Clinton quotes Kennedy. Reagan quotes Roosevelt. Glass quotes himself, endlessly. Warhol quotes Madison Avenue. The Autobiography of a Flea .
King does campfire tales, childish rip-offs from Poe.
And so on, and so on. So I have come not to expect a latter-day Barbara Jordan to appear, to inspire us, to remind us of what we were and what we can be. I expect the sordid American drama of greed-ridden Puritanical and political expediency to play itself out down to the last dirty little historical whimper. Which is the best all the players have in themselves. How can we expect them, filled like ourselves with hollow dreams and false, grasping hopes, smaller than life , to speak with a voice for the ages.