The Profane Appeal

"Politics," said Frank Zappa, "is the entertainment branch of industry.'' Much as I prefer to avoid quoting the artist behind "Nasty Little Jewish Princess'' and "Camarillo Brillo'' as a political sage, I think he has a point. Flamboyance, pizzazz and showbiz skills have eclipsed policy savvy as chief prerequisites for national politics, and politicians have changed their strategies as a result. This makes perfect sense to me. Only major caffeine abuse could keep me conscious through a policy guru's lecture on the tax code, but if the same wonk dons a pair of shades and blows a sax, I'll pay a cover charge. He might even get me to vote for him.

The 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 the White House a few months later.

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."

Comparisons between the President and the King dominate Double Trouble. The parallels are almost too obvious to be worth noting: two southern hillbillies with no business in the national spotlight, much less the national consciousness, amble confidently into positions of immense power. And as if 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 him so.

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.

As 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 and corrupt your morals; it is that he will do all that and more, and make you like it."

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.

One wonders how to apply that vocabulary to the current election. The present election has been a depressing drought for anyone who cares about music and the politics of sexiness. One shudders to think whose Doppelganger Al Gore '69 is, if 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 in 1992.

DOUBLE TROUBLE: BILL CLINTON AND ELVIS PRESLEY IN THE LAND OF NO ALTERNATIVES

by

Greil Marcus

Henry Holt

248 pp., $25

by

Greil Marcus

Henry Holt

248 pp., $25