Pynchonesque/Clintonesque? (was Betrayal from above)

[davemarc]

Since Paul brought up the horrible, horrible subject, I guess I'll go ahead
and quote from Nat Hentoff's current Village Voice article on Clinton as an
outlaw.  I think the opinion piece makes a provocative companion to
Pynchon's intro to Stone Junction as well as his Luddite article.

"There is another reason why Mr. Bill--as his admirer, Stanley Crouch,
calls him--keeps climbing up the polls.  There is an American tradition of
the charming rogue, the trickster, who is so daring in his evasion of the
law that he becomes a romantic figure.

"Or, as Katie Roiphe, a Clinton Acolyte said on Nightline (January 8):  'We
are tired of having all sides of sexual aggressiveness in a man be
criminalized.  Here comes, you know, this very charismatic leader and he
acts on his appetites and he acts on his impulses, and even if we wouldn't
want to marry him, and even if we don't condone his behavior, there is
something about Bill Clinton that captures our imagination, that remains
and is appealing.'

"Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  The superb New Encyclopedia of
the American West (Yale University Press) notes that Cassidy was a rustler
and robbed trains and banks.  His dashing colleague, the Sundance Kid, was
also a gunslinging desperado, reportedly even more charismatic--as Ms.
Roiphe might say--than Cassidy.

"Their exploits made them American legends....The real Sundance Kid and
Cassidy were supposedly killed by Bolivian troops in San Vicente, Bolivia,
in 1911.

"But, as The New Encyclopedia of the American West points out, 'no proof
exists that the men killed there were Butch and Sundance.  The families of
both men claim that they slipped out of South America and quietly reentered
the United States.'

"....Could Mr. Bill be the Sundance Kid's true hidden child?"

Shuddering,

d.