Power, Henry Kissinger once said, "is the ultimate aphrodisiac. "It is all of that and more, as the formidable Dr. K surely knows. During the past 12 months, we have seen power and powerlessness side by side, opposite faces of the same capricious coin. Start with Bill Clinton. As President of the most powerful nation on Earth, he—with Hillary at his side—has often seemed an unwilling passenger on a roller-coaster ride in the polls. He's a winner for now, but hang on. Sounding off from opposite ends of the ideological dial, Howard Stem and Rush Limbaugh demonstrated the power of notions whose time in the marketplace of ideas has arrived—for better or worse, or better and worse. Infomercial diet deity Susan Powter spoke for the elusive power by which we hope to control our own destinies or at least the images of ourselves we would show to the world.
Oprah Winfrey felt "empowered," as the buzzword of the moment would have it, to reject her fans' and the media's fervent entreaties that she get married and write a book. Lyle Lovett, employing powers previously unsuspected and still a bit mysterious, became a fairy-tale hero with a twist; instead of becoming a swan, he managed to marry one.
Of course, not everyone was a winner in Mudville. Little Jessica DeBoer, now Anna Lee Schmidt, showed the helplessness of children as playthings of fate and the courts. Michael Jordan, wearying of the game he once loved and distracted by the death of his murdered father, hung up his Nikes before his time. None other than Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop, found himself hounded around the world by rumors of child abuse, his career and his very life in the balance. And in the end it fell to our oldest intriguer, the mighty Mississippi, to remind us who is holding the aces in the cosmic game we all play and why Nature sometimes rates a capital N.
