The $165 million dollar single-wide.
Yikes, isn't that the door to the famous 'finishing' sink?
Everyone within three miles gets a black umbrella except for...
A library worker cleans off a seat for Dubya, a real President...
Posted on 11/25/2004 12:12:41 PM PST by Libloather
Elusive building, like the man
Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004
By John Brummett
I agree with Hillary Clinton when she says her husband's new presidential library in Little Rock reflects him perfectly. But I see it and him differently from the way she sees them.
She says the structure represents Bill in that it is open, expansive and full of light. She's correct as far as that goes. But the library mirrors him in a more substantive way: What you make of it depends on your angle.
From the Interstate 30 bridge over the Arkansas River the structure looks for all the world like a pretentious house trailer. By that I mean the traditional single-wide, not the double-wide that the national writers kept talking about last week. They do not know their manufactured housing.
But when you're on the site and gazing north along the glistening western side of this massive and powerfully detailed steel-and-glass protrusion, which is cantilevered and mildly missilelike, you behold a dramatic and compelling work of modern architecture. As New York sophisticates have tried to explain, the structure is metaphorical and futuristic. It symbolizes Clinton's theme of a bridge to the 21st Century. It's an incomplete bridge, suspended, spanning nothing. We can only prepare for and reach out to the future, not tell it.
You look across the river into the peacefully radiant yellow and orange trees of an undeveloped section of North Little Rock and wish the area could be left alone. Then you turn west and observe an instant contrast: Little Rock as you've never seen it, from this long-neglected and racially resegregated eastern side of the interstate highway, through the speeding and heavy freeway traffic into three new towers of the River Market and the old skyscrapers beyond. Your city gets reborn to you.
Inside you see, as Hillary observes, accessibility and brightness. You play with the interactive touch-screen computers. You are moved by exhibits on race relations, Irish peace-seeking and international humanity. You are impressed by the graph denoting steadily rising economic performance in the Clinton years. You enjoy the photographs and personal items revealing the ingratiating pedestrianness of this uncommonly common man.
But then you go to the alcove presenting the exhibit about Monica Lewinsky and impeachment to peruse a description of events that, while true enough, stops frustratingly short of candor or accountability.
You want one more paragraph, something like this: "So, yes, the investigation and impeachment of the president stemmed from the partisan abuses by the Republicans and their politics of personal destruction as nurtured by a new and less responsible media. But in the end, the president, by misbehavior and dishonesty, brought problems on himself, betrayed the country and damaged any hope of lasting influence for his third-way politics."
It comes down to where you are when you look at the building and the man. From a distance there's tackiness. Up close there's such glorious impressiveness that your breath almost gets taken away. Inside, at the core, there's much to see and admire, then, inevitably, slipperiness.
I may never come to a firm conclusion about the building, just as I've never come to one about its subject. All I can say with certainty is that Bill Clinton is a distinctive and elusive man who has forever changed the landscape of his home state by favoring it with a structure just as distinctive and elusive.
The $165 million dollar single-wide.
Yikes, isn't that the door to the famous 'finishing' sink?
Everyone within three miles gets a black umbrella except for...
A library worker cleans off a seat for Dubya, a real President...
The clinton Liebrary also looks like a phallus, which is rather appropriate, since clinton was such a prick.
The $165 million dollar single-wide.
Is that the drive-through underneath?
close up
LOL!!!!!!!
Thats one ugly building.
Put a giant condom on it to reflect the true spirit of what was really important to Bill Clinton.......
Hahaha! It IS a trailer house!
I don't suppose there's a video clip of his lying to the American public, "I did not have sex with that woman." I also, suppose there's not a picture of that bruiser on the side of his head when Hillary chunked an ashtray or whatever it was at him on their little getaway weekend to Martha's Vineyard. You know, that weekend the scandal hit the fan and Chelsea had to walk between them across the lawn which was aired on every station and printed in every newspaper.
I highly doubt Clinton used condoms.
(it looked more like a RR structure)
Dang. Almost forgot the pinched stuff. If it isn't the actual item, will there at least be pictures of the heist?
bump
Good thing the toilets work or the building would, like Bill, be full of it.
What a piece of junk.
All flash & trash...just like Clintoon!
I have no idea what's inside but the structure looks as if it could be erected for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I have heard reports that a sum of $165 million dollars was contributed by various donors...some were arab, guess they're expecting to get their money's worth in 2008.
There must have been an awful lot of loot left over.
You're right! And we all know they didn't have to spend any of it on silverware, china, or artwork!
Well it does look as if it is wrapped in plastic and secured with duct tape.
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