“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
—Anonymous
Fall 2000 already seems like a long time ago, and it actually is. Perhaps I remember in a haze of nostalgia for that period, a brief entertainment of hope for the American polity, one which was soon snuffed in a blizzard of dimpled chads and a lot of votes for Al Gore, who talked as if he were teaching a remedial class. Since then, things have changed, and I now know not only a lot more about Arab newspapers and Islamic sects than I ever wished, but even more about the hauteur of William Kristol and the blustering of Charles Krauthammer.
However, like a narrator in an old flick with a flashback/voice-over, or like the Ancient Mariner mugging the wedding guest, I have to insist that there was life before the 2000 election, and it was pretty bad, too, even though a lot of people made a lot of money without doing anything to earn it. That was called “prosperity” by some and “a Ponzi scheme” by others. That’s right: Repression is hard to surrender because it’s so painful to give up, but here we go. I remember the first Iraq war and the disastrous election of 1992 and the consequent appearance of the Clinton Cabinet, which I noted because it was obvious and also because Bill Clinton said that he wanted a cabinet that looked like America. If you ask me, however, I thought his Cabinet looked more like Charles Krauthammer.
A cool 43 percent of the vote had handed the White House to Bill Clinton, and this was supposed to be some kind of political coup, and it was—a coup in reverse. The ineptitude of the campaign of Bush I and the shrewd, spoiling spitefulness of Ross Perot had worked the wonder for which the Democrats claimed credit. Since the whole thing was a TV show, however, it looked better on Saturday Night Live than it did on the news. And then the capons came home to roost—this is the part that gets repressed. Remember Joycelyn Elders, Janet Reno, the sub-Cabinet level or just sublevel Roberta Achtenberg, and all the rest of them, and Whitewatergate, Troopergate, Nannygate, Filegate, and Travelgate besides? No question about it, they bring back a lot of misty, watercolored memories of the way we were.
Was it all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line? If we had to do it all again, would we? Could we? I guess I was thinking about the cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan—attacks that were supposed to intimidate the U.S. Congress as it contemplated impeachment—and I started to get verklempt like Bill Clinton at a Barbra Streisand concert. I knew I was going to need at least a box of Kleenex to get through what I had to get through, because there was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new book vacuuming all the being out of my immediate environs. I checked my supplies: Kleenex, leftover potato chips, leftover pizza, a half-consumed room-temp candy bar, and two cold beers. I was ready. I got to the beginning—the thing was configured as a “book”—and said, All right, Miz Rodham-Clinton. Show me what you got.
I suppose I looked at her book as a book, and that was my second mistake, my first having been to look at it at all. Then I made another unconscious assumption: that her book might have some autobiographical elements of reflection, which was mistake number three. Dim memories of the confessional tradition (Saint Augustine and the pear tree, his repudiation of sins and paganism) led me to expect that Senatrix Rodham Clinton might have learned something at her age, and maybe she did. I saw no note of recantation, however. Neither the book nor its purported authoress was going to change, so maybe I had to.
You know, stale potato chips are not as bad as they are made out to be. They are still salty and greasy, even if they are stale. Here is a helpful household hint: Close the bag with one of those doohickeys or a clothespin if you have no doohickey, and those chips will not get so stale. And by the way, I check out the new chips sometimes, but I always come back to Lay’s Classics. Well, that was refreshing, even if it was not crisp. I used a Kleenex to wipe my fingers clean and got ready to go again. I did not want to get any smears on the dust jacket or anything, because I am by nature a sensitive, even delicate, fastidious person, and also because I wanted to sell the thing as soon as I could get rid of it.
