c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ Ronald Reagan’s authorized biographer, Edmund Morris, is suffering for committing America’s original sin: the invention and reinvention of the self.

It is the New Age version of salvation and redemption and the first article of the Advertising/Public Relations Creed: I believe that I can be born again not through water and the spirit but through anti-aging creams and Grecian Formula.

Morris, a native of South Africa, merely took on the coloration of his Washington, D.C., surroundings, as animals and birds do to protect themselves against predators. Who can deny he lived among predators within the Washington Beltway, a zone of fancy whose principal product is the rearrangement of reality?

He caught his problem from us, becoming too American, too much like the spinners and weavers of truth substitutes such as Michael Deaver and James Carville, who are the modern counterparts of the biblical makers of false images.

Politicians may transform themselves every few hours, changing their opinions, their votes, their parties and, of course, their names. This often leads to loss instead of gain. Who can forget the onetime presidential candidate who famously traded the splendid Dickensian name of Hartpence for the bland Hollywood leading-man sound of Gary Hart?

Morris lost focus only after the White House became completely unreal under President Bill Clinton (not his birth name), who once wanted to be a movie star and, indeed, turned the presidential residence into a set for an X-rated term in office.

This has had numerous bad side effects, including the number of films and television series apparently inspired by the current president. The White House now shows up as regularly in the movies as that vast rock outcropping in Monument Valley the late director John Ford (not his real name) employed in so many cowboy movies starring John Wayne (not his real name, either).

Psychiatrists speak of the”as if”personality, the individual who seems to be leading a normal life until you examine it closely and discover it is all wrapping and no present, that it looks like a life on the outside but is spiritually empty within. Politicians are often”as if”personalities, constructs of managers, poll results, makeup artists. In short, movie stars.

Why blame Morris for finding a role for himself in the movie he was making of the Reagan biography? Every American wants to be in the movies and wear makeup and pretend to be part of great lives or great events. And during the week in which his technique was revealed, two movie stars _ Warren Beatty and Cybill Shepherd _ announced that they wanted to become real people and run for the presidency. And do not forget wrestling, the mother lode of phoniness in America, has produced a governor for Minnesota.

Morris was so taken by the cinematic that he created terrific special effects. He not only made himself Tom Sawyer to Reagan’s Huck Finn, but he constructed supporting data and footnotes for his invented self.

Illustrating how high-class fakery leads to low ethics, the book’s publishers defend their accepting what they knew to be false by insisting, according to The New York Times, that Morris”invented his character with such careful scholarship that lesser writers could not accomplish the same feat … (and) created an elaborate collection of fictional archives and documents to support his new self.” Yes, and let’s clear Willy Sutton’s record because he robbed banks so smoothly.

Now Morris, looking like a man who has just been hit by the car he himself was driving, is peeved that we are not letting the book”weave a spell of its own.”He has turned himself into the most overused of metaphors, a”wake-up call”about the difference between truth and falsehood. He is becoming a scapegoat for our excesses in reinventing ourselves with movie magazine moonshine that is OK until the film is over and we must head out into the harsh sunlight of reality again.

The wrath we have loosed on Morris may well be fueled by our own regrets at being bound by so many strands of fiction when we know, at a deeper level, that only the truth can make us free.

DEA END KENNEDY