Basketball and President Clinton

"You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you."

                                    Bob Dylan

“Oh, yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”

                        John Meloncamp

Here's what I remember: a last second head fake followed by a layup--and then spontaneous, game-stopping applause from my superiors at a weekly pickup game.

Too strong a reaction. I'm not that bad, and it didn't feel like my show stopping "A-" on Ms. Eisenberg's history exam. Very strange, then, this outpouring.

Here's what I'm reliably told actually happened: I stole the ball, made a behind the back dribble through two defenders, tore out past half court where I eluded someone else on my way toward dodging a final defender with a wrong-side layup. Nine sober witnesses, and it was news to me.

Here's how I reacted to the crowd: like some ah, shucks grinning idiot whose casual ease masked (and marked) an inner confidence and strength.

And here's what I felt: familiar, empty confusion.

I had a direct, physically undeniable experience of real, unmediated autonomous glory; and I blew it. Would it have been better to blow the layup? That I did in a critical high school game.

And I never got over it.

Back home, son Michael was using our TV's picture-in-picture capacity to "interactively" destroy­ Slavic-looking villains while monitoring a "reality-based" sit-com dealing with incest.

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Both the game and the sit-com used compelling visual and verbal techniques to provide the illusion of peril and character respectively. Yet he displayed little affect for having "done" so much in the game, and he responded to the sit com with an occasional smirk that was dwarfed by the canned laughter of the show.

I felt the echo of countless arcades screeching with disembodied souls seeking direct experience; a wail of disconnect in a struggle for authenticity, now defined as a realistic simulation of fantasies. He was experiencing two parallel forms of parallel play. Experience at a remove.

Of course he would soon tire of it.

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My “experience” and observations of my son prompted a  small question: are we the sum of our direct memories or the stories others tell about us?

And a large question:

What was the President thinking?

Simple arrogance could, conceivably, leave a trail as well lit, but with higher quality trophies. And his sophomoric blend of naughtiness and puppy love are not markers of excessive power.

Talk of Clinton’s behavior reflecting the self absorption and permissiveness of his generation ignores the search for authenticity that informed the youth of his day. Those in their 50’s are the last generation without both lobes tethered to the media. We remember a time when radio and television were accoutrements to daily life, not its self-defining sound track. We remember the songs, not just their controlled distillation in advertisements that squeeze their rhythmic air, leaving only a virtual reminder of an experience direct, uncertain and immediate.

We can remember when there was at least a little something more to electoral politics than media manipulation.

Given the constellation of childhood shaping he experienced regarding women, their purpose, position, power and possibilities, combination of baby boomer, lacking either moral or political inner core, bored by the successful result of a lifelong pursuit.

I think our President was trying to remember; remember what it all felt like when it was new, forbidden. Such experience is spoiled by too careful planning. There needs to be more than risk; there must be mistakes. If you are looking to see how close you can come to the, you cannot really know until you begin to burn yourself. The proof is in the pain.

Breathless sexual fetishes typically involve a convoluted, out-of-context replay of a direct hit on the nerve endings. The pouting and counterpouting were every bit as important to Clinton as the sex in his pathetic recreation of unmediated experience.

But though they serve to trigger the desired feelings, such liaisons fail to satisfy, any more than video games or televised emotion.

And of course he would tire of her.

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So much of what he did to get elected was blatant image creating that such liaisons represented the rock ‘n roll authenticity of an increasingly stilted existence. Offsetting a public life drenched in stilted artifice by recreating challenges; making someone fall for him; recreating the process of first love, first hand, when it was challenging and its outcome as uncertain as an attempted lay-up.

The thought is sobering; could this accumulator of continuous victories and triumphs carry with him only the hurt? Could the political animal who had completed his brilliant move from underneath his Arkansas basket all the way to a Presidential basket have forgotten, i.e. failed to directly experience, his victory? Why does victory thrill and evaporate like cotton candy? Is he, in effect, like those teenagers who cut themselves in a desperate attempt to find self validation—pure self? Like the lyrics of an imaginary country song, the only time he felt honest was when he was cheatin’.

If he is not our hero, he is our national action figure, and we measure ourselves against him; job obtained; women conquered; hell, percentage of body fat.

As we watch ourselves watch a man who put a psychic mirror in the halls and watched himself when nobody else could, we close with a question less philosophical than the first, but more to the point of this absurd, obscene adventure.

Will he have as much fun getting out of this trouble as he had getting into it?

Stay tuned.

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