[email protected]
Tue, 20 Oct 1998 22:42:33 EDT
"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 a 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 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, Leonard Peltier. 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 & 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 back yard: 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 some kind of 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."
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