RENAISSANCE MEN : From Louisiana to Massachusetts, Let’s Face It: The Pols, They Are A-Changin’

Aside from from his plastic surgeon’s interpretation of Dan Quayle, what impresses me about David Duke is how often during his campaign for Louisiana governor, when questioned about his past, he resorted to a strategy now being tested by his ideological nemesis, Teddy Kennedy. Both men are saying to voters, in essence, “I know I’ve had a stupid and criminal past. But Americans believe in redemption, do we not?”

Duke frames his journey in the rhetoric of born-again-ism, while Kennedy seems, on the scant evidence so far, to be speaking in the more measured cadences of 12-step programs. But both of them are daring us to believe that people can change, and change big.

That belief is such a prominent feature of the American mental landscape that we can barely realize how special it makes us. Influenced by everything from religion to Hollywood (whose TV and movie characters are so one-dimensional that they have to change radically or there wouldn’t be any plots at all), we take the old bumper-stickerism “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” as the whole truth. The rest of the truth, of course, is that today is the next day of your life so far.

Our heritage is people pulling up stakes, leaving everything behind, starting over. It’s a short step to believing that the inside can change just as easily. Except for some folks in Rio, nobody else on earth seeks the blessing of knife upon flesh as eagerly as we do. From David Duke to Joan Rivers, the experience seems to deliver what it promises: a new life.

And if you think that life is a Space Age polymer that can be endlessly remolded and reshaped, it’s easy to regard the past as just so much nostalgia. We say of someone whose jig is up, “He’s history.” To us, phrases such as “the ash heap of history” are a redundancy. The past isn’t something that hems us in; our choices don’t have consequences that echo through the years. For Americans, the only reason to remember the past is that it can help to flesh out our memoirs.

Oddly enough, though, believing that we can turn our backs on history and start fresher than farmers-market eggs opens the door to an equally extreme notion: that the power to stop and start history can also fall into other, less benign hands. Belief in sudden change can go hand in hand with belief in the end of change.

So now that the Cold War is receding, becoming nothing more than an excuse for collectibles (the Pentagon is spending $10 million to assemble the definitive array of Cold War artifacts), it’s clear that our peculiar view of history helped us see the East-West struggle in a special way: as a war not just against evil, but against the unprecedented specter of Evil Forever. We really seemed to believe that the triumph of Communism anywhere in the world wasn’t a temporary advance by an overextended empire; as we kept seeing in “educational films” of the ‘50s, the blood-red tide oozing down the map toward another hapless nation was the descent of permanent midnight. We were told that never in human history had a Communist regime been voted out of office. Human history, in this case, turned out to be about 45 years long, and it ended when a continent full of Communist regimes collapsed like tired sitcoms.

The most extreme and silliest Marxist rhetoric proclaimed that the ascent of the workers’ paradise would end the process of history. Aside from some Marxists, for whom that served as a scary and effective advertising slogan (as opposed to, say, “Our changes will all blow over in a few years”), the only people on the planet who could have fallen for the notion that change stops, that history ends, were the people who believed that history was something you could ignore by joining a group or apologizing on TV.

Maybe Teddy Kennedy, in his 60th year, will become a man whose private behavior is as humane as his public rhetoric. Maybe Jesus really did convince David Duke that it’s not a good thing to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.

If you believe them, then, as Orrin Hatch said on the floor of the Senate, there’s a bridge in Massachusetts you might be interested in buying.