Now that everyone, from Maureen Dowd to your favourite kitty party hostess, has some view on Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, let me add my own bit and write myself into the endnotes of history. What rankles me is not Clinton's testosterone level -- he's entitled to his gift from God and, moreover, the Americans don't mind their presidents oozing that stuff as long as they don't do it in the Oval Office. My problem is not, to put it in Dowdian terms, whether he's entitled to a divorce or an impeachment, or whether Lewinsky is the victim or the perpetrator, which is Katie Roiphe's dilemma. My problem is about basic instincts.

Can we in this Age of AIDS live with the baby-boomer philosophy of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll? Do we need to turn Benjamin Spock, the ideological parent of the baby boomers, on his head and bring back some old-fashioned values into our children's lives? How can old-fashioned values thrive in a world that looks up to the American President? And can America, which put the AIDS scare on the world map, sell a safe sex message, even to its new generation, when it has a president with a propensity to drop his pants the moment a bimbo walk into his office?

The Americans who are getting hot under the collar must look at the issue differently, not through the prism of that Bible-thumping Texan going by the name of Kenneth Starr. The issue is not sexual morality; the issue is sexual health. How can a promiscuous president preach restraint to a nation that badly needs to learn about it?

I remember American Ambassador (and Friend of Bill) Richard Celeste's wife, Jacqueline Lundquist, speaking to us in the heady aftermath of the Richard Gere visit about her plans to get the actor back in India to promote the Paediatric AIDS Day, which is an annual feature in the US. But today, how can any American be taken seriously on HIV/AIDS, when the president is the biggest advertisement against the most effective weapon against this as-yet incurable affliction, namely, safe sex?

Safe sex has ceased to be a moral issue, the way witches were in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1620s (read Arthur Miller's The Crucible and you'll know all about that original eruption of American puritanism), so we cannot afford to take the politically correct stand of letting the sexual predilections of others be their own business. We are talking about the health of nations here -- nations, because viruses are world citizens who don't need passports to cross borders. We are talking about economics, too. So, what the president does in the Oval Office is the business of the world.

Maybe HIV/AIDS has been around for too long to be able to shock people any longer. But there's no ground for complacency, for, and this was the take-home message of the last World AIDS Conference, the only hope in the horizon, AZT, has been proved to be ineffective, especially with-in two years of a patient using it, because the smarter-than-science virus develops resistance to it within that time-frame. The more recent cocktail therapy that combines AZT with a protease inhibitor and another drug, meanwhile, is too expensive even by First World standards. At $15,000 a year, it is too big a price to pay for Clinton-inspired promiscuity.

It was estimated in 1994 that the US National Institutes of Health alone had a budget of $1.3 billion for research on HIV/AIDS. Still, the future doesn't appear to be any brighter. Today, according to WHO estimates, 26 million people are living with HIV worldwide; in 2020, the number is expected to treble, for HIV/AIDS has a unique characteristic -- there's a substantial delay between infection and the onset of the disease, so the numbers we may not be seeing today are likely to materialise in the first decade of the new millennium. That places an additional responsibility on world leaders like Bill Clinton. They have to lead by example, not by excess.

The Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, led by excess and today his country tops the global HIV/AIDS morbidity-mortality table. The world cannot afford another Uganda. And nations like Uganda, like India, where half-a-million people are expected to succumb to AIDS in the year 2010, cannot afford any of the existing treatments. Safe sex, therefore, is the least expensive cure to a debilitatingly expensive disease. But how can the message get across if leaders like Bill Clinton compete with Casanova?

There's an unsaid message in the Zippergate saga. Clinton's peccadilloes reinforce the feeling a lot of People Like Us entertain. That HIV/AIDS is a disease of the high-risk groups. That HIV/AIDS cannot touch people in life's fast lane. But it is not a matter of Us versus Them -- like tuberculosis, like dropsy, HIV/AIDS does not spare the upwardly mobile. The old Victorian divide of the diseases of the rich and the diseases of the poor no longer exists.

So, safe sex is as important for the American President as for the commercial sex worker at Kamatipura. And if the American President keeps unzipping in office, he may just be blowing away an opportunity for the world to protect the new generation from HIV/AIDS. Each generation learns from its mistakes to make life a little bit easier for the next. It took a generation of unhealthy living to convince the world that there exists a link between excessive lifestyles and the early onset of heart disease. Maybe the Clinton episode may make safe sex once again more fashionable.