But the public spectacle we're watching ain't exactly Watergate. Some of my friends at the news weeklies have been pulled off their other assignments to dig around in Monica Lewinsky's underwear drawer. One reporter I know was called back from the Southwest, where she was working on a story about abuses by the border patrol, to phone the Lewinskys' neighbors and find out what they think.

It's worse than depressing. It's an existential crisis. Here's a story full of human baseness on all sides--from the President to the independent counsel to the duplicitous Linda Tripp. Every day there are new details--semen stains, grainy video footage, idle gossip reported as fact. It's all pretty unappetizing. And unlike Watergate, it has no significance whatsoever for our democracy.

Oh, I know, there is plenty of material to spin. "The Feminists," for example, are getting tossed every which way. Columnists from George Will to Maureen Dowd to Frank Rich to Bob Herbert blame "The Feminists "--whoever they might be--for not joining the attack on President Clinton for allegedly having oral sex with his twenty- one-ye ar-old intern in the Oval Office. This, say the pundits, is an outrage, since feminists generally condemn sexual harassment.

There is, of course, an important difference between harassment and consensual sex. The feminists I know are divided over how appalling it is when a powerful older man has an affair with a young, vulnerable employee. Certainly it's in bad taste. But it's not illegal. Nor should it be, so long as the woman is a consenting adult.

Then there's the difference between private boorishness and a betrayal of the public trust. I got off the Clinton bandwagon when he cut food stamps for immigrants and ended welfare for millions of impoverished women and children. If he commits adultery, even if he lies about it, it doesn't make much difference to me.

Finally, there has been a lot of hashingout of sexual-harassment law. The most enlightening reporting I've seen on this was Jeffrey Toobin's article in The New Yorker. Toobin advocates the idea that sexual harassment rightly applies in cases where a woman is pressured to exchange sex for employment (one of Paula Jones's claims), or when she is so hounded and persecuted by men on the job that she doesn't have an equal chance at work (the case in the Mitsubishi auto plants). But Toobin rejects the notion that sex in the workplace is automatically grounds for a lawsuit. Any sane person should agree. The issue should not be sex but discrimination.

In the Clinton case, it is perjury--not harassment or impropriety--that threatens the Presidency itself. I.F. Stone did have something to say about this: "All governments are made up of liars. Nothing they say should be believed."

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Clinton may have lied about his sex life. It's worth ousting a President who lies to cover up crimes by the executive branch. But lying about marital fidelity does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. And chasing around sordid details about the President cheating on his wife just to catch him in a fib is pretty penny-ante stuff.

In the end, the whole furor is mainly an excuse to talk about sex. And that's the thing about having a front-row seat in the media circus. It's trivial and embarrassing.

The bleakest moment came when the Monica Lewinsky affair was competing for air time with that other public spectacle, the execution of Karla Faye Tucker in Texas.

"Date with Death," Fox News called it. I went on the air to debate a conservative pundit who called the death penalty "an excellent idea." As we were talking, Tucker's execution was only a few minutes away.

The horror of the execution was dulled by the issues--the spinning and chatting and taking sides. I gave the familiar reasons for opposing the death penalty: that it's unfairly applied to the poor and poorly represented, that speeding up the appeals process could mean taking innocent lives, and that it's just plain barbaric. My opponent made a case that execution is a fitting punishment for murder. The more we talked, the further we seemed to get from the cataclysmic truth: that Tucker was walking to the table where the state would put her to death.

I had the creepy feeling of being part of the countdown. Nothing I said could make any difference.

I went home and stayed up all night flipping channels, searching for news about the execution that made sense. I found it on Pat Robertson's 700 Club. Robertson and a lot of other Christian conservatives took a particular interest in Tucker's case. A reporter from the 700 Club had the last interview with Karla Tucker, which was broadcast right after she died. Tucker's humanity came through like a lightning bolt.

She spoke eloquently about taking responsibility for her crime, and her belief in redemption. "There are a lot of people like me in here," she said from her prison holding cell. "It's up to us to reach out to them." The reporter from the 700 Club cried.

Later, standing outside the Huntsville, Texas, execution chamber, the reporter said she didn't think the anger and hate and bitterness Tucker's victims' families felt would go away after Tucker was killed. Pat Robertson agreed. "I've always been a proponent of the death penalty, as you know," he said. "But this doesn't make any sense."

Amen to that. To Robertson, of course, the point of the story is Jesus Christ. But he threw away all pretense of building a consistent case for his particular crusade. Instead, in recognizing the awful senselessness of the killing, he acknowledged a simple truth--a hard thing to find these days, in the media swirl and spin.

Ruth Conniff is Washington Editor of The Progressive.