File spoon-archives/bataille.archive/bataille_1999/bataille.9902, message 258


Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 03:42:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Orpheus <cw_duff-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: Why my Friend Bill Had to Lie, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (fwd)


	One wonders... about the aging brains of writers..
	************************
>Why my Friend Bill Had to Lie, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
>1/30/99
>
>The Guardian
>
>Copyright (C) 1999 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (TM)
>
>The first thing you notice about William Jefferson Clinton is his
>height.
>The second is his power of seduction: from the first handshake he oozes
>the familiarity of an old friend. The third is his intellectual
>brilliance. You can tackle him on any issue, however thorny, as long as
>you phrase your question right. I had already been warned by one of his
>lesser admirers that the real danger of Clinton is the way he charms you
>
>into thinking that whatever you are saying is the most fascinating thing
>
>he has ever heard.
>
>I met Clinton in August 1995 at a dinner organised by the writer William
>
>Styron at his summer house in Martha's Vineyard. During His first
>presidential campaign, he had said that my novel One Hundred Years Of
>Solitude was his favourite book. I was quoted in the Press responding
>that I thought this was just a bait for the Latino electorate. It didn't
>
>go unnoticed. Clinton's first comment on meeting me at Martha's Vineyard
>
>was that he'd meant everything he'd said.
>
>Carlos Fuentes and I have our reasons for believing that we lived a
>great
>chapter in our memoirs that night. Clinton caught us off guard with his
>sense of humour, his interest and respect for what we were saying. He
>hung on our every word as if it were gold dust. His mood fitted his
>appearance. His hair was cut short like a brush, his skin was tanned, he
>
>had the rude health of a sailor on leave and he wore a childish
>sweatshirt with a logo stamped on the chest. At 49, he was a glorious
>survivor of the generation of '68, someone who had smoked dope and sung
>along to the Beatles, someone who had taken to the streets in protest at
>
>the Vietnam war.
>
>The dinner began at eight and finished at midnight, there were 14
>guests at the table, but little by little, the conversation turned into
>an impromptu literary jousting match between the President and the three
>
>writers. The first topic was the imminent Pan-American summit. Clinton
>wanted it to be held in Miami, where it eventually did take place.
>
>Fuentes and I thought that New Orleans or Los Angeles had a more
>historical standing. We defended our thesis valiantly until it became
>clear that Clinton wouldn't budge. He was counting on the Miami vote for
>
>his re-election.
>
>'Forget votes, Mr President,' Fuentes said. 'Florida loses,
>history wins.' That set the tone for the evening. When talk turned to
>drug
>trafficking, the President lent me a benevolent ear: 'The 30 million
> drug addicts in the US are proof that the North American Mafia is
>much more powerful than the Colombians and the US authorities are far
>more corrupt.' When I raised the issue of Cuba, he seemed even more
>receptive: 'If you and Fidel sat down and discussed this face to face
>I'm
>sure that it could all be sorted out.' We skimmed over Latin America and
>
>it became clear that his interest was far greater than we had imagined,
>even though he lacked a few essential details. When the conversation
>threatened to turn too formal, we asked him to name his favourite film.
>High Noon, by Fred Zinnemann, whom he had honoured in London days
>before.
>And when we asked what he was reading, he breathed a sigh of relief and
>mentioned a book about economic wars of the future, whose author and
>title I didn't recognise.
>
>'You're better off reading Don Quixote,' I told him. 'It's all in
>there.'
>The truth is that Don Quixote is not read by half the people who mention
>
>it in conversation, but very few own up to never having opened it.
>Clinton proved with two or three references that he knew it well.
>
>Enthused, he asked us all to name our favourite books. Styron chose
>Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, I would have chosen Oedipus Rex by
>Sophocles, which has taken pride of place on my bedside table for 20
>years, but I decided on the Count Of Monte Cristo for reasons hard to
>explain. Clinton's favourite was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and
>Fuentes didn't hesitate on Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner's best
>work, although some prefer Light In August for personal reasons. In
>homage to Faulkner, Clinton stood up and, taking long strides around the
>
>table, recited from memory Benji's monologue from The Sound And The Fury
>
>- an astonishing but almost impenetrable passage.
>
>Talk of Faulkner led us once more on to the subject of the affinities
>between Caribbean writers and the authors of the American South. It
>seemed logical to us to view the Caribbean not as a geographical area
>confined to the Caribbean sea but as a vast cultural and historical
>space
>stretching down to the north of Brazil and up to the Mississippi basin.
>Thus Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and so many others are
>
>just as Caribbean in their own right as Jorge Amado or Derek Walcott.
>Clinton, born and bred in Arkansas, welcomed the idea and happily
>proclaimed his own Caribbean affiliation.
>
>It was approaching midnight when Clinton had to interrupt the
>conversation to take an urgent call from Gerry Adams, and then and
>there,
>he authorised Adams to raise funds and campaign for peace in Northern
>Ireland. That would have been a historic ending to an unforgettable
>evening had Fuentes not gone one step further. He asked Clinton who he
