It was my pleasure and honor to speak at a symposium a while back with the likes of Jesse Ventura, former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, and former Presidential Press Secretary Mike McCurry.

The one-day event was called "Talking to the People: What Next in Public Communication?" and it was a collection of views from different walks of life. I was asked because I walk three weirdly different walks -- one as a writer about technology, another as a writer about leadership, and a third as a writer of poetry.

The only thing these walks have in common is that most people see them as having nothing in common.

So the question was, Why do all three? And the answer I came up with was: we like to keep them separate, and weak.

There have been times when leaders were stronger, and it was because they girded themselves in both the technology of the hour and the silver tongue of rhetoric.

There have been times when our poets mattered, because their words linked concretely to the life and death issues people cared about.

There have even been times when technology was not sterile and mechanistic; it was human technique harnessed to human tasks.

Ancient Ireland had no written language. As in many pre-literate cultures, its leaders therefore had a special responsibility to provide for common memory -- how to plant, how to fight, whom to emulate. People needed to devise a system for passing this survival knowledge from generation to generation.

As necessity is the mother of invention, the Irish created a system of poet kings called bards (other peoples called them rhetors), whose technology was a system of remembering without writing things down. Rich aural language, unforgettable because of its music, alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, took the place of written records.

The words were so good that they became permanent, even after their initial vibration in the air subsided.

So important was the bard to the community that if an enemy were in the community to negotiate, he was seated beside the bard. For to threaten violence near the bard was to threaten the life of the clan.

Many societies did this, but none matched the Irish for technology. Homer's Greek knew 16 kinds of metric feet; the poetry of Ireland boasted 64. And the people knew them all -- had to, in order to live.

But Ireland fell, and the British tradition of separate powers took hold throughout the west. Politicians were shorn of their rhetoric. Poets were stashed away in ivory towers and laureates. Technologists were cuffed to the cold task of accountancy.

Every now and then a leader comes along who knows the value of making a syllable hang in the air. Some of them, like the Irishmen McCarthy, Kennedy, and Moynihan -- actually had the gift and technology to match the leaderly skill.

They say Kennedy played Norman Mailer like a violin. George W. Bush hangs with novelist/songwriter Kinky Friedman. Jimmy Carter writes poetry himself, and friends, it ain't bad.

But mostly we don't want to see the three qualities reunited. We seem to prefer the kind of castrated leaders who attend electioneering seminars before filing for office, and line up to pay consultants $1000 an hour for lessons in leading.

You would think we'd crying out -- for leadership to connect people to endeavor, for art to matter again, and for the technological apparatus we pin so much of our hopes on to have a life outside the screen.

(Almost sounds like the Wizard of Oz, don't it?)

There's a strange story that appeared in the Washington Post during the impeachment. Latin novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes were having an evening with Bill Clinton. As they were breaking up, Marquez mentioned William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Clinton, according to Marquez, stood in the doorway quoting from memory the great prose passage at the end of the book. It's an anguished passage that would be especially poignant to a literate southern politician, and heartbreaking to a politician undergoing an impeachment trial. And revealing that Clinton knew it cold.

I don't know if this story was planted to consolidate the magical realist vote before the trial. Bill Clinton, in perfect Faulkner fashion, is a cipher among ciphers. But if true, it suggests that this perplexing and offensive man stands in the bardic tradition of leadership informed by the fire of poetry.

And it explains why we are loathe to see the three fuses intertwined. No Caesar, no Roosevelt wielded this.

Which explains, to this conspiracy theorist, why death, exile, and disgrace is the usual fate of leaders who master the spoken word.

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