HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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through electronic media, true fictions pour from politicians; they
are
true because they
should
be true. The political biographer's model is not
"What happened, what REALLY happened? And how can
I
represent it
realistically?" But, "What fictions were dispensed by these political folk,
and how can I represent a political life true to its inventions?"
In this election season, then, we are being treated to the spectacle of
a campaign between two major novels titled
Gore
and
Bush,
two short
stories titled "Nader" and "Buchanan," and an anthology of short short
stories titled "Hagelin," "Browne," and "Phillips," all competing for
our attention.
It has always been this way. Plato's constructed memory of Socrates
occurs episodically in an Odyssey-like epic, which Plato retitled "The
Apology of Socrates,"
The Re/)lf/J/ic,
and so on. In "The Apology"
Socrates is a hero who would rather die than give up philosophy; dying,
he lives on as a political hero. Plutarch's Marcus Cato is an exemplary
tale of the heroic richness of simplicity. To be sure, Plato and Plutarch
concealed their fictions. Machiavelli was explicit about them. He
assumes that men judge superficially, and therefore asserts that the qual–
ities of a political figure must
seem
rather than
be:
"a ruler need not
have all the positive qualities I listed earlier; but he must seem to have
them.... If you merely seem to have them, they will benefit you." It is
enough to be "supposed
to
be" good or wicked, when either is neces–
sary for staying in power;
being
good or wicked is irrelevant: fictions are
all. Had Archibald MacLeish been writing
The
Prince,
he would have
said: "A political leader must not be / But seem."
A political leader is by nature a maker of fictions; his life consists of
the fictions he makes. (In a superb and outrageous fiction, Milosevic said
this morning, "I thank the people of Yugoslavia for taking the burden
from my shoulders, and allowing me to spend more time with my grand–
children.") It's dangerous for a political figure to offer himself as a fic–
tion; Machiavelli's book was meant for private eyes. It is better for the
biographer, Parson Weems in this case, to tell us that George Washington
"could not tell a lie" than for Washington himself to have invented the
cherry tree tale. A biographer constructs the true spectacle of a politician'S
inventions. To paraphrase the title of a Kurt Vonnegut story, the question
is, "Who Am I This Time?"-and the answer: "Whoever 1 need to be."
Machiavelli writes of the ruler's necessity to create public spectacles;
he recommended hangings. Today we have ceased
to
hang people in
public; we do the next best thing-compose biographies as spectacles,
speculums of their political power.
If
the biographer is good enough, he
or she is never faced with the question posed in Stevens's poem:
