Word: marcus
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...most famous wonk to blow a sax was, of course, Bill Clinton, the main subject of Greil Marcus's new essay collection Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives. Marcus, a rock-n-roll critic best known for lively volumes on Elvis, Bob Dylan and the Sex Pistols, pinpoints Clinton's appearance on Arsenio Hall as the turnaround of his 1992 presidential bid. Considered a sure loser against Bush and Perot, Clinton swaggered on stage with his tenor saxophone, wailed a few bars of "Heartbreak Hotel" and instantly won enough support to capture...
Clinton was, Marcus writes, "out to show the country someone willing to cut himself down to size, and at the same time try to take off and fly. A man willing, for a moment, to pretend he could be Elvis...
...their poor backwoods pedigrees weren't enough reason for damnation, both seemed the enemy of all things decent: Elvis was sex, and Bill Clinton, if not the embodiment of libido himself, never really wanted to, or could, totally evade the truth about his womanizing. Writing of Clinton, Marcus notes that "many still can't believe it, any more than in 1956 they or others, those horrified and those thrilled, could believe what a twenty-one-year-old from Mississippi and Tennessee was doing in their living rooms...
...Marcus shows how the image of twenty-one-year-old musical Antichrist shows up again and again in discussions of the chief executive. He knows how plain the comparison is, and like any competent critic he stretches the conceit bravely, well past the facts' tolerance. Clinton's politics go almost unmentioned, for example, the better to focus on the president as if he were nothing more than an incarnation of a cultural icon. The Elvis perspective is, however, a stunningly illuminating way to see Clinton and understand why we have hated and loved...
What is amusing, disturbing and fascinating about Marcus's book is that it is Clinton's utter profanity that makes him so appealing, both today and eight years ago. To listen to Marcus, one would think that America really does want a pathological liar, a hip-gyrating panderer in the Oval Office. When we gasp at Clinton's antics, we're just being coy, since we all knew from the beginning that electing Clinton meant electing President Sex Machine, and that the consequences would be more entertaining than anything we'd had in years...