Can anyone sell me on why I should use clojure over say, any of the other nice Lisp-1s, given that I don't care about java.
You should watch Rich Hickey's talk "Clojure for Lisp Programmers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPNkH-7PRTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mbcYxHO0nM