FAREWELL AMERICA/The Observer/Guardian

[Gloria]

Broken out from the current World Media Watch...


1//The Observer/Guardian Sunday August 24, 2003

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



FAREWELL AMERICA

After six years, The Observer's award-winning US correspondent Ed Vulliamy takes his leave from a wounded and belligerent nation with which, reluctantly, he has now fallen out of love

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...'



I arrived in an America regarded by the world as 'cool'. One can never be sure whether a President defines the country or vice versa, but this was Bill Clinton's America.

I'm not quite sure what 'cool' means in any context beyond a vague positive, but the Clinton administration turned even Washington into a vaguely 'cool' place; one could spend a relaxed evening listening to the Allman Brothers Band with someone who had all day been advising the President of the United States over takeout pizza (George Stephanopoulos, who, admittedly, left the administration, disillusioned).

Meanwhile out in the world, intervention by the US was either welcomed by the persecuted of Haiti and Kosovo or else craved by (but culpably denied) those in Bosnia and Rwanda - as a force of deliverance, not of empire. Clinton's declared quest did not always aim to embrace only the Americans. Terrorists then were spawned by the homegrown Right; proud to murder hundreds of their own countrymen, women and children with the Oklahoma bomb of April 1995, a bloodbath I covered during a brief American sojourn exploring the armed 'patriot' network in which Timothy McVeigh - by no means a lone wolf - operated. Strange now to recall that stench of charred masonry, the floodlit wreckage, the rescue workers spluttering dust, the tearful, wandering bereaved displaying pictures of their 'missing'... (scenes that would return to a different America, from a different quarter, six years later).

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[LittleApple81]

1. dupe

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