by Jim Kunstler
I was pretty disturbed eight years ago when Hillary Clinton up and
announced she was running for a New York seat in the US Senate. Say
what? She didn't even live here after she quit Arkansas. Why didn't
she run for the single non-voting District of Columbia House of
Representatives seat (in a primary against Eleanor Holmes Norton)?
Why? Because Hillary is a monster of ambition.
So, Hillary and Bill bought a piece of real estate in
Westchester County, NY, and that theoretically qualified her to run
for that senate seat. Of course, her move was a huge slap in the face
to the 15 million or so adult native New York staters who were also
theoretically entitled to run for that office -- including especially
the smaller but still substantial number of New Yorkers with serious
qualifications. They all rolled over for Hillary, allowing the
Clintons to maintain a major power base in American government when
the Big Show of Bill's White House tenure was up.
Her run for president took off on schedule with a disturbing
sense of inevitability. It was clear that she had internalized the arc
of the women's movement to the the degree that the nation owed her a
turn in the White House, since this was the logical symbolic
destination of the Boomer political ethos: absolute equality above all
other considerations -- Hillary gets to play, too! The American
public seemed willing to go along with this national psychodrama. It
satisfied a certain school days sense of morality. Then Barack Obama
had to come along and spoil it all. The nerve of that... uppity Negro!
Or so, apparently, Hillary would have us believe, now that her
campaign has run off the rails. In awful desperation she has so much
as said that the Democratic party has to nominate her because non-
white people are unelectable -- forgetting for a moment that Barack
Obama is as much white as he is black.
The spectacle of Hillary's un-making has been pretty horrible to
witness, the efforts to stage her as a lumpenprole Nascar mom drinking
boilermakers while celebrating her latest hunting exploits. (How
worried is Hillary about making her mortgage payments, or filling her
gas tank?) Naturally, the final act of this nauseating play takes
place in Hillbilly Heaven, the states of West Virginia and Kentucky,
where Hillary expects to make a big "statement" about exactly whom
voters will go for. She'll win big and the effort will symbolically
disgrace her.
She's carrying on now like William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes
Trial -- an obvious, gibbering loser unwilling to shut up and go home,
even after every measure of consensus from the bailing super delegates
to the cover of Time Magazine has made it clear who the preferred
party nominee will be.
I hope New York voters will not fail to remember this ghastly
final act of the 2008 primary season. I hope a bona fide New Yorker
will step up and challenge Mrs Clinton for the senate seat she will
return to for the next several years. I hope the Clintons will move
offstage and do something else -- enjoy their millions... make even
more money... use it to "go green" or something....
Back around the year 2000, I used to joke with my friends that
Bill Clinton would return (despite the two-term limit) as Emperor Bill
the 1st. He almost made it. I voted for him twice in the 1990s, but
the new script addition wasn't so appetizing. It would have been one
of the stranger occurrences in all of modern world history. The
political "death" of Hillary and Bill is a story of Shakespearean
dimensions. It seems to be ending as farce, though. Who knows, before
the day is over, Hillary may yet put on a pair of overalls with one
suspender and have her picture taken sucking on a jug of moon****ne
likker. Of course, irony has been the Boomer's intellectual stock-in-
trade.
Whatever America's fate may be in these very trying times of
peak oil and climate change, a consensus seems to have formed that we
can't afford to leave the same old cast of characters running things.
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/
May 12, 2008 in Commentary on Current Events | Permalink | Comments
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