Paul Andersen ([email protected])
Thu, 22 Oct 1998 08:42:54 -0700
"Sex, Power & The Presidency: The Clinton Conversation" -- "the opinions of
the musicians, poets, actors, writers and filmmakers who shape the culture
of our times..."
Bono
Lead Singer, U2
(p.70)
In the Eighties, U2 used to take shit in Europe for having hits in the U.S.
We loved the U.S. and lost ourselves in it...the music, the words, the
whole idea of America the dream. But by the time we were making The Joshua
Tree, the landscape we loved was a desert: cock-ups in Central America;
Iran-Contra; more shootings in East L.A. than in Lebanon; mentally
handicapped outpatients roaming the streets; savings and loans. For Irish
people who viewed the U.S. as the promised land, it was heartbreaking.
Enter the Clintons, an Eighties power couple with a pragmatic idealism that
would define the Nineties: rightish economics, leftish social reform; her
intellectual rigor, his strolling optimism. A White House staffer once
told me how frustrated the new president was at not being able to just jog
out the door without his security net, which tells you a lot about his
current troubles. And the key to his appeal: humanness. We met him a few
times, piggybacked his motorcade to a Chicago Bears game, gave him our read
on Ireland, hassled him over Tibet, Leonard Peltier. Even in disagreement,
the thing that impressed was brainpower.
We were in a black church in San Francisco the day after the '92 election.
It was electric, it was rock & roll, hope was alive. America was young &
sexy again, and wasn't all talk. The president's actions in Bosnia showed
up Europe's moral and bureaucratic morass. Here in Ireland, there wouldn't
be a Good Friday peace agreeement without him. It seems his real foes were
in his own backyard: medical insurers, the gun lobby, the powerful tobacco
companies. And something much worse -- in the media, an insatiable desire
for sex that mocks their own criticism of the president's. To the rest of
the world, America looks like a teenager in a masturbatory frenzy of
voyeurism and Schadenfreude: ratings vs. decency, a Salem witch hunt for
evidence vs. the human right to privacy, even in the wrong.
Stop it -- America is better than this. Move on. Stop it by not voting
for the politicians who have presided over it. The publishing of the Starr
report on the Internet is the defining moment at the end of the twentieth
century, like the papparazzi flies around the body of a princess, like a
video-game war, like O.J.'s trial by television. Except this time, it's
America in the dock.
See ya,
Paul
PS There is a full-page ad for "Best of U2 1980-1990" in the issue as well.
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