We live in a time of democratic disguises when everyone -- at least until they reach their place of employment -- can be whoever they want. A nation of poseurs treating life as though it were an endless masque ball. Those who fail at the deception are the poor, the fat, the incompetent and the otherwise terminally declassé. For the rest, a manic preoccupation with style and attitude tempts them to become, like the president, not a reflection of who they are but what they want others to think they are. Our primary business as Americans is to fool each other.

Our tools come not from religion or politics but from the modern corporation. Hence the quiz shows that reward those who have absorbed most precisely the marketing messages transmitted to them. Hence the modern writing genre in which brand names have replaced archaic adjectives. Our angst has become not that of the existentialist but of the discriminating shopper, witness the New York Times author who summed up his 23-paragraph crisis as, "can a white consumer really get away with wearing a product designed and marketed by a youthful African-American company whose very name is a rallying cry of racial solidarity and economic empowerment?"

Juliette Guilbert in the Washington weekly, Generation Next, was no less challenged as she examined the consumptive effluvia of 1950s retro. What does it mean, she asked, that so many young people are "fetishizing a period before rock and roll, before women's liberation, before Civil Rights?"

As I wandered down the aisles of these verbal WalMarts, I likewise felt a terrible burden for, as Guilbert put it, "like or not, everyone who buys a vintage toaster is engaged in a culturally significant activity." If this is true, then who has time for politics?

Even sex, which is what people did for virtual reality before computers and White House communications directors came along, has been affected. For example, a San Francisco Chronicle story described a new form of Russian roulette in which gay group sex takes place with the knowledge that one participant is HIV-positive. This practice has earned criticism, especially from gay activists who have been working to protect their ilk from disease. Tom Coates, the director of an AIDS research institute panned an aggressively non-judgmental gay magazine article by Michael Scarce for not only "sensationalizing the movement but for not presenting a balanced view. Nowhere did I see the word 'responsibility.' As an HIV-infected man myself, I take that responsibility very seriously."

The Chronicle then continued:

Mr. Scarce dismisses the highly respected AIDS expert as part of an "old guard" whose vision of HIV prevention is grounded in the experience of Baby Boomers devastated by the epidemic. This vision of a generation gap within the homosexual community permeates much of the discussion of barebacking and shifts to riskier sexual practices. ~~~To younger homosexual men such as Mr. Scarce, AIDS has become interwoven as part of homosexual identity.  'AIDS and gay culture are permanently tethered to one another, and not necessarily in a bad way, ' he says.

Note that Coates' offense was not one of fact or even of motive but rather of age, attitude and image. Who needs NIH when a hipper perspective will do the job just as well?

Scarce's argument is not so far removed from that used in defense of Clinton by Democratic liberals. In fact, over six years of discussions of this matter, I can think of hardly any instances in which a liberal has challenged me on the basis of facts other than to announce ex cathedra that mine were wrong. Their arguments have typically been, you might say, that Clinton and liberal culture are permanently tethered to one another, and not necessarily in a bad way.

But if the liberals have engaged in bareback politics, it must also be said that Henry Hyde and Trent Lott do not offer much comfort as the final bastion of the Enlightenment. And sadly, neither in politics nor in the media has anyone in power fulfilled Conrad's definition of a hero by doing, for one brief moment, something out of the ordinary. There has been no Senator Margaret Chase Smith taking on Joe McCarthy, no resignation a la Archibald Cox, no Edward R. Murrow somberly calling the corrupt to account.

Instead we have had a craven circus, full of the redundant, the self-serving, the sly, and the mendacious.

Such conditions have little to do with Clinton (although he masterfully reflects and propels them), but a great deal to do with where we find ourselves at the end of the 20th century.

Over lunch the other day, I asked journalist Stephen Goode -- one of the few in the trade who still regards history as extending beyond last year -- how he would describe our era. Without hesitation, he said it was a time of epigons.

An epigon, he explained, is one who is a poor imitation of those who have preceded. In truth, they are all about us. Bill Clinton pretending to be Lyndon Johnson, Henry Hyde pretending to be Sam Ervin, Ted Koppel pretending to be Walter Lippmann. Pat Moynihan pretending to be Pat Moynihan. Nothing so defines the time as its poor reproductions of that which preceded it. It's like being trapped at a bad craft fair where everything you see seems to have been made before, only better.

A recent New York Times article captured epigonism in full flower. Talking about the decline of television programming, the paper quoted the head of a production studio:

We go into development meetings after they see how all their shows are failing, and they tell us we have to give them our wildest, most creative ideas.

So we tell our writers to come up with the most original ideas they can. Then we come back and we've got about eight ideas to pitch, four that are truly out there and four that are more like original spins on familiar formats.

The first thing that happens is they throw out the four wilder ideas because they're just too risky. Then they start to tinker with the others. And every change they suggest makes the show more conventional. Then they give a list of actors and say don't cast anyone not on this list. Then there's list for directors. And by the time they get the shows, they wonder why they have no original ideas.

I have run into epigons before, albeit without having a word for them. As an anthropology major I was first introduced to the then revolutionary notion that progress was not inevitable, that there can be a rise and ebb to cultures. I remember in particular an American archeology course in which we studied the steadily improving design of a certain tribe's pottery. As time passed, the browns and the blacks and the whites and the zigs and the zags became ever more intricate and attractive.

But then cultural entropy set in and it all started to go the other way. The art became epigonic, a poor imitation of its predecessors. In short, the tribe simply forgot what it once had known.

More recently, a friend took a course in boat-building which introduced him to some ancient techniques of the shipwright. Subsequently, despite having been born and raised Washington, DC, he found himself teaching Canadian Inuits how to construct a craft designed by, and once common among, their ancestors, but now forgotten.

Unlike the Eskimo boat, however, democracy and common decency are not dim in our memories. We can remember times of trust, of reasonableness, of compassion. Some of us still try to witness such virtues yet every day our experiences are dismissed and values tormented, ridiculed or patronized by a cultural elite determined to smash any tradition that tempers in the slightest the puerile satisfactions of their transitory power.

To page 3 of "Recovering Country"