COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : The Inaugural: In Praise of Yesterday : Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow? It looks like tomorrow is an endless alibi.

The more you think about tomorrow, the less you have to remember about yesterday. Tomorrow is a promise. Yesterday is the rest of the story.

Bill Clinton is a man of many tomorrows. In his inaugural speech he called for “a government for our tomorrows, not our yesterdays.” The Fleetwood Mac line, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” has become his mantra. He’s even said he’d hang it as a sign in the Oval Office.

The great thing about tomorrow is that it never comes, and by the time it does you can reschedule the rhetoric, claiming that it is necessary to adapt to new circumstances. Thus has Clinton rationalized his somersaults of the past month. Tomorrow is an endless alibi.

The symbolic transition is not from Bush but from Reagan. Reagan invented a past, Clinton projects a future. The outcast in both cases is history, and a psycho-biographer would no doubt point out that each man had the experience of a drunken parent in his earliest years. The real past is pain, bonhomie the eternal mask.

Creative eras of change spring from an engagement with history, not a nostalgic parade of look-alikes. The ‘60s contained at their heart, were impelled by, an attempt to excavate and understand America’s history: the true nature of the Cold War, the actual fate of black Americans and the indigenous population, the class partialities of law and learning.

But as my old friend James Ridgeway wrote in the Village Voice last week, “The new public-relations campaign is aimed at eradicating our history by celebrating the end of the World War II generation and the dawning of the age of the baby boomers. In this new age there is no history as we once knew it, no prevailing theory, no argument over what constitutes truth. Any text is as good as any other.”

In Washington, on Jan. 20, the cliches rolled forth: “Mission . . . sacrifice . . . experimentation.” No words here that touched reality, in, say, the real world of Los Angeles where a mayoral election pivots on the promise of police repression and the eviction of immigrants.

Clinton did reach out to one chapter of the past, the cadences of Camelot: “We will not shrink from the challenges nor fail to seize the opportunities of this new world . . . . When our vital interests are challenged or the will and conscience of the international community is defied, we will act, with peaceful diplomacy wherever possible, with force when necessary.”

Here indeed is the loom of a dark history: a reconstitution of the imperial project, an affirmation of manifest destiny and of the corrupted moralism that underpinned intervention in Vietnam.

To judge by my own conversations with people attending the inaugural or watching it on television, expectations are unusually high, all the way along a spectrum stretching from the MTV crowd to the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, who cannot conceal their delight at most of Clinton’s Cabinet appointments.

Even radicals of my generation who came of age as the pretensions of Camelot ended up in the graveyard of Vietnam fret at criticism of Clinton and argue that he must be given a chance. They see him still as a stealth leftist in the Oval Office.

“Give Clinton a chance”? How many?

The nomination of corporate lawyer Zoe Baird--quite grotesque aside from her domestic problems--is now a closed chapter. But her nomination was not the only disappointment.

The Pentagon goes to Rep. Les Aspin, a friend of the arms companies who long ago shed whatever tincture of liberalism he once possessed and who now preaches intervention overseas and the doctrine of “compellance”; that is, bending the world to one’s will, by violence if necessary. Energy goes to Hazel O’Leary, nurtured in the nuclear lobby and a veteran of Jimmy Carter’s greatest surrender to the corporate interest, the decontrol of natural-gas prices. Are these two, Aspin and O’Leary, to be the overseers of conversion from Cold War modes?

One more sour footnote: Lawrence Summers, infamous for his World Bank memo urging export of pollution to the Third World, gets the post of undersecretary of the Treasury--for international affairs!

Today the left is virtually dormant. Bush’s final mad sorties over Iraq scarcely provoked a whimper of protest. So maybe there’s at least a silver lining here, that the candidate of “change” will at least force people to see through the phrase-making and remember that change--meaning any serious advance in social and economic justice--was forced on Kennedy and will have to be forced on Clinton, who has yet to offend those in high places.