William Butler Yeats tells of Icelandic peasants who found a skull in a cemetery and suspected it might be that of the poet Egill. "Its great thickness made them feel certain it was," he writes, but "to be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with a hammer." When it did not break, "they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet and worthy of every honor."
The human propensity to test the worthiness of a thing by seeing how well it stands up to abuse—the instinct to kick the tires on a used car—is an ancient and, if Yeats is to be trusted, occasionally charming habit. It can also be painful. Trial by ordeal, the venerable and once widespread practice by which fire or poison or some other divining element is used to determine a person's guilt or innocence, is the kick-to-test instinct applied to living subjects. It used to be a popular method for deciding whether or not someone was a witch, perhaps because what the practice lacked in fairness (the ancient Hindus tied a bag of cayenne pepper around the head of an accused witch, and suffocation was the only proof of innocence) it made up for in finality.
We have come a long way since those dark days. Or have we? We no longer pick our witches or our poets this way, but that is because moderns have little interest in either. When it comes to things they are interested in—doctors, lawyers, Presidents—they have replaced skull-bashing and suffocation with more subtle ordeals. Aspiring doctors must first survive the pressure cooker of a sleepless year of internship, aspiring lawyers the cutthroat paper chase of first-year law school. And those who aspire to the most exalted title of all, President, are required to traverse a campaign trail of Homeric peril. Its length is ludicrous: three years for any serious candidate; its requirements absurd: giving up privacy, often family and almost always a job ("You have to be unemployed to run for President," says Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, who leaves the Senate in January and is pondering a run for the presidency in 1988); and its purpose obscure: posing with funny hats has, on the face of it, little to do with the subject at hand, namely, governing.
The ritual seems strange. Things just aren't done that way any more. Not even in Chad, where ten years ago President Ngarta Tombalbaye ordered all high government officials to undergo Yondo, a sometimes fatal initiation ritual combining physical abuse (e.g., flogging, mock burial) with ingeniously gruesome tests of stamina (e.g., crawling naked through a nest of termites). For his pains, Tombalbaye was assassinated within a year, and his people danced in the streets. Americans bear their burdens with better humor. They show no inclination to deal nearly so decisively with, say, the Hubert Humphrey test of presidential toughness. Humphrey once questioned whether Walter Mondale had the "fire in the belly" to run for President, a charge so serious that to meet it Mr. Mondale had to submit to a three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow. Mondale may have other political liabilities, but the absence of a burning belly is no longer one of them.