Just past sundown on April 12, Chuck Bartels of the Associated Press had some news he thought might be of interest to the most famous woman in Cabot, Arkansas. So he rang Paula Jones’s doorbell — it plays the spooky five-note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind — and informed her that Judge Susan Webber Wright had sanctioned the president for contempt of court in the fones v. Clinton litigation. Hearing this, the plaintiff danced a quick, barefoot circle on her front porch, hands held high over her head. “Ah! Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta,” she trilled. Then she stopped: “That’s all I have to say.” Undeterred and no doubt hoping to secure a quote that contained some actual words, Bartels asked whether Jones thought a finding of contempt against the president was “healthy for the country.” To which she replied: “I could care less.” Goodbye.

Here, at last, Paula Jones, upper-middle-class nightmare extraordinaire, has learned to speak the language of well-bred society. For hers is the approved and near-universal response to Judge Wright’s ruling: vague satisfaction mixed with abject boredom.