Evil Is Not Impressed for Very Long

By LANCE MORROW

In Bill Clinton's boyhood home of Hope, Arkansas, they sell a postcard showing a picture of his grammar school class -- Bill's shy, boyish face unmistakable. On the back of the card, the fine print reports that young Bill was so smart that the other kids used to go over to his house "just to watch him think." All the kids enjoyed an amazing display last week as they watched Bill Clinton thinking his way through the Haiti business. What a performance -- plates waveringly spinning on sticks balanced at the end of nose and chin and fingertips, a plate now and then wobbling and pinwheeling toward the stage, only to be deftly rescued: a mental-moral-political equivalent of the kind of act that the adolescent Bill might have watched on the Ed Sullivan Show. Here was the excitement of the President of the last superpower attempting a well- nigh unconstitutional if admirably motivated exercise (admirably motivated if one discounted the approaching midterm elections and the poll bounce to be coaxed from a triumphal little war: mere cynicism, of course).

Here was a gaudy show of Clinton's channel-changing skills, his rescindable reality, his now-I-mean-it, now-I-don't. The last, final, no-kidding, planes- in-the-air, lock-and-load, ah'm-gonna-knock-yo'-haid- clean-off dudgeon metamorphosed -- surprise! -- into Jimmy Carter's dropping from the sky into Port-au-Prince. The voodoo of appeasement. Erstwhile murderer-torturer-rapists deserving nothing less than violent eviction (even if the invasion violates U.S. popular and congressional opinion and virtually every lesson learned in Vietnam) became, in the sunshine of Carter's smile and hunger for a Nobel Prize, honorable men. General Cedras has a "slim and very attractive" wife, Carter told the New York Times. And Lady Macbeth was a gracious hostess. Cedras, a notably bloody and ruthless man on a bloody, miserable island, should go and teach Carter's Sunday school class sometime. Carter, citizen of the world, seems to have missed class the day we learned that even a character like Hitler can turn on the charm.

Never mind. The plates continue spinning. General Cedras stays in Haiti. And Father Aristide, one of the sorrier horses that American policy has backed on a foreign track, returns to the winner's circle where he belongs, ringed by about a quarter of a billion dollars' worth of American bayonets. Democracy will be restored to an island that never had it in the first place. Haiti surely deserves democracy. It is just that the country's political culture, like that of, say, Somalia, is at the moment inhospitable to the novelty.

In an article in the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills marvels at the fury directed at Bill Clinton these days, and wonders what it is that makes so many people so mad: "The amount of sheer personal meanness is staggering, even to the casual bystander," writes Wills. But Wills, who is a sympathetic bystander, seems to know where Clinton's trouble lies: "Clinton is an omnidirectional placater. He wants to satisfy everyone, which is a surefire way of satisfying no one."

The evanescent, conjured reality (Cedras evil ... er, that is, I mean, Cedras good) must be present and true -- at the time. The salesman or the politician requires persuasive hallucinations to earn a living.But those who, * like me, voted for Clinton and have wished him well believe now that his multilayered, many dimensioned reality, too slick by half, lacks a moral core.

During the campaign back in 1992, Clinton and Gore seemed taken with the rhetoric of the recovery movement. Clinton hasn't absorbed its most useful slogan: "Keep It Simple." A now-you-see-it, now-you-don't style leaves Americans feeling a little conned -- as if they sense that in Clinton's mind, the people are as infinitely manipulatable as the rest of reality.

In the Haitian adventure, the admixture of Carter's mind-set and personality to those of Clinton produced strange effects. Clinton turned himself into the hypermasculine, planes-in-the-air bad cop while Carter fluttered in as the angel of conciliation, the Blanche DuBois of crisis diplomacy.

In any case, many of the evils of the planet (General Cedras and the atrocities of Haitian politics, for example, or the slaughters in Rwanda) undeniably arise from a brutal, uncivilized, masculine side of human character. It may be advisable -- and constitutionally imperative -- for American Presidents to keep American soldiers out of such satanic messes. Clinton has been neither aggressive nor effective in facing the tragedies of Bosnia and Somalia, which may be part of the reason he felt tempted by the apparently more manageable case of Haiti. But if a President asks American soldiers to go in, what is needed to answer such evils is absolute clarity and, usually, a brute counterforce. Evil is not impressed for very long by those plates spinning on nose and chin.