Farewell America (you will be glad you read this)

[donsu]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1028186,00.html

Once smitten, it should be impossible to fall out of love with America. Who could fall out of love with that New York adrenaline rush, or the clutter of the 7 Train as it grinds on stilts of iron from Manhattan out to Queens through the scents and sounds of 160 first languages? Who could fall out of love with the mighty desert when a lilac dawn fades out the constellations in its vast sky? Who could fall out of love with the muscular industry of America's real capital, Chicago, 'city of big shoulders', as the poet Carl Sandburg described it? It was insurgent Chicago that first captured my heart for America as a visiting teenager in 1970.

Now it's time to leave the United States as a supposed adult, having been a resident and correspondent for exactly as long as Tony Blair has been Prime Minister - I was appointed that May morning in 1997 that brought Britain's Conservative night to an end. Blair's love for America seems to have deepened since; but love is both the strongest and most brittle of sentiments, and mine has depreciated. I still love that adrenaline rush, the desert light, those big shoulders; but something else has happened to America during my six years to invoke that bitter love song by a great American, BB King, 'The Thrill is Gone': 'And now that it's all over / All I can do is wish you well...'

-snip-

During my first full year here there was a lynching in east Texas: James Byrd, a black man, was chained to the back of a truck by three whites and dragged to his death, severed into 75 pieces. The subliminal connections were obvious: Mississippi Burning; the smell of evil that hung in the muggy air as thick as the sweet scent of pine trees, as I ended those days with a drive, a little dazed, listening to Emmylou Harris's 'Waltz Across Texas Tonight'. But Jasper, Texas, was not a cliché. When the hooded Ku Klux Klan paraded through town a few weeks later, most of the crowd which faced them down was white. When the murder trials began, sure enough: slat blinds broke diagonal shafts of sunlight, and the fan whirred around - straight from the movie - but 11 whites on the jury elected the single African-American as foreman and sentenced a white racist, Billy King, to death for killing a black man. This in east Texas, the most racially vicious slice of the Deep South; something was afoot even in that corner of Bill Clinton's America; not a result but maybe a beginning.

-snip-

The gyre has turned three times in America since the Monica scandal engulfed Clinton's presidency. First, after November 2000, with that long wrestle between George Bush and Al Gore; counts, recounts and hanging chads. As even a Democrat pollster remarked at the time, the moment James Baker III arrived to handle Bush's side, the result was a foregone conclusion. Baker - lawyer to the Texas oil industry for decades and former Secretary of State to President Bush senior - was one of The Firm.
-snip-
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this is a long but deeply interesting article about why this journalist is leaving.

[LittleApple81]

1. Dupe

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=7451