people could teach
Orwell something.

What will the future bring? Will Exner, still dying of cancer,
demand a DNA sample from John Kennedy Jr. to prove Jackie was
really his mother? Will Summers file a lawsuit demanding the
government turn over RFK's private snuff film of Monroe's murder?
Will Hersh now say that he was duped on the Monroe docs but now
he has the real McCoy: it was Jayne Mansfield all along. With Liz
Smith as the moderator, satire is impossible in this field.

But down deep, submerged but still present, there is a resistance
to all this. The public knows something is wrong. Two years ago,
CBS and the New York Times conducted a poll which asked the
respondents: If you could pick a President, any President, which
one would you choose to run the country today? The winner, in a
landslide, was John F. Kennedy who doubled the tally of the
second place finisher. In 1988, Rolling Stone surveyed the
television generation, i.e. the below forty group, on their
diverse opinions and attitudes. Their two most admired public
leaders were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, dead twenty
years before, when many of those polled were infants or not even
born. This holds not just in America. In Pete Hammill's 1995 book
Piece Work, he relates an episode in his life when his car broke
down in the Mexican countryside. He walked to a poor, Third World
style hut which had no amenities except a phone. Before he left,
he thanked the native Mexicans who lived there and took a look
around the dilapidated, almost bare interior. The only
decorations he saw were a plaster figurine of Che Guevara