>considered to be his enemies. The answer was instant. 'My only enemy is
>right-wing religious fundamentalism.' With that, dinner was over. On the
>
>other occasions that I have met Clinton, in public or in private, my
>first impressions have been confirmed. He is quite the opposite of what
>Latin Americans imagine a US president to be.
>
>So is it right that this exceptionally human man should have his place
>in
>history distorted because he couldn't find a secluded spot in which to
>make love? It's true: the most powerful man on earth was unable to
>consummate a secret passion because of the invisible but ever-present
>eyes of his security force, a force that serves more to prevent than to
>protect.
>
>There are no curtains at the windows of the Oval Office. There is no
>lock
>on the bathroom door behind which Clinton carries out his more private
>matters. The vase of flowers that you see behind him in photographs of
>the Oval Office is, according to the press, host to the bugging device
>that provided details of his affair.
>
>Sadder still, the President only wanted to do what the common man has
>done behind his wife's back since the world began.
>
>Puritan stupidity did not only refuse him that, it withheld his right to
>
>deny it.
>
>Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that
>he
>was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale. Shielding
>himself with a similar trick of story telling, Clinton denied that he
>had
>had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. He denied it with his head
>held high, as any self-respecting adulterer would. Because at the end of
>
>the day, his personal drama is a private matter between him and his
>wife.
>Hillary was quick to defend him to the world with Homeric dignity.
>
>So it should be. It is one thing to lie to deceive, it is something
>quite
>different to conceal the truth in order to protect one's private life.
>By
>right, no one is obliged to denounce themselves publicly. But because
>Clinton persisted in his initial denial, he has been
>prosecuted in every way possible. Surely it is more dignified to perjure
>
>yourself in defence of carnal desire, than to condemn love altogether?
>It
>was Clinton's misfortune that, with the same determination with which he
>
>denied he was to blame, he was later to admit it and carry on admitting
>it in every single media - be it printed, visual or spoken - to the
>point
>of total humiliation.This was the fatal mistake of a lover disturbed in
>foreplay. Clinton will go down in history not for having made love
>badly,
>but for having turned the act of love on its head. He submitted to oral
>sex while on the telephone to a senator. He sacrificed himself to a
>frigid cigar. He resorted to every trick and appliance he could in order
>
>to make a mockery of nature, but the harder he tried, the more his
>inquisitors found grounds against him. Because puritanism is an
>insatiable vice that feeds off its own shit.
>
>The entire impeachment process has been a sinister plot by fanatics for
>the personal destruction of a political adversary whose grandeur they
>could not bear. The method chosen was the criminal abuse of the justice
>system by a fundamentalist public prosecutor named Kenneth Starr, whose
>inflamed and salacious examination of witnesses
>seemed to excite him to the point of orgasm.
>
>The Bill Clinton that we met four months ago at a White House gala
>held for Andres Pastrana was a different man. He was no longer the
>laid-back graduate of Martha's Vineyard, but a condemned man, wizened
>and
>shy. His professional smile couldn't hide his physical exhaustion; it
>was
>like the metal fatigue of an old plane.
>
>Days before, at a dinner with journalists, in the presence of the grande
>
>dame of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham, I heard someone say that
>judging by the Clinton trial, the US is still the country of Nathaniel
>Hawthorne. My dinner at the White House was the living proof.
>
>Hawthorne, the great American novelist of the last century denounced the
>
>horrors of New England fundamentalism which saw the Salem witches burnt
>alive. His best work, The Scarlet Letter, is the story of Hestor Prynne,
>
>a young married woman who had an illegitimate child by a Man who wasn't
>her husband. In the novel, a Kenneth Starr figure of the time orders
>that
>she shall be punished by wearing a penitent's shirt marked with the
>letter A, the same colour and smell as blood. A guard is ordered to
>follow her everywhere she goes, beating a drum so that passers-by will
>stand aside.
>
>The novel's ending shatters the dreams of our present day Starr, For the
>
>father of Prynne's child turns out to be the minister of the very cult
>that martyred her.
>
>The morals and the methods of the persecution of Clinton and
>Prynne are essentially the same. When Clinton's enemies were unable to
>find a basis for prosecuting him for what they wanted, they hounded him
>with questions until they caught him in a secondary snare. They forced
>him to denounce himself in public, they forced him to repent for
>something that he hadn't done, live on air. The drums that haunted
>Hester
>Prynne were replaced with the latest information technology, and through
>
>the lusty questions of the prosecutor, children at their mother's
>breast learned of the lies that their parents had told them about how
>they came to exist.
>
>Beaten by fatigue, Clinton succumbed to the unforgivable madness
>of an imagined enemy 5,396 sea miles from the White House forcefully
>punishing him just to divert attention from his personal grief.
>
>Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner and one of the greatest
>writers of this dying century, sums it up in one inspired flourish.
>'They
>have treated Clinton as if he was a black president.'
>
>
>
>Copyright Gabriel Garcia Marquez /Cambio Translation by Angelique
>Chrisafis.
>



   

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