(another old piece - "the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." :-))
Talking about
So many times I wanted to write about my fondness of Bill Clinton and as many times I was glad that I did not get to it. Now, after all these turmoil years (for him, not really for most of us in the same sense), I am surprised by myself for still holding fairly postive opinion of this guy. It is particularly puzzeling considering meanwhile I have also been such
a dedicated reader of the Wall Street Journal - not a single day has passed by without some Journal editorial sneering at him (usually rightly so).
Politicians as a breed bore me. Back in 1992, however, I was quite impressed by the young and energetic pair, Bill and Al. Al lost his appeal long before his disastrous presidential election; yet Bill has kept his attractiveness from the ruins of his own making. I still consider 1998 a bad year because I spent way too much time worrying about his fate. Favorable and unfavorable events seemed to alternate each day and I would only read "good" news, rumors or not. So I never bothered with that Starr report, yet was pleased when Betty Currie lied to protect her boss (no principle on my part certainly). Of course, when I barely breathed a sigh of relief towards the end of his tenure, he had just got himself into the deep water of a pardon scandal. Now I have pretty much resigned to the fact that, from this guy, there is always another dirty shoe waiting to fall. Nonetheless I am still interested in reading any good things about him and hope somehow he continues to manage whatever trouble he is going to run into next.
I know it is again my soft spot for complicated personalities. I generally like people inflicted with extremes, strength and faults,
Still it is all too embarrassing and un-sought for, this unwavering fascination with someone so principle-less, faith-less and reckless. Now
5 comments:
that's pretty "rational", isn't it? ;-)
i meant to show the irrationality of human emotions. :-)
welcome, xiaosha!
Hear hear!
I can't agree with you more.
He's like a great escape artist. His complex personality is a rare case study.
One time while waiting at the gate at the Dulles Airport I saw Clinton striding down the walkway, surrounded by 4 or 6 handsome young bodyguards. He was wearing a dark gray suit with orange shirt inside, looking absolutely dashing. People were all gaping at him, star struck, including myself... He seemed to be exuding charm even when walking an airport isle...
---One time while waiting at the gate at the Dulles Airport I saw Clinton ...
lucky you! ;-)
meanwhile, i can't bear the sight of our current "great leader" or listen to his mumblings. and again it has nothing to do with what he thinks or can't think of. :-)
Haha. What a coincidence! (And you are just as "bad" as I am, hehe.) Have been reading Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" and this is what he said about the drama of 1998:
Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism-which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security-was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s, lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago as "the persecuting spirit"; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman's ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again.
>>>Haha. What a coincidence! (And you are just as "bad" as I am, hehe.) Have been reading Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" and this is what he said about the drama of 1998:
coincidence or inevitability. ;-)
thanks for reciting philip roth - all walden neighbors all the time. :))
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