HOW TO RI-:CAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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Little Albert's parents were clearly masterful creators of their son-as–
candidate, able to become anyone or anything at all, creating each fictive
AI Gore that was politically needed, naturally and easily. He
is
this or that
way because he
should
be that way. He should have been with James Witt
in Texas at the time of the fires-so he was. He created the Internet or
exposed the Love Canal scandal because that is what a pre-president
should do. He must have worked miracles because that is what a political
saint should do. AlOne, AI Two, and their successors continued the par–
ents' earliest fictions, as AI kept on inventing a new self whenever the need
arose. Gore said during one presidential debate, "I want you to look at
me for who I am "; but we need
to
remember to complete the title of Von–
negut's famous story, and to add two words, "Who I am-This Time!"
Reflections on these two biogra ph ies lead me to a fu rther concl usion,
crucially important
to
our own understanding of the political personal–
ity in our time.
In
my book,
Who Am I This Time: Uncovering the Fic–
tive Personality,
I assembled a loose taxonomy of the vigorous growth
in contemporary America of ficticity, especially as accelerated by the
dominance of electronic media. Pathological identifications with fictive
characters, such as John Hinckley's identification with Travis Bickle in
Taxi Driver;
calculated projections of grandiose fictions of power-and–
victimization adopted by terrorists; individual incorporations of fictions
as desperate personal defenses against internal nothingness; imitators of
fictions, from fictive Don Quixote and Werther to real Marilyn Monroe
"be-alikes," who commit suicide because Marilyn did; children's identi–
fications with video games and TV and movie characters-these, along
with the normal processes of personality growth through imitation of
helpful psychological rransferences, were my subjects in that book.
What I did not see then, but now can glimpse as these two exemplary
biographies light up other mysteries, is that the political personality
itself, especially in our time, is the chief example of the adaptive useful–
ness of fictive processes within the personality. Neither pathological nor
normal, these fictive processes in the political person offer a special case
of adaptation
to
the bewilderingly complex politics in the electronic age.
"Leadership" as a concept has been an important subject for political
investigators only during the last thirty years. Political elites and what
characterizes them have been studied theoretically by such early politi–
cal sociologists as Vilifred Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, and later by Ken–
neth Prewitt, George
E.
Marcus, Moshe Czudnowski, Roderic Camp,
and llya Harik, among others. Scholarly focus has fallen on how polit–
ical interests are generated in candidates, why some people are candi–
dates for political recruitment, what characterizes the entry
