Gorgeous George

People might bristle at celebrities speaking politics, but when politicians are as vacuous and devoid of ideas as your average celebrity, someone as forthright and articulate as George Clooney has a responsibility to speak. Thank God he rarely requires a second invitation.

 

George Clooney: I was good. I had two Cincinnati Reds tryouts, but when I went up to bat, the pitcher threw an 85mph curveball at my head, and I threw myself to the ground. Everybody was laughing. I remember standing up, and it was the first realisation that I wasn’t going to be a professional baseball player. It was devastating.

 

GC: I'm right where I want to be in my life. I’m having dinner in two nights with Bernard Kushner, the French foreign minister, and we’re working on a Darfur policy. I want to be able to do that. I’m not a policymaker, but I’m an advocate – maybe a little more than an advocate. I’m a diplomat in some scary, f**ked-up way. I like the ability to do that. It’s what my father’s always done. It’s what my mother’s always done. 

 

GC: Not just apologise – cower from it. Screaming liberals will go, “I’m not a liberal!” It really started with the Dukakis campaign, where the opposition made liberal sound like big taxes, big government. So now, liberals – and I’m talking Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards – will go, “I’m not a liberal!” All I said about Iraq was “We should ask some questions before we send in 150,000 people to get shot at”. I was shocked that my liberal friends in the Senate didn’t ask those questions. I was angry. They sit back and go, “We didn’t know”. I knew. And I’m not so informed. I don’t think it’s just your right to question government – it’s your responsibility, always, because unchecked government corrupts. The press wasn’t going to do it; The New York Times admits it. So whoever co-opted the word “liberal” has to give it back.

 

GC: That’s why it has to be done by a president. The president can do it. Kennedy could do it. And I ain’t no Republican, but Reagan could have done it. Bush has no interest in doing it. It takes balls to get up and do it.

 

GC: Political discussion. Seven years ago, you couldn’t sit at a restaurant and have anyone talking about the state of the country at all. We voted a president in - if we voted him in at all - out of apathy. We thought, “We don’t need a leader anymore; we need a manager.” Is it Gore? Is it Bush? Everybody thought, “Ah, what’s the difference? Either-or. All we need is somebody to manage. The Cold War’s done, just get us through, take care of the occasional bad problem”. And then after 9/11, the world changed.

 

GC: What you’d like it to be is “tried to leave things a little better off”. What it probably will be is “two-time sexiest man alive”. [Laughs] The one thing my dad taught me – which sort of informed me on everything, including going at the administration when I did – was that the only thing you don’t want to be is on the wrong side of history. You don’t want to be standing with George Wallace when he’s keeping James Hood from going to college, even though it’s easier to do at that point. What I’m always afraid of is being on the wrong side of history, where you go, “God, I was sitting there stoning the witches, because it was easier.”

 

for a full version of this article, see NOX17.