When I went to Madrid to interview Newton Bigelow, my main goal was to gather a few juicy factoids about his personal life which I could pass on to his irritatingly persistent admirers. As I listened to him talk, though, I was caught by the sick irony of his predicament. Bigelow is man who deeply, almost obsessively, loves his home country, but at the time finds the idea of returning to it completely repugnant. This creates a tension in him which sort of pulses out of him, like the light from one of those beeping orange traffic barricades. I ended up throwing out most of my preselected questions, opting instead to follow his train of thought as best I could.

What follows is a partial transcript of that conversation. I think it provides a glimpse into the mind of this difficult, unapologetically critical, but undeniably patriotic American.
 
RP: I think the question your fans back home most want to know the answer to is, "why did you leave America?"

NB: I saw Oliver North being glamorized as a hero, and I realized it wasn't my country anymore. I watched his testimony on television, and the way he twisted up his face trying to look sincere made me physically sick. Then I heard about all of the posters and T-shirts, the ones which proclaimed "Ollie North, American Hero", and I had a sort of nervous collapse. Not in the sense of going insane, you understand, but it was as if reality just sort of shifted, and nothing about America looked familiar anymore.

RP: So you found the Iran-Contra scandal too much to bear. That's understandable, but why didn't you return when Clinton took office?

NB: How was Clinton any better? Oh, I'll admit to a brief period of optimism after he was elected, but he soon proved himself to be just a different species of weasel. I mean, forget about the Starr Investigation. That was just Republican mudslinging. SOP for those guys since the Nixon era. What was disgusting about Clinton was his complete lack of commitment to any principle beyond his own self-interest. He was the slick glad-hander who would sell his own children if he thought there was something in it for him. Actually, he would have made a great Republican, but the Republicans hated his guts, so the Democrats got stuck with him.