Presidential jelly

Sometimes I wonder if an alien species with a sense of humor didn't cast our president down upon us. He is not a man but an amorphous jelly, a pasty, thigh-colored substance that must be regularly reshaped into a human image. Every morning he wakes up in the presidential vat as a pool of slime, and a team of elite advisors must work for hours to mold him into the pleasantly-smiling personage we know. With every Big Mac, the amount of slime steadily increases, and each new day, the advisors find themselves having to face the prospect of either uniformly distributing the excess or assigning it to one of several more-or-less concealed areas, thereby creating deposits that effectively nullify the effects of the morning jog. Periodically, the problem gets so bad that he must be secretly shipped back to the homeworld to be recast through a process akin to liposuction.

Of course, all of that is just my fantasy. In reality, he's one of us, a man fashioned not by aliens but by the times--his cynical generation. The only vision he has ever had is of his place in history books years from now. He wants to be the man who reshaped the Democratic party and American politics in his own image. But an image is built around a set of beliefs, a core ideological construct around which peripheral details can accumulate in a logical order. Unfortunately, he is all periphery, a vast array of mind-numbingly specific programs without an overriding mission. A crackdown on smoking, a crusade against deadbeat dads, an earned-income tax credit for families, a read-and-react foreign policy--that's what he stands for. He is a dabbler, not a believer, a consummate actor who can effortlessly tap his bottomless well of commiseration and indignation to make health care reform attain the moral stature of saving the earth from the aliens of Independence Day.

But whatever we may think of him, we deserve Bill Clinton. We are accustomed to viewing ourselves as cynics. Having learned the lessons of 20th-century history, we have comforted ourselves by pretending that cynicism is an invention of the past few decades, developed as a defense mechanism against being duped like earlier naïve generations. Everyone from politicians to the media to the literature of the time confirms our belief that we are a cynical people. And so, confident in the pervasiveness of what is only a cynical veneer, we free ourselves to do what human beings naturally do--search for new systems of belief.

No, he is not an amorphous being sent by aliens. He is an amorphous being that has been shaped by us. We have brought upon ourselves a human mirror reflecting our loss of faith in the big covenants, yet channeling that free-floating belief into a passion for little things. For now, the age of the great society with its great leaders is over. A soulless bureaucrat sits in the White House once occupied by Lincoln and the Roosevelts. The title of President belongs to a maintenance man.

There exists a certain piece of embarrassing footage. He is at a funeral, and he is seen entering a room joking around and elbowing his buddies. Then he catches sight of the camera. Instantly, his chameleonic demeanor kicks in. He is transformed into a perfect picture of heartfelt grief. The metamorphosis is complete and convincing, except that the entire process is captured on camera. It is an ideal image of a hollow man at the height of his hollowness, the emblem of a nation without a purpose. Our blank gazes are reflected in his glib smile and in his maudlin sorrow. If we are to change him, we must begin with ourselves, and the first step is to understand our human psychology, our susceptibility to being fooled over and over again.