--- Are You Loathsome Tonight?
Bill as Elvis, Elvis as Bill—notes on the metaphor that wouldn’t die.
Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in the Land of No Alternatives Henry Holt & Co. $24.95
by Steve Perry
If one had to pick a doppelganger for Bill Clinton, an antecedent who cast a light on the essence of the man, the obvious choice would seem to be JFK. Both men were charming, photogenic, profligate souls whose careful and basically conservative political calculations were ever in danger of being upset by their personal indiscretions; we may not have known the truth about Kennedy’s dalliances in their time, but it doesn’t mean they were not an endless source of worry to his political intimates. Each entered office as a symbol and a vessel of hopes he had no intention of carrying to fruition—each, that is, promoted himself as the harbinger of something new on the political landscape when he was in fact the happy tool of his party’s controlling interests. And each became a specific sort of martyr, to whom public sentiment has been far kinder than warranted.
But that’s just me. To Greil Marcus, and apparently a good many others, Elvis is the figure Clinton most resembles. Why? You can scour the whole of Marcus’s Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in the Land of No Alternatives without finding a very definitive answer. “The metaphor of Clinton as Elvis is powerful because of a sense that we may be able to catch what we want from this man,” he writes portentously, “what we hope for and what we most fear ” And in a subsequent essay, from the vantage point of President Bill’s first year in office: “I think that Bill Clinton is an unfinished man; that the future, at least in the near term, is now unpredictable; that the next few years will be full of surprises, some of them thrilling.” What Marcus intends by this is illuminated best by a line he tosses off in a piece about a 1992 campaign fundraiser. Watching Roger Clinton sing cover tunes at a San Francisco club, he intones, “You got the feeling this might be the closest any of us in the I-Beam might get to the next president, or the last blown chance.” The last chance, he means, for the public at large to reclaim a sense that government is in any way the expression or the instrument of the many and not just the few.
Well. Elvis Presley may have spent his last years in a bloated pharmacological haze, stumbling across stages in towns he was too blitzed to name while he slurred the words of his greatest hits. He may have died, as post-mortem reports famously put it, “straining at stool” until he pitched forward onto the floor in a fetal position with his sweat pants round his ankles and his face turning purple with pooled blood. But however much he defiled himself, it’s hard to imagine that he ever has been or ever will be subjected to a greater indignity than the suggestion that his true heir is Bill Clinton.
Because Elvis Presley meant something. Love him or hate him—and at this late date it’s easy to forget that in the beginning it was one or the other, and that there were multitudes who did hate him—the irreducible fact is that he transfigured the culture. Elvis blurred lines of race and class in ways that threatened the identity of countless staid, decent Americans and opened up new possibilities, ways of being and of relating to the world around them, for their children. Which is another way of saying that all those preachers and PTA chairs and police chiefs who proclaimed Elvis a menace were right.
Now you see, Marcus might say, that’s just my point—people hated Bill Clinton too, and for similar reasons. But it’s not so. A lot of people did hate Clinton, but the ones who despised him (or claimed to) for the cultural transgressions he supposedly represented (as a Southern man, as an avatar of ‘60s culture come to Washington) were mostly lunatics or right-wing careerists, people like Bill Bennett. They were a distinct minority. Bill Clinton was never any sort of threat to the status quo; he was an interloper, but not of the sort Marcus would like to imagine. Most of the people who hated Clinton were more like my father, a lifelong Republican who resented the ease with which he appropriated Republican social and fiscal agendas while making real Republicans into his scapegoats and, ultimately, his political saviors: He was untouchable so long as the public viewed men like Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr as more cynical and mean-spirited than Clinton himself.
But give the devil his due; there was one respect in which Clinton was indisputably Elvis-like. He dissolved a good deal of the language that people had spoken before he came along. Clinton’s much-noted policy of “triangulation” really consisted of talking left and moving right—paying lip service to the very values his administration worked to undermine with respect to welfare, civil rights and civil liberties, the environment. It paralyzed left-liberals like Marcus, who seemed at times almost child-like in their faith that the genuine, compassionate Clinton might emerge at any moment, but more than that it effected a disjunction between word and deed that was staggering even by the already sour standards of the day.
Elvis broke open the language, too, but where he forged a new language, or the promise of one, Clinton left only a void. In his wake it is now more possible than ever for people to talk about politics without ever feeling they have quite nailed down their differences, much less resolved them. You think the state bears some responsibility for the welfare of the least fortunate? Well, I do, too, but
But, as Marcus’s subtitle proclaims, there are no alternatives to the present drift of things.
It’s a lie. In this regard the signal moment in the Clinton presidency came in 1996. When the welfare bill that he eventually signed landed on Clinton’s desk—a bill that would throw more than a million additional children into poverty according to a report prepared by his own administration, a report that Clinton suppressed—he was facing an election that he was bound to win handily. The prospects for Democratic gains in Congress were good as well. There were, in short, plenty of alternatives at hand. Clinton did two things: He signed the welfare bill and he denied a request to release a portion of his campaign war chest for use in close congressional races. There is no excuse for supposing that he did so for any reason other than the obvious one: It was what he wanted to do. And no course of myth and mystification, however artful, should be allowed to obscure the fact.