Not Icarus
Smith, R.T.
Not Icarus A sky too bleak for Brueghel, the woods a legion of black sticks and no bird stirring. What quickens me is the way the stripped wisteria vine has writhed its way through the deck...
...Clinton's second term," just as his approval ratings often seem to serve no purpose other than "deflecting an impeachment proceeding...
...I have loaded the thistle tube for finches and hung a bell of barley so I can sit like some apprentice Adam listing the transient birds when they come...
...R.T...
...A piece of green wood in the hearth is snarling, and when I step out to gather logs I split two seasons back, I feel foolish for loving winter so much, like an adoring husband whose wife is indifferent to his passion...
...Simpson, would you care about the state of Johnny Cochrane's soul...
...What quickens me is the way the stripped wisteria vine has writhed its way through the deck railings...
...I am learning to settle for small pleasures...
...In liberal republics, the price of office, like its authority, is ordinarily not so steep...
...But kings who are children have always been bad omens, and the presidency of the United States is cut to an adult's measure...
...If you were O.J...
...Above all, they have to show personal respect for the forms, for the very conventions and laws that a president's extra-legal public power may have to repair or reform...
...Assuming that all the charges against Clinton are true, Alexander Hamilton--"a sexual libertine," John Adams called him--was probably his match, though certainly more graceful in his predations...
...But when Hamilton was accused of winking at or collaborating in the corrupt schemes of his paramour's husband in order to cover up the affair, he chose to publish a self-reviling confession, sacrificing his private character to preserve the honor of his public conduct and policy...
...We will need to do better next time...
...Presidents, acting for us--he took power, FDR said, "in the spirit of the gift"--mediate between convention and nature, the laws and the divine...
...Able to dispense mercy, presidents can bring down the apocalypse...
...Not woven, though, nor even a meander, but a series of tortured gestures...
...In this respect, the privatized view of the presidency, and Clinton's conduct in office, seem more and more like an anecdote without a punch line, or more charitably, an episode of "Seinfeld...
...As New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote, the swirl of scandal has served to distract attention from the "hollowness of Mr...
...I have filled the sparrow feeder and tossed out kernels of dry corn for the resident crows...
...Commonweal | 2 July 17, 1998...
...We are more apt to think of political leaders, including the president, as lawyers or advocates, people we hire for essentially private purposes...
...at bottom, the presidency is hierophantic and tinted with regality, a truth partly captured in FDR's hyperbolic likening of his administration to Christ's driving the moneychangers from the temple...
...Americans feel more and more "unencumbered" (the term is political philosopher Michael Sandel's), allowed to follow an ethic of personal liberation which, in turn, encourages tolerance for the president's "private life...
...Bill Clinton, in these terms, is doing a good job: we put him in as CEO to fix the economy, and his character is irrelevant unless it shows up in the bottom line...
...Bill Clinton is genuinely engaging, and even his misdeeds suggest a Tom Sawyerish kind of mischief, the sometimes very hurtful frivolities of a basically good kid...
...In the same spirit, public life is becoming privatized, not only through deregulation and government downsizing, but through a politics in which money and lawsuits, administrative hearings and "rights talk" replace the effort to persuade and organize majorities...
...In that doleful moment, though, I find a fallen wren under the suet cage, his feet twisted up and one stiff wing reaching skyward and beautiful, still beautiful, with its rim of ice...
...And it follows, as in the popular recent thriller, Air Force One, that presidents also put private motives first, which is O.K., the movie teaches, so long as the Soviet general gets killed in the end...
...Smith our pride and dignity, we offer it less of ourselves...
...At the beginning of American national life, there were strayings among the Framers...
...Other problems aside, however, political leaders may-especially in times of great transformation--have to ask us to do things that cost or hurt, that trouble the existing order, or that challenge the way we see ourselves and our country...
...But the public price of that dangerous authority is the president's willingness to sacrifice his or her private self while in office, assuming a wholly public persona: In great monarchies, like the papacy, rulers often surrender their private names, just as high kings must be willing to die or to offer up those they love...
...It's an example the current president has so far been unable to appreciate, let alone follow...
...The authority to do great things requires a stronger relation between people and president, one in which we give our allegiance and our willingness to sacrifice, but in which we receive moral assurance and personal responsibility from those who lead us into new ways and times...
...Still, if our rulers want to be taken seriously, they have to give up most of the liberty they would enjoy as private citizens...
Vol. 125 • July 1998 • No. 13
