Inspiring Story
Justin Webb writing in The Times tells the inspiring story of Loretta Lynch, the US attorney general, who has risen to one of the highest offices the American state despite being born at a time when her family was living in segregated conditions similar to those in apartheid South Africa.
But that's what I like about America: its 'can do' attitude, its willingness to confront problems and its ability to change the game.
Racism and prejudice still exist in America, obviously, but society has reinvented itself compared to how things were only 50 years ago.
Whereas is large parts of the Islamic world, for example, Muslims are still killing each other every day over a long-running, unresolved feud between the Shia and Sunni branches of the same religion.
So if you ask me, warts and all, America is still a great country.
Whereas is large parts of the Islamic world, for example, Muslims are still killing each other every day over a long-running, unresolved feud between the Shia and Sunni branches of the same religion.
So if you ask me, warts and all, America is still a great country.
If you want justice, call for Loretta Lynch
By Justin Webb - The Times
The US attorney general is not just the scourge of Fifa but she shows how to rise above prejudice
There go the Americans again, sticking their noses into other people’s business. Football, a game they have no regard for, only playing it seriously till the age of ten, brought to book by people who won’t even watch it on TV because there aren’t enough advertising breaks; Fifa officials hauled from their beds at a startlingly early hour at the behest of an arrogant superpower.
As the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich put it, the Fifa arrests were “evidently another case of illegal extra-territorial implementation of American law.”
Well, it’s a view.
Others, on Twitter, pleaded with the FBI to investigate further football outrages. Maradona’s “hand of God” for instance. Or Geoff Thomas missing an open goal against France in 1992. America we love you, much of the football world cried out. We didn’t mean it when we said you were ghastly and loud and dim. We really do think you will win the World Cup one day. And if you call it “soccer”, hey, that’s fine too.
The Russians might be unmoved but one woman has done more this week to counter the mutterings of the global coalition of anti-Americans than the entire presidency of Barack Obama. Her name is Loretta Lynch.
Appointed only last month, America’s first black woman attorney-general is now world famous. There could be no finer American export: her story and her role are the stuff of the American dream and the product of American political culture.
First the personal history, which is beyond jaw-dropping when you consider the power she is wielding this week. Her mother Lorine began life picking cotton in the fields of North Carolina and her father Lorenzo was a Baptist preacher who remembers driving across the American South and not being able to use the “whites only” lavatories at roadside cafés. In an interview with TheWashington Post he said of those days: “You were never judged on merit . . .There were no black police, no black judges, no black bankers or even clerks in the stores.”
But America was changing and Loretta was clever. She did so well on a standardised test in her mostly white elementary school that she was asked to take it again. A white student would have suffered no such indignity. Loretta sat another exam and increased her score. When she left secondary school to go to Harvard the teachers gave the top prize to Loretta and to a white child who had scored less: to have awarded a black child alone would have been too controversial. And this was in 1977.
In short: Loretta Lynch knows injustice when she sees it. And she knows what it takes to overcome it and — let’s guess here — she feels quite strongly about righting wrongs and rewarding good character. She lives this stuff.
It is a quintessentially American story; a journey towards betterment, personal but social as well; a land that wants — aches — to think of itself as just.
But there is another, perhaps less noticed, uniquely American side to the Loretta Lynch story. The role of the district attorney — her job in New York before she became attorney general — is an all-American dramatic construction. Politically appointed or directly elected, local attorneys are not just powerful: they are designed to be invigorating, energetic, aggressive.
In fact much of the style of the Swiss raid was out of the form-book of a previous hard-charging New York district attorney: step forward (as if you could stop him) Rudy Giuliani. The man who rose to become mayor of the city and a serious presidential candidate, is also the man who is credited with inventing the “perp walk” in which suspects are arrested in full view of the previously tipped off media.
Ms Lynch is no political friend of Mr Giuliani — she has been a Democratic appointee all her career. But she is very much in the grand American tradition of the take-no-prisoners attorney. They are a breed and they follow a tradition that marries personal ambition with the deliverance of justice in a manner that can make Europeans feel a little sweaty around the collar.
