Professor Harold Bloom, the famous Yale literary critic, has
been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. We know this because he took space on the op-ed
page of The Wall Street Journal to tell us so. Professor
Bloom’s reading of the great historian has led him to the
surprising conclusion that what the United States needs now is “a
military personage as president,” and one, moreover, “who is
more in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower than of Ulysses
Grant.” Now who do you suppose Professor Bloom has in mind?
Yes, you got it in one try:

In Wesley Clark, we have a four-star general and former
NATO commander who is a diplomatic unifier, an
authentic hero, wise and compassionate. That Gen. Clark
saved tens of thousands of Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo
is irrefutable …

Actually, that last proposition is eminently debatable, as
even a glance at the bumbling military campaign in Bosnia
and Kosovo will show. But Professor Bloom believes that
General Clark is “highly electable for 2004.” Hence he
discovers premonitions of Clark in Gibbon. Perhaps, in
Professor Bloom’s notorious phrase, that counts as an
example of “the anxiety of influence.” Maybe it is just
pedantic nonsense. In any event, we were pleased to see
Harold Bloom cultivating his talents as a humorist. No
sensible person could take his windy political endorsement
seriously. Which, come to think of it, might be why The
Wall Street Journal chose to publish it in the first place.