"Certain things about the new President are not clear. I can't make out what he is thinking. When he has finished speaking I can never remember what he has said. There remains only the impression of strangeness, darkness . . . On the television, his face clouds when his name is mentioned. It is as if hearing his name frightens him. Then he stares directly in to the camera (an actor's preempting gaze) and begins to speak. One hears only cadences. Newspaper accounts of his speeches always say only that he touched on a number of matters in the realm of . . . "
How prescient on Barthelme's part. His short story "The President" appears in his 1968 collection "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts." Nixon/Bush? Onward to serious work on the American Colossus.
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