To put it bluntly, the Fifa raid was a personal opportunity for her. That’s how the American system works. As an aide of a Bush era attorney general put it: “It’s a huge story, and it is a heck of a lot more interesting than the average tax case — and this one is a tax case. This is one where she hits a home run. It helps to define who she is and helps to define her to the American people.”
Hit a home run. He meant “put it in the back of the net”. But who’s complaining?
The US attorney general is not just the scourge of Fifa but she shows how to rise above prejudice
There go the Americans again, sticking their noses into other people’s business. Football, a game they have no regard for, only playing it seriously till the age of ten, brought to book by people who won’t even watch it on TV because there aren’t enough advertising breaks; Fifa officials hauled from their beds at a startlingly early hour at the behest of an arrogant superpower.
As the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich put it, the Fifa arrests were “evidently another case of illegal extra-territorial implementation of American law.”
Well, it’s a view.
Others, on Twitter, pleaded with the FBI to investigate further football outrages. Maradona’s “hand of God” for instance. Or Geoff Thomas missing an open goal against France in 1992. America we love you, much of the football world cried out. We didn’t mean it when we said you were ghastly and loud and dim. We really do think you will win the World Cup one day. And if you call it “soccer”, hey, that’s fine too.
The Russians might be unmoved but one woman has done more this week to counter the mutterings of the global coalition of anti-Americans than the entire presidency of Barack Obama. Her name is Loretta Lynch.
Appointed only last month, America’s first black woman attorney-general is now world famous. There could be no finer American export: her story and her role are the stuff of the American dream and the product of American political culture.
First the personal history, which is beyond jaw-dropping when you consider the power she is wielding this week. Her mother Lorine began life picking cotton in the fields of North Carolina and her father Lorenzo was a Baptist preacher who remembers driving across the American South and not being able to use the “whites only” lavatories at roadside cafés. In an interview with TheWashington Post he said of those days: “You were never judged on merit . . .There were no black police, no black judges, no black bankers or even clerks in the stores.”
But America was changing and Loretta was clever. She did so well on a standardised test in her mostly white elementary school that she was asked to take it again. A white student would have suffered no such indignity. Loretta sat another exam and increased her score. When she left secondary school to go to Harvard the teachers gave the top prize to Loretta and to a white child who had scored less: to have awarded a black child alone would have been too controversial. And this was in 1977.
In short: Loretta Lynch knows injustice when she sees it. And she knows what it takes to overcome it and — let’s guess here — she feels quite strongly about righting wrongs and rewarding good character. She lives this stuff.
It is a quintessentially American story; a journey towards betterment, personal but social as well; a land that wants — aches — to think of itself as just.
But there is another, perhaps less noticed, uniquely American side to the Loretta Lynch story. The role of the district attorney — her job in New York before she became attorney general — is an all-American dramatic construction. Politically appointed or directly elected, local attorneys are not just powerful: they are designed to be invigorating, energetic, aggressive.
In fact much of the style of the Swiss raid was out of the form-book of a previous hard-charging New York district attorney: step forward (as if you could stop him) Rudy Giuliani. The man who rose to become mayor of the city and a serious presidential candidate, is also the man who is credited with inventing the “perp walk” in which suspects are arrested in full view of the previously tipped off media.
Ms Lynch is no political friend of Mr Giuliani — she has been a Democratic appointee all her career. But she is very much in the grand American tradition of the take-no-prisoners attorney. They are a breed and they follow a tradition that marries personal ambition with the deliverance of justice in a manner that can make Europeans feel a little sweaty around the collar.
To put it bluntly, the Fifa raid was a personal opportunity for her. That’s how the American system works. As an aide of a Bush era attorney general put it: “It’s a huge story, and it is a heck of a lot more interesting than the average tax case — and this one is a tax case. This is one where she hits a home run. It helps to define who she is and helps to define her to the American people.”
Hit a home run. He meant “put it in the back of the net”. But who’s complaining?
