CITIZEN DOCTOROW

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Citizen Doctorow
He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.
One four-year term may find us at reasonable peace with
one another, working things out, and the next, trampling on
each other for our scraps of bread.
That a President is inevitably put forward and elected
by the forces of established wealth and power means usually
that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But
in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to
think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported
by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy
as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn
appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored
and multigendered millions, as an act of trust, fingers
crossed, a kind of prayer.
Not that it’s worked out that way. In 1968 Richard Nixon
rebounded from his defeat at the hands of Jack Kennedy,
and there he was again, his head sunk between the hunched
shoulders of his three-button suit and his arms raised in victory,
the exacted revenge of the pod people. That someone
so rigid, and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any
kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spiritually
dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that
is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible
reverence in him for human life, and certainly with
never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics