Of Myth and Memory

(10 of 10)

Then the plane vacuums up the particles again and again sails east. American landscapes are so resonant -- the sere wrinklings of Nevada mountains that hold the topaz lake, the Badlands, the great agricultural geometries of the Midwest, the stretch of Georgia that Sherman blackened. We fly now steady east, against the time zones, into darkness. At last Boston, below, slides toward us like Christmas, strings of light on velvet. How festive American cities look from the air at night.

KENNEDY AND NIXON: HOW THEY WALKED

Nixon had a fascinating walk. If you put a carpenter's level on his head, the bubble would stay steady as he went along. The action was mostly in his knees, a sort of Bob Hope sidle. Not an athlete's walk and not one powered by an athlete's muscles. The captain on the bridge did not want to know much about engine room and propellers. Smooth.

Kennedy was a coordinated man, and he had a bit of dance in his walk, an athlete's sureness. But who knows? That is part of memory, of the old kinescope that has passed into the sacred. Nineteen eighty-eight makes its way, as it must, in the medium of the present, the decidedly profane.