A Pilgrim’s Digression

Today’s coffee is Verona. Not bad, but nothing special about it. I still believe the Italian is the best flavored Starbucks coffee. I remember in Paris, my wife and I would breakfast at a brasserie near the Gaillon fountain, off the Avenue de l’Opera. I would always order a café au lait, which sounds innocent enough in either French or English. It presented such a bold taste I would usually have to cut it with a single sugar cube. French coffee is the only coffee I have ever had to sweeten. Even the foam on the top of the freshly poured coffee was a rich, deep golden brown. Now that is a fine cuppa joe, as Agent Cooper used to say.

France is also the only place I have ever seen sugar cubes, either in a restaurant or grocery store. I wonder why in America, sugar cubes seem like surprising relics of a former decade, like ice trucks and milk men? Yet in France, a sugar cube still retains its usefulness and can be found in small bowls on the tables of both the lowest and the finest dining establishment. So much of France struck me as anachronistic in that way. That was one of the things I liked most about that country.

So today I signed in to work and then walked out to buy my coffee. I passed the same supervisor I regarded last week, doing the same thing. On my way to Starbucks, I passed a bookshop window and remarked to myself that every one of any political note, and many persons of not much note at all, have a book on the shelves today. In the window was a large mock-up of the cover of Bill Press’s new book, Bush Must Go: The Top Ten Reasons Why George Bush Doesn’t Deserve a Second Term. Now there’s a book with a shelf life of about a week. It was destined for the bargain bin almost before it was published, though not because George Bush is necessarily going to win in November. If Bush loses, the book will be worth even less. I suppose Press did not write it for the ages, yet there seems a horrible waste in all the paper used and man-hours expended over a book of such limited scope and lifespan. One can hardly speak better of President Clinton’s tome due out tomorrow. 950-some-odd pages, the critics say. “Often eye-crossingly dull,” the New York Times has told us in advance, as if it could make for other than a very dull read. Presidential memoirs, like memoirs in general, are pretty worthless stuff, the post hoc efforts of a good, but not brilliant, mind attempting to give the impression that it had thorough control over events that happened “on its watch,” in the parlance of the political world. I often think that the great secret of the presidency is that for all the appearance of command and control, a President actually arrives in office to find events already transpiring pretty much on their own without regard for the high office of the Executive. Thus one’s term of office is spent making pronouncements, hopefully preemptive, the significance of which is to give the appearance that the President is himself a maker of history rather than just another bystander. I was especially impressed with that idea week before last, during all the Reagan commemoratives. Even when he was alive and in the strength of his power, I never thought of Reagan as much more than a smiling, idle old man, yet two weeks ago I discovered to my surprise that he single-handedly brought down the soviet empire and engineered the economic recovery of the nineteen-nineties. Oh, but his hagiographers were saying such things even when he was still alive, and the din of loud remembrance only increased after he doddered into the blackness of senility and incoherency.

And so another President tries to write history in his favor, tries to make sense of the insensible. I imagine Mr. Clinton must wonder where those eight years went he spent here in Washington. He lived his whole life for the chance to change the world, and yet very little of any great moment happened during his eight years. It must be disappointing. He was cursed to rule during peacetime, I suppose, though he could have had his war, too, if he had recognized the signs. That is George Bush’s peculiar triumph over history as well as over Clinton.