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"It's like taking the rock jerk that the Fly is and . . . take him to his logical conclusion, which is when he's fat and playing Las Vegas." -- Bono, on his MacPhisto persona |
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"It's like taking the rock jerk that the Fly is and . . . take him to his logical conclusion, which is when he's fat and playing Las Vegas." -- Bono, on his MacPhisto persona |
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Sex, Power & The Presidency: The Clinton ConversationThe opinions of the musicians, poets, actors, writers and filmmakers who shape the culture of our times...
Rolling Stone,
November 12, 1998
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, 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. © 1998 Rolling Stone magazine. All rights reserved.
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