A Day in the Life . . .(Brief Article)

We shall never have satisfactory explanations for the Bill Clinton phenomenon. No amount of disgrace prevents him from continuing to play to the gallery. For their part, people seem to have a morbid fascination with anyone who can do things that they could never bring themselves to do. So it was when the ex-president blew into Hay-on-Wye in the course of a trip round Britain. He had come from Omagh, scene of the worst terrorist carnage in Ulster, and from fixing Chelsea up with a place at Oxford University, and a day or two later he was off golfing at St Andrews. Everywhere he seemed to be enclosed in a seamless bubble of fantasy.

Hay is a special place, a picturesque little town on the border between England and Wales, a center for the area's farming community but also famous for its secondhand bookshops and its annual literary festival. Thirteen hundred people from far and wide had paid 100 pounds to hear Clinton talk at this festival on the subject of conflict resolution, and five hundred also paid 250 pounds to dine with him afterwards. No equivalent world figure has ever been to Hay before.

A romantic semi-ruin of a castle dominates the town, and a stately tent was erected on its grounds for this occasion. On a perfect summer evening, the crowds began to gather and to wait. The buzz in the air slowly ebbed. Clinton was a good hour late. Ticket-holders under the tent started that sarcastic British protest, the slow hand-clap, and bystanders in the street eventually booed him. The public received neither explanation nor apology.

To borrow a famous quip, he is a self-made man deeply in love with his maker. But there is no sign that he has any idea of who he really is or what was the purpose of holding high office. Ego rushes to fill the vacuum within. For him, the Middle East, Ireland, Bosnia and Kosovo, Rwanda and Haiti, are stage sets on which to strike poses. As he talked, conflict resolution dwindled into a chain of platitudes so trite that meaning has long since been washed out of them. Move ...