NP Steve Erickson on Clinton, the 60s, sex

[Doug Millison]

http://www.salon.com/sex/feature/2000/08/18/erickson_sanctimony/index.html

excerpt:

"To be sure, Clinton is a rather pallid embodiment of the '60s, not
even really much of a Beatles Person -- more "Up, Up and Away"
than "Tomorrow Never Knows." Still, only out of the '60s could such
a sensibility have emerged. At almost the very moment he was a
teenager shaking John Kennedy's hand on the White House lawn,
6,000 miles away four young, fairly clueless Brits were unleashing
what would become the cultural equivalent of thermonuclear
holocaust, atomizing all the geopolitical structures and
philosophical verities that civilization believed it had resolved barely
a generation before. Losers from a scuzzy English seaport that
produced pop bands by the hundreds -- almost any of them,
according to accounts of the time, better than the lamely
monikered Silver Beatles -- they migrated to an even scuzzier
German seaport to play epic amphetamine shows before Deutsche
kids reading Camus. The children of England, in other words, were
learning French existentialism as mediated by the dispossessed
children of a Germany that just 20 years before bombed English
cities to rubble, while Hitler's children were absorbing an updated
black American slave music as mediated by the dispossessed
children of an England that just 15 years before bombed the Reich
to rubble. "
-- 

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>