Word: marcuses
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Thirteen of a thousand faces: center, as Capt. Henry St. James (The Captain's Paradise, 1953). Clockwise from top left: Herbert Pocket (Great Expectations, 1946); Agatha d'Ascoyne (Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949); Professor Marcus (The Ladykillers, 1955); Colonel Nicholson (The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957) General Yevgraf Zhivago (Dr. Zhivago, 1965); Adolf Hitler (Hitler: The Last Ten Days, 1973); Professor Godbole (A Passage to India, 1984); Sigmund Freud (Lovesick, 1983); George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1980); Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi (Star Wars, 1977); King Charles I (Cromwell, 1970); Prince Feisal (Lawrence of Arabia...
...with Elvis, Marcus says, Clinton appeals to the extreme ways in which we can see ourselves, the levels of greatness and deviance that we ordinaries may never reach. We feel the need to see ourself in their relief, Marcus writes, "to prove that if we will never rise so high, we will never sink so low." If nothing else, Marcus's book should go some distance toward explaining to all those flabbergasted Republicans how Clinton could have trounced Bush, then gotten away with so much naughtiness. "The fear Bill Clinton inspires is not that he will steal you blind...
...Marcus, whose previous books have all been (overtly, at least) about music, not politics, freely intertwines writings on each field in Double Trouble: some essays deal solely with Clinton, some just with music, often musical subjects totally unrelated to Elvis. Pieces on Dylan, Kurt Cobain, Kenneth Starr and Hillary are especially insightful, and are treated with uniformly graceful prose and pleasantly reckless extensions of metaphors. In Marcus's world, the political and the sensational are one, and so they deserve the same critics and the same vocabulary...
...Clinton is heir to the King. Perhaps Pat Boone? Gary Lewis? Better, I think, not to stretch, and instead to wait for a politician who has half the gusto of a Clinton or a Pierre Trudeau. Our natural disgust for the insipid, bloodless legalism of this election, coupled with Marcus' insights on our attraction to political depravity, go a long way toward explaining what the hell we must have been thinking back...
...Greil Marcus...