The Incredible Shrinking President

Because it's 30 years since Watergate we've been treated to plenty of photos of Richard Nixon, mostly at the moment he was leaving office. I was happy to see him go, but today am sad that for obvious reasons the National Archives will never be in a position to release Nixon's unvarnished comments on the man whose father he made chairman of the Republican National Committee.

How aghast that malign political genius would have been at the pathetic ignoramus occupying the Oval Office once fragrant with Dick's curses. What a falling off was there! From malediction to malapropism. I'm sure W's speech is less burdened by obscenity than that of the Navy vet and seasoned poker player, but this is the pudeur of the born-again imbecile. W has the vocabulary of a 12-year-old, though most 12-year-olds have an infinitely stronger grasp of world affairs.

Our spaniel press makes Herculean efforts to pass over the fact in tactful silence, but the truth is that George W. Bush is the laughingstock of the world, by dint of the obvious fact that his maximum level of competence was that of greeter at the ballpark in Arlington, which, as the blues piano player Dave Vest recently remarked, is the only real job he ever had before he met Ken Lay. Nixon had policies, strategies. Bush has notes (often contradictory) from his staff, which he bears no sign of comprehending for longer than the brief moments in which he lurches his way through them in some public forum.

Take the Middle East. Don't even go back to last year. Just take the last few weeks, in which Bush told Mubarak of his hopes for a Palestinian state, hopes that promptly vanished with the arrival of his next visitor, Ariel Sharon. How long can Secretary of State Colin Powell endure the humiliation of being dispatched on one ludicrous mission after another, even as Press Secretary Ari Fleischer (a man who makes Nixon's Ron Ziegler look like George Washington) tells the press that Powell's statements are irrelevant as expressions of presidential policy? Edward Said puts it well in a recent column: "To say that he and his disheveled administration 'want' anything is to dignify a series of spurts, fits, starts, retractions, denunciations, totally contradictory statements, sterile missions by various officials of his administration, and about-faces, with the status of an over-all desire, which of course doesn't exist. Incoherent, except when it comes to the pressures and agendas of the Israeli lobby and the Christian Right whose spiritual head he now is, Bush's policy consists in reality of calls for Arafat to end terrorism, and (when he wants to placate the Arabs) for someone somewhere somehow to produce a Palestinian state and a big conference, and finally, for Israel to go on getting full and unconditional US support including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that, US policy waits to be formulated, by someone, somewhere, somehow."

Iraq? It was the acme of the axis of evil. Then it wasn't, because the Joint Chiefs said it would be tough to invade the place. Now we've got something billed as a new preemptive policy. What's new about it? Throughout the Cold War America's strategic policy never set aside the possibility of a preemptive first strike against the foe. We're now told that the CIA (yes, the same agency that has just made the worst screwup in its history) can try to kill Saddam, on the grounds that if he makes any move to avoid being killed by the CIA, that can be construed as aggression, meriting assassination.

Never mind that the U.S. has been trying to kill Saddam since 1991, tried to mount coups against him through the first half of the 1990s, concluded that it was impossible and that the best thing to do was throw some money around to groups like the Iraqi National Accord. Never mind all that. Here we are in the wake of a terrorist attack outside the Sheraton hotel in Karachi that killed 11 (another major intelligence failure, right?) and the Bush regime (until it decided to hang Ashcroft out to dry) tries to change the subject with mighty boasts about the capture a Puerto Rican gangbanger who took an H-bomb blueprint off the Internet, and a "new" finding for the CIA to finish off Saddam.

How about national security? Should Bush have fired the FBI's Robert Mueller and the CIA's George Tenet long since, along with that lunatic Richard Clarke, a White House counterterrorism czar under Clinton, now special advisor to Bush? Of course he should. Should he have appointed a commission to reorganize America's intelligence agencies? Of course. But here we are in June of 2002 and all we have is a proposal to create a new alphabet soup of agencies now bracing to spend the next two years battling over turf.

Last time Bush was in Europe, a German newspaper ran a headline on its front page announcing Bush's historic speech. Then it left the rest of the page blank. The Europeans are a snotty, self-regarding bunch, but this time they're on the money.

The leader of the World, Free and Unfree, simply isn't up to par. He's not qualified for the job. He never was. And that means big trouble ahead for the World, Free and Unfree. At least Nixon knew what he was doing, which is why the world was frightened by him. When it's not laughing at him the world is frightened of George W. Bush because it knows he hasn't a clue. That's truly frightening.

Marcellus, I Thought You Had the Passports!

Getting out those summer guidebooks? Let me recommend Tony Perrottet's Route 66 A.D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (Random House). Like most good travel books, Perrottet's jaunty excursion makes one alternately eager to get on the road and happy to stay at home, relieved that someone else has gone forth in the heat of the day and done the journey.

Perrottet had a good idea, which was to go to the New York Public Library and read Roman travelogues from the early days of the Empire, figure out the most popular trips and then do them himself with his pregnant girlfriend Lesley. So the book switches from the viatica of such classical tourists as Pausanias or Pliny the Elder to the trails and trials of Tony, Lesley and the Boy Embryo whose own intrauterine journey, completed appropriately by Caesarian section, forms a piquant part of the narrative.

The humorless Julius Caesar makes a characteristically megalomaniacal entry into the story through an encounter with pirates off the coast of Asia Minor. He was seized on his way to Rhodes to study rhetoric, and promptly castigated the buccaneers for demanding what he regarded as an insultingly low ransom for his release. He told them to multiply it by five and then bossed them about, treating them as servants, insisting that they listen to his rhetorical exercises and maintain absolute quiet when he was taking his nap. Sensible pirates would have thrown Caesar over the side, thus altering the path of history, but for some reason the Caesar-nappers spared him, probably because his self-importance made then laugh, particularly when he pledged to come back and execute them.

They stopped laughing abruptly when Caesar made good on this pledge. Released against his huge ransom, Caesar made his way to Miletus, raised a fleet, came back with a punitive force and crucified the lot of them.

The Perrottets, Australians, were on a low budget, and some of the pleasure of the book derives from relief that one isn't back in one's own junior years swatting bedbugs in some Neapolitan or Cairene hovel. By and large the portrait of mass tourism in the modern era is terrifying, as almost every site of tourism, ancient and modern, whether Luxor, Olympia, Delphi or Knidos, quivers with a thousand tour buses amid the reek of french fries and sunscreen.

Knidos, incidentally, boasted the statue of Aphrodite Kallipygos, or Aphrodite of the Beautiful Ass. This was the first nude female statue of classical antiquity, commissioned by another town on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. But when the work arrived, painted and shimmering with erotic power, the town bluenoses were appalled and said No.

The town council of nearby Knidos saw its opportunity and put in a quick bid. The statue put Knidos on the map. Thousands flocked, plopping down their coins to see Aphrodite, then discovering that the crafty guardians of the Love Goddess demanded further disbursements to see her from the rear. The great second-century writer Lucian wrote a story about her called "Affairs of the Heart," featuring himself and two traveling companions, one of them what used to be called a gay dog (i.e., one for the girls), Charicles, and the other what is now called a gay guy, Callicratidas.

The trio makes its way to Aphrodite's temple, which would not have been out of place in Las Vegas, with priestesses in scarlet robes, walled gardens, statues of Dionysus and Bacchus, plus whores and tax collectors at the ready. At last they enter the pergola housing Aphrodite Kallipygos. Charicles, the straight one, rushes to kiss Aphrodite on the lips. Callicratidas is unmoved until he unbelts the extra coins and is taken to the posterior viewing station that affords him total satisfaction. "By Hercules!" he shrills. "What slender hips! How delicately molded the buttocks! How sweetly they smile!" It somehow reminds me of some English intellectual taken to the Indian sex temple and running amok, giggling, "I say! Oh, jolly good fuck." Maybe it was one of the Huxleys. I can't remember.

Lucian and his pals then adjourn to a shady bower to debate, lengthily, the respective merits of pederasty and conjugal love. Lucian finally gives Callicratidas the palm, on the grounds that sexual desire for a woman is fatally compromised by mankind's brute need to procreate, whereas the passion for a boy is closer to friendship, focused and pure. I'm sure everyone wandering down Christopher St. or through the Castro tells themselves the same thing.

"Thus ended our stay in Knidos," Lucian concludes, "with its combination of gay earnestness and cultured fun."

Before you buy tickets for Knidos, be aware that the original statue has disappeared long since, though there are Roman copies in the Vatican (posterior to the fore, no doubt), Naples and the Louvre.

Perrottet's boisterous prose reminds me somewhat of the style of his fellow Australian, Robert Hughes. He put in enough time in the New York Public Library to get a grip on the classical literature. These same labors also prompted him to write a shade more than he should. I would have been happier to see Finis looming up in under 300 pages, whereas Route 66 A.D. wraps at a hefty 391. But that's only a quibble. You can always stop reading.