The X-President

Philip Baruth’s The X-President is a science fiction novel about Bill Clinton. It’s a hoot. The novel is set (initially) in the year 2055. The narrator, Sal Hayden, an historian specializing in the twentieth century, is working on the authorized biography of the (still-living, thanks to prosthetic enhancements) 109-year-old former President (referred to in the text exclusively as “BC”).
As Sal toils away on her project in Litle Rock, however, the United States is slowly but surely losing World War III. And the ultimate cause for the war turns out to be a trivial (and at the time scarcely noticed) act of Clinton’s Presidency: in return for submitting to stringent restrictions on cigarettes at home, and agreeing to pay reparations for cigarette-related deaths, the tobacco companies were given free reign, with US government support, to peddle their product in the Third World.
The only way to avert disaster is to change the course of history, using the dangerous technology of time travel. So Sal is sent into the past, to meet the 16-year-old Clinton in 1963, as well as the mature President in the mid-1990s.
That’s the set-up. Such a manic and loony framework allows Baruth to throw out extended riffs on such matters as Clinton’s character, the ways American popular culture has changed over the years (and the ways it hasn’t), and the paranoid mentality of the national-security/surveillance/military state. Baruth plays around a bit with the inevitable paradoxes of time travel (how changing the past changes the present from which we started out to change that past, leading to a destructively self-reflexive feedback loop), but this is mostly in order to think about what it means to look at things historically, and to not take the seeming obviousness of our surroundings for granted. We see the near-present, in which the book was written and is being read, from a perspective of extreme distance.
But mostly, we get to see Bill Clinton from a bunch of different angles, from adolescence before he had made his mark, to a future in which he is scarcely more present in peoples’ minds than Harry Truman, say, is to us today.
The X-President is really about how impossible it is (unless you are a hard-core hater from the Far Right) not to love ol’ Bill, even though you know that he’s a rascal and a scalliwag, whose vision never extended past the reports from the latest focus groups, whose accomplishments were at best disappointingly meager, whose political favors were always for sale, who always supported the military-industrial complex and the interests of multinational capital, and whose libido always overcame his judgment (though this last quality is, of course, rather endearing). But Clinton’s charm and charisma, his odd combination of narcissism and cynical calculation and genuine empathy and desire to help, are such that none of this matters. The book allows Clinton to seduce us all over again, all the more so in that we really should know better by now.

Philip Baruth’s The X-President is a science fiction novel about Bill Clinton. It’s a hoot. The novel is set (initially) in the year 2055. The narrator, Sal Hayden, an historian specializing in the twentieth century, is working on the authorized biography of the (still-living, thanks to prosthetic enhancements) 109-year-old former President (referred to in the text exclusively as “BC”).
As Sal toils away on her project in Litle Rock, however, the United States is slowly but surely losing World War III. And the ultimate cause for the war turns out to be a trivial (and at the time scarcely noticed) act of Clinton’s Presidency: in return for submitting to stringent restrictions on cigarettes at home, and agreeing to pay reparations for cigarette-related deaths, the tobacco companies were given free reign, with US government support, to peddle their product in the Third World.
The only way to avert disaster is to change the course of history, using the dangerous technology of time travel. So Sal is sent into the past, to meet the 16-year-old Clinton in 1963, as well as the mature President in the mid-1990s.
That’s the set-up. Such a manic and loony framework allows Baruth to throw out extended riffs on such matters as Clinton’s character, the ways American popular culture has changed over the years (and the ways it hasn’t), and the paranoid mentality of the national-security/surveillance/military state. Baruth plays around a bit with the inevitable paradoxes of time travel (how changing the past changes the present from which we started out to change that past, leading to a destructively self-reflexive feedback loop), but this is mostly in order to think about what it means to look at things historically, and to not take the seeming obviousness of our surroundings for granted. We see the near-present, in which the book was written and is being read, from a perspective of extreme distance.
But mostly, we get to see Bill Clinton from a bunch of different angles, from adolescence before he had made his mark, to a future in which he is scarcely more present in peoples’ minds than Harry Truman, say, is to us today.
The X-President is really about how impossible it is (unless you are a hard-core hater from the Far Right) not to love ol’ Bill, even though you know that he’s a rascal and a scalliwag, whose vision never extended past the reports from the latest focus groups, whose accomplishments were at best disappointingly meager, whose political favors were always for sale, who always supported the military-industrial complex and the interests of multinational capital, and whose libido always overcame his judgment (though this last quality is, of course, rather endearing). But Clinton’s charm and charisma, his odd combination of narcissism and cynical calculation and genuine empathy and desire to help, are such that none of this matters. The book allows Clinton to seduce us all over again, all the more so in that we really should know better by now.