Word: cincinnatus
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...knows," a young Harry Truman wrote to his future wife Bess, "maybe I'll be like Cincinnatus and be elected constable someday." The ideal of the noble citizen reluctantly laying down his plow to spend a few years cleaning up his government is deeply appealing to most Americans, especially now during this open season on professional politicians. Such sentiments account for the burst of enthusiasm greeting Ross Perot and for the best-sellerdom that inevitably awaits David McCullough's loving and richly detailed megabiography of Truman...
...king of phone-call frenzy is neither an insurgent Democrat like Brown nor a Republican conservative like the fast-fading Pat Buchanan. That honor belongs instead to billionaire Texas businessman H. Ross Perot, who positions himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus called from the boardroom by the little people clamoring for him to mount an independent campaign for the White House. In what may be the cleverest antipolitics fandango in an antipolitics year, Perot insists, "I have no desire to be President. My personal feelings are, anybody intelligent enough to be able to do the job would not want...
Like Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus on a similar occasion, General Putnam is celebrated in New England for leaving his plow in mid-furrow to go to fight the British. Even before that, the general was a local legend as "Old Put," homespun hero of the French and Indian War, who escaped scalping only by a mixture of courage and guile...
Time fof Chop-Chop. A million candles etch the initials P. and C. against the night sky of Cincinnatus' home town. On the ride to the scaffold, bouquets of flowers pelt P.'s and C.'s open car. The whole vulgar holiday is surrounded by rules and rituals of elaborate illogic. Finally, the moment nears "to do chop-chop," as M'sieur Pierre puts it childishly; and childishly, too, the prisoner seeks to save his last shred of self-respect as he mutters: "By myself, by myself." Author Nabokov saves a climactic surprise for the chopping...
...prisoner, the book is disappointing. Compared with the author's superior novels, it is only a kind of detour de force. It may be that, unlike Kafka, Nabokov sacrificed horror to hallucination -or that the young Nabokov did not really know what he was trying to say. Whether Cincinnatus was condemned by wicked masters, or whether he was self-condemned by his own conscience, the ending is both enigmatic and unsatisfactory; for, Nabokov appears to be saying, Cincinnatus can banish the carnival of evil around him simply by coming to his senses. And that seems too easy...