Word: gore
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gore had just been read some of the letters he wrote during his years at Harvard. The letters, recently published in the New Yorker, were not all that remarkable for a student writing home in the late-1960s, a mish-mash of misplaced idealism and rampant cynicism about the U.S. Government...
First, and of lesser importance, it shows once again that our top elected officials grew up with a very different conception of this country than most of its people. Both Bill Clinton and Al Gore seem to have had, at least temporarily, a visceral hate for national institutions, or the nation as a whole. This is an interesting realization (and one that may help to explain the corresponding visceral dislike of the Clinton administration by the American people). But on a substantive level the feelings Gore expressed in his letters mean very little...
Unfortunately, that is not how Gore explained the letters. Instead, he reflexively brushed them off as kid's stuff, and that, it seems to me, is dishonest. First, a 20 year-old is not a kid. 20 year-olds vote--they helped Clinton and Gore get elected. Moreover, 20 year-olds were going to Vietnam and dying when Gore was writing home to father. And judging from the language Gore used, these were strongly-held sentiments, not idle ruminations...
...would have been refreshing if Gore had defended himself with honesty, rather than cant. The necessities of politics are often constraining, and forthrightness is a difficult commodity to find. But surely this was a time when forthrightness was possible. All he had to say was that the letters represented his true feelings at that time in his life, feelings that have subsequently changed...
Vice President Al Gore dismissed as a "college kid's silly language" a letter he wrote while a Harvard undergrad claiming the U.S. Army promoted "fascist, totalitarian regimes. " That letter and others -- written to his father, former Sen. Albert Gore, Sr., and disclosed this week in The New Yorker -- included inflammatory passages, such as: "We do have inveterate antipathy for Communism -- or paranoia as I like to put it. My own belief is that this form of psychological ailment -- in this case a national madness -- leads the victim to actually create the thing which is feared the most. It strikes...