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- by Mia T
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- Not Joe Klein's Primary Colors. And not Jack Stanton.
- bill clinton is straight out of
- Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
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- clinton is Alex,
- one of the few truly amoral characters in either film or literature;
- not quite as Kubrick (or Burgess) had imagined him, however,
- but rumpled, wrinkled, paunchy, edematous,
- stripped of the youth-excuse
- after 30 additional, pathetic, recidivistic years
- of marauding, stomping, raping, gangbanging, deceiving and destroying.
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- Like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the story of bill clinton
- is the story about a society that has lost its capacity for moral choice.
- But unlike in the less fabulous and no more ironic fable,
- clinton is not mere nascent symbol but nihilistic agent.
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- clinton, like Alex, is the leader of the gang, the "droogies."
- Eerily prefigured by the rocking, crooked phallus,
- clinton's a conscienceless sadist
- who thrills at risk and gratuitous destruction,
- whose sexual and non-sexual impotence
- is at the root of his obsession with "the old inout."
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- When Alex kills a woman during a rape, Alex is sent to prison.
- When clinton rapes women, girls, his country and God knows what else. . .
- and kills? --- check out Ron Brown's death, please!
- And don't forget the wag-the-dog, desperately-seeking-a-legacy bombings,
- or the cold-blooded Ricky Ray Rector execution---
- not clinton but society is imprisoned,
- imprisoned in clinton's
- besmirched, semen-stained, feckless presidency.
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- A risible and repulsive result;
- yet not even the punch line.
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- While Alex is conditioned in prison with aversion therapy,
- transmuted into a moral robot who becomes nauseated
- by the mere thought of sex and violence,
- bill clinton and his Thought Police,
- in a perverse reverse aversion,
- have conditioned society's collective brain
- into not mere acquiescence but twisted admiration.
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- In the end,
- if clinton's arrogant, ruthless, reckless nature is restored to him,
- it seems the joke will be on all of us,
- for it will be a victory for infinite victimhood and irresponsibility,
- for seduction, for violence, for nihilism, for anarchy.
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- We will have set apart clinton as the hero
- by making his victims less human than he;
- we will have allowed clinton to carefully estrange us from his victims
- so that we can enjoy the rapes and the beatings
- as much as clinton himself does.
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