COMMENTARY: The President Mars the Mystery of Election Day

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) A mood filled with enough wonder for a Robert Frost poem settles on America on Election […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) A mood filled with enough wonder for a Robert Frost poem settles on America on Election Day. Big and small cities grow hushed, people seem reflective, for they understand that a solemn ritual is under way.


Despite the pyrotechnics about the separation of its religious and governmental aspects, America is a Church, a Temple, too, in which most people believe in God and attend services with a seriousness hard to find elsewhere.

Americans sense they are carrying out a sacred obligation when they enter the voting booth, that secular confessional in which our consciences inform the decisions we make. It is therefore amazing, not to say, embarrassing when a president mars the mystery of our freedom through behavior that degrades himself and the office the people respect as a great symbol in the spiritual landscape of the republic.

President Clinton appears on the cover of the December Esquire “sitting on a stool, his legs spread wide open.” A magazine staffer is quoted as saying, “It’s a very phallic photo,” while another media observer says, “I have never seen a person with any dignity pose in this manner.”

Clinton so far has refused to comment while spokesmen expose their shriveled ethics by complaining the magazine wasn’t supposed to run the piece until after the election.

Esquire denies any such agreement ever existed. None of it is Bill’s fault. Does this sound familiar?

One thinks of the plaintive cry uttered by a youngster, speaking as EveryFan, after learning Chicago White Sox star “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and other players had sold out their team and betrayed the honor of baseball by throwing the World Series in 1919.

Say it ain’t so.

These players’ capitulation to their worst instincts hurt all the more because they had achieved so much only to wound every fan and to make a sacrilege, needlessly and at the last moment, of the nation’s favorite game, and of their own athletic greatness through the smallness of their human weakness.


The plangent feeling beneath that cry, “Say it ain’t so,” surges at learning the president has, needlessly and at the last moment, made a sacrilege of his honorable office and his own possibilities for honored remembrance by re-enacting what we would rather forget about his low behavior.

On another magazine cover, Rolling Stone, the vice president has allowed himself to appear with air-brushed emphasis on the same level of his physique.

Perhaps in the vast reaches of America people exist who find this physical emphasis by middle aged men _ and it is difficult to find the right word for this _ but let us say, motivating.

Far more are profoundly offended. Not since Ernest Hemingway’s poignant journey through he-man-ship as masculinity has the country witnessed such ill-suited male exhibitionism.

Hemingway may be understood as a great artist, armoring himself against his own intense sensitivity to the least stir of human feeling. That makes something both tragic and touching about the writer’s tortured life.

Nobility cannot be mined out of the calculated half-Monty of poses by Clinton and Gore that demean them and dare us to remember them, not for their service to the nation but for their self-centeredness in these advertisements for their fantasy selves.


Such poses are less in the style of Karsh and his immortal photographs of Truman, Churchill and other greats than of 1960s movie stills of Elvis and his guitar.

Clinton’s pleased spread-eagled self-presentation cannot but remind Americans of the very things about his days in the Oval Office you would think he would want them to forget. Is this the lovable rogue, as many interpret him, challenging us to accept, forgive and embrace him one more time before he leaves office? Or is he making a final gesture of contempt, like the gutless bully making an obscene hand signal from the safety of the departing school bus?

This all too characteristic incident mars the sacred character of election time and, as ordinary people grasp, this is of no small spiritual significance. Joseph Campbell spoke of the spiritual symbolism of the Christian cross. The crossbar was at the level of the heart for this powerfully illustrated the lofty spiritual center of Christianity. It contrasts the teachings of Jesus sharply from those cultures whose center is in the phallic region and is so symbolized in their monuments and statues.

It is sad that, in the image-equivalent of a farewell address, Clinton, richly gifted to raise the sights and aspirations of the American people, has lowered them instead.

Mr. President, say it ain’t so.

DEA END KENNEDY

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