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And these days, Harlem is on the rise again, with Disney moving in, and Rite Aid and Magic Johnson's movie theater. And Starbucks and the Gap. And a revitalized Apollo Theater, and the fashionable houses of Striver's Row made fashionable again. And now, who should appear, ready to do business, but the Comeback Kid himself?
Like the former President, Harlem attracts, repels and attracts again. It is a sad and brazen place and yet, oddly, one in which it is possible to see something essentially American that one cannot see elsewhere. Here all the music and shadows of the country flow together. Here thrives the figure of the adorable con artist, like Harlem's Mr. Rinehart in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, whose "world was possibility." He was "Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the lover and Rine the Reverend." His multiple identities occupied "a world without borders...where Rine the rascal was at home."
This is how one begins to see Clinton, and how history may see him as well--in his wide-brimmed hat and million-dollar zoot suit, and a smile for everyone. After the heist of the White House gifts, after the shady pardon of Marc Rich and the latest brother-act pardons of the Clinton Going-Out-of-Business sale--long after Monica--he emerges on 125th Street, larger even than himself. He is the fallen preacher, the three-card-monte dealer, and the best of all time. And he is going to bless and disappoint and fool us again. But what the hell.