Amber is not indifferent. She’s just numb. Listen to her convention commentary in her own voice.
People ask me continually about the radio talk show legend, 
the ferociously articulate caller who tangled on the air with the best (including Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia, William Safire, William F. Buckley and Harold Bloom) and bested them all. “How’s Amber?” people want to know. “What is she thinking? Are you in touch?”
Well, we are ever in touch, and she is ever her indomitable, industrious, provocative self.
This summer she is reading Robert Fagles’ translation of The Iliad, “the ultimate tale of war and consequences,” and scheming to hand the book directly to Donald Rumsfeld.
She is appalled by the machine guns in the hands of the SWAT teams on the Boston transit system during convention week. “I’m scared stiff,” she says. For want of identity papers, she says, “I feel like a criminal,” though her only crime is to have been orphaned in Boston 20 years ago, at the age of 11. So she does not advertise herself, but she could be the smallish brown-skinned beauty sitting next to you, with a backpack, on the subway.
Amber typifies for me a sort of uninvited guest at the American feast. She is the “other” in our midst. She studies this country with an unrequited fascination.
This summer, however, she is part of the core audience for politics that has tuned out our hometown Democratic convention.
She is furious that the Democrats assembled in Boston this week never mention their grand-daddy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Months ago Amber told me she hoped the Democrats didn’t win the 2004 election, because they shouldn’t have to clean up George Bush’s mess. Four more years at this rate, I said, and the country could be unrecognizable. She said: “Chris, it is unrecognizable.”
Amber is unreconciled to the “coup d’etat” of 2000 and the government that cheapened civil liberties and “took us into a war.. that John Kerry voted for.”
In a Caribbean grade-school Amber feasted on American heroes like Patrick Henry and slogans like “Give me liberty or give me death!”
“I’m one of those strange creatures who came to this country from somewhere else, who still believes in those American ideals and who couldn’t believe the U.N. and Jimmy Carter weren’t flying into Florida [in 2000] and declaring this an invalid election–’cause I certainly would have wanted the United States to be calling an election like that in my country invalid. You think of me as a negative–I think of me as a positive person. I positively and passionately and with every fiber of my being believe in this country and what it stands for–and I haven’t seen that for years now.”
But that’s not quite true either. She says she has fallen in love this summer with New York City–the brilliant shower of accents, colors, voices. It’s a $10 trip on the Chinatown bus. And she has wept for the scar of 9.11. “What scares me,” she says, “is that we’re creating a hundred more 9.11s. That’s what keeps me awake every night.”
Amber speaks for herself here. She may even speak for you.
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I’m glad to hear about Amber. I was wondering about her the other day.
I’ve never heard anyone so unrelentingly negative and pessimistic. She had virtually nothing positive to say about anything. Her interview drained the life force out of me. A professional complainer. As for the election of 2000 and how it made her feel, how does she think the rest of us felt when Clinton, a draft dodging, lying lothario beat a real American hero as a result of a jug-eared nutjob jumping into the race. Why does a whiner like Amber choose to berate the US when there are countries that are openly practicing genocide and others are starving their people. Why do these people always want to lambast the US? Does Amber work? She weems to have a lot of time to travel and hang around and real the Iliad. Could she be living off the largess of the country she despises?
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Well, Amber, don’t know if I’ve met you as I go protesting the coup d’etat of both our federal government and our Bill of Rights by the madmen of the Bush junta. But I would love to.
It is a sign of your love for and belief in this country that you sound so ‘negative’ as one ignoramus put it. In the same way that I must have the right to set fire to a piece of red/white and blue material to SHOW my freedom, then I must also have the right to express my fury at the disdain this bat-eared coke brain shows my Bill of Rights. He is also a distant cousin, and I pray for his soul.
Thanks, Chris,and thank you, Amber. It gives me some kind of solace that we’ve been this corrupt before and recovered. Pray it’s not too late.
Well, Amber, don’t know if I’ve met you as I go protesting the coup d’etat of both our federal government and our Bill of Rights by the madmen of the Bush junta. But I would love to.
It is a sign of your love for and belief in this country that you sound so ‘negative’ as one ignoramus put it. In the same way that I must have the right to set fire to a piece of red/white and blue material to SHOW my freedom, then I must also have the right to express my fury at the disdain this bat-eared coke brain shows my Bill of Rights. He is also a distant cousin, and I pray for his soul.
Thanks, Chris,and thank you, Amber. It gives me some kind of solace that we’ve been this corrupt before and recovered. Pray it’s not too late.
Well, Amber, don’t know if I’ve met you as I go protesting the coup d’etat of both our federal government and our Bill of Rights by the madmen of the Bush junta. But I would love to.
It is a sign of your love for and belief in this country that you sound so ‘negative’ as one ignoramus put it. In the same way that I must have the right to set fire to a piece of red/white and blue material to SHOW my freedom, then I must also have the right to express my fury at the disdain this bat-eared coke brain shows my Bill of Rights. He is also a distant cousin, and I pray for his soul.
Thanks, Chris,and thank you, Amber. It gives me some kind of solace that we’ve been this corrupt before and recovered. Pray it’s not too late.
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Pearl Harbor came to NYC? Where’s FDR? Yes, FDR’s response was total war and the quest for unconditional surrender, [preparation for] atomic bombing, military tribunals, and suspension of civil liberties for large numbers of Americans. Sounds about right.
Nice interview, great job
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[...] has them all). We wanted oracles. Then came an email from a listener in New York: “Give me Amber, or give me death…,” thirsting for that fabulous firehose of crystalline commentary [...]
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