Timothy McIntyre ([email protected])
Mon, 21 Dec 1998 19:33:54 -0800 (PST)
Personally, I'm a big Clinton fan, almost as much of a fan of his as I am
of U2, so if anyone accuses me of being biased in posting this, they're
right. Besides, how cool is that our President has a favorite U2 song?
(Angel of Harlem) Okay, here's the bit:
-By Bono, lead singer U2:
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, thw 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 Lebanon; mentally
handicapped outpatiets roaming the streets; savings and loans. For Irish
people who viewed the U.S. as a promised land, it was heartbreaking.
Enter the Clintons, an eighties power couple with 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 not being able to just jog
out the door without his security net, which tells you much 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 and Leonard Peltier. But even in
disagreement, the thing that impressed was the brainpower.
We were in a black church in San Francisco the day after the '92 election.
It was electric, it was rock and roll, hope was alive. America was young
and sexy again, and it 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 agreement without him. It seems that 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 looked 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 a defining moment at
the end of the twentieth century, like the paparazzi 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 itself that's in the dock.
-Rolling Stone 11/12
________________________________________
Timothy McIntyre
Boston University School of Law
[email protected]
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~timothym
"The writer never seeks admiration.
He wants to be believed."
--Jean LeCocteau
________________________________________
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Mon Dec 21 1998 - 19:35:14 PST