Before I forged an autograph to max out the asking price, however, I certainly wanted to check up on and check out the former Miss Rodham’s success in the futures market. Years ago, she claimed that it was work and research that steered her to a 10,000 percent profit in one year—not corrupt advantages that came her way as the bizarre little wifey of the goofy governor of Arkansas. Yet, but, however, nevertheless, even so, and on the other hand, in her memoir, in startling contrast, she makes exactly the same claim. She neither tells how it was done nor does she reveal any insider hanky-panky. The complete failure of the gnostic universal healthcare plan of 1,342 pages is dismissed by the scribbleress as an action of virtue: “We were trying to move too quickly on a bill that would fundamentally alter American social and economic policy for years to come.” In short, this tell-nothing strategy within a tell-all rhetoric is more than a bit undramatic—it is downright stupefying. Basically, all anecdotes recur to the theme of the preternatural wonderfulness of the pseudonarrator who signed off on the book that was written by a committee and leave the reader in a semantic Dead Zone. The only question, then, is: What could this cybertext possibly signify?
Now let me tell you something. Some people say leftover pizza is no good, and they are just wrong. It is OK cold, right out of the fridge, but you can always zap it or toast it, if you want. DiGiorno is quite good, but Freschetta Supreme is my favorite—it is the square one with a thin crust, and it is just loaded with goodies. Of course, if you eat it with your fingers as I did, then you will need to wipe your fingers, too. Always remember your good manners and personal hygiene, even if you are alone and no one is watching! I always do, and you take my word on that. After all, I am regarded by many as a “role model,” as they say, in the area of personal deportment, honesty, and all-around good taste. But I know what you’re thinking. “What about Monica? Come on and get to the Monica part,” and all that sort of thing. As Miz Hillarity used to say, “Okey-dokey, artichokey!” That Rodham wit and spontaneity really gets me.
Mrs. Clinton seems to have indicated that the Lewinsky bimbroglio and all the embarrassment about “the portly pepper pot” came as a complete shock to her because her husband had never lied to her, the Gennifer Flowers thing and the Paula Corbin Jones lawsuit to the contrary notwithstanding. She has described the gross fornication of her porcine husband as “an inappropriate intimacy,” and, if such Orwellian language is even remotely truthful, then “victim” may be a substitute for “enabler,” as well. She also claims to have decided to remain in her marriage in part because of political considerations—she had to be loyal to her President. She does not note that Bill Clinton told his Cabinet that his lies, and the lies he had maneuvered them into telling on his behalf, were justified because they were designed to protect his political position—the power of his presidency. She has in effect agreed with this remarkable reasoning, even in hindsight. Such thinking would bring us to the heart of her book, if her book could be said to have one.
All this made me want something—anything—substantial. I used to like Snickers bars, but, I must say, they are a bit on the heavy side. I was so pleased when they obligingly brought out the new Snickers Cruncher in the yellow wrapper. With crisp rice and peanuts, it is crunchy all right, and lighter than the original Snickers. Try one, and check out the nutrition facts—you might be pleasantly surprised. Another Kleenex, and back to the salt mines of Venus or whatever planet Old Hillarious is from.
There seems actually to have been a method to all the madness. First of all, the form of a memoir lends some semblance of logic to Mrs. Senator Clinton’s self-absorption, which is the ostensible subject of her book. We might say that her narcissism has been given an epic treatment, which works something like this: First, she tells us of her commitment to the progressive political agenda at an early age, so that later, she can analeptically refer to her “lifelong commitment” to children’s issues, women’s rights, and so on. And then, because she and Bill were so attuned to progressive values, it makes sense that his betrayals were trivial compared to the grand cause of the global agenda. I was reminded sometimes of Homeric epithets and Miltonic allusions, what with all the formulaic repetitions, until I realized that I was making mistake number four: I was thinking. Living History should not provoke thought but elicit sentiment about the passions of Hillary and what she has suffered for us in order to bring us universal healthcare and many other blessings that have not materialized. But wait, the story is not over. “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” intoned Hillary and Tipper—just lighthearted young chicks, or middle-aged bottle-blonde phonies—as they shook their peroxide locks in 1992. Perhaps the meaning of the Rodhamiad lies in the murky future, in some proleptic, clarifying vision of a great destiny, or even paradise regained. But then there is another and more appropriate epic analogue that spammed or blogged my screen: that of the “democratic epic” of Walt Whitman. I was scanning a “Song of Herself,” a cosmic exercise of fanciful egomania, that identified the speaker with a vacuous deity.
What with all the sodium and the nonbeing, I was starting to get thirsty. I figured an Amstel Light had to be the answer, and it was. Amstel Lights are OK—actually, they are better than that. They taste almost as good as Heinekens but with fewer calories. Check one out, if you have not already done so. I endorse, but am not on a retainer for, nor have I signed any written agreement that has yet been identified with, Amstel Light.
There was another formula I thought I perceived in Living Herstory, if I could make out anything in the glare of all the boilerplate. Miseries Clinton has devoted many pages to outlining her “intimate” relations with famous people—certain individuals who have recognized her as their coeval. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is one of these, and there are many others. She goes so far as to indicate that Nelson Mandela gave her a personal example of forgiveness in his attitude to his former captors, which helped her to relate similarly to Republicans. She acknowledges that she did indeed “channel” Eleanor Roosevelt, who was perhaps a Virgil to her Dante, and I can relate to that. I talk a lot with Stephen Decatur, myself. He really likes me.
No more than Emerson or Whitman does ex-co-president Rodton Clintham acknowledge problems of self-contradiction. This hobgoblin of small minds does not faze her. Does she contradict herself? Very well, she contradicts herself—she is large, she contains multitudes. Her blindness is insight, as when Jiang Zemin, president of China, instructs her on the situation in Tibet: “They were victims of religion. They are now freed from feudalism.” Our inspired narrator would no sooner recognize such an exact iteration of her own political philosophy than she would pass over a chance for declaiming, “Christmas is always a big event in the Clinton family.” Hers is not a voice that can be silenced by traditional sex roles, if sex roles have anything to do with logic. With tautological aplomb, Mrs. Clinton insisted in China that women’s rights are human rights and that female infants should not have their spines broken. Since such a daring proposition rang oddly from the proponent of abortion on demand and of infanticide in the form of partial-birth abortion, I began to appreciate even more the Rodhamian pursuit of power. Her story that she found her way in prayer on her knees took on a rather Machiavellian cast. The cognitive dissonance was getting a bit oppressive, and that reminded me of something.
Beer in the early evening is always a big event in my household. If one Amstel Light is good, two are even better—twice as good, to be precise. And let me just mention that if you buy by the case in a discount warehouse, you can save quite a bit of money—money that you could then be sending to charities like the Children’s Defense Fund, founded by Marian Wright Edelman, which Hillary Rodham Clinton has supported throughout her adult life. I swallowed some of that second Amstel the wrong way and had to use a trusty Kleenex again. That clarifying beverage had boosted me to understand that the Rodham/Clinton book could not be altogether decoded by traditional hermeneutical methods. It seemed that a little phenomenological analysis was in order, but, before I could get started, I had a phone call from Angelina Jolie, who just wanted to tell me that she is a big fan. I appreciated Angelina’s support, but I had no time to schmooze with her, so she left her unlisted number. Some things you have to face all alone.
On my knees in prayer (as I do not mind confiding), I was beginning to see that Her Lying Story was not a book after all but a political ploy, a moneytree, and a strategic venture. Mrs. Clinton has signed so many autographs in bookstores that she had to seek medical assistance. Politically, the book’s presence is complex. It means that the author has reminded everyone that the Democratic aspirants for the 2004 campaign are weak and that the possibility for a Clinton run next year is real, though she has denied it. The book means also that the Democratic nomination in 2008 is hers for the asking. There are other implications as well. The book covers her back; for this self-portrait of a scheming backroom politician in whose mouth oleomargarine will not dissolve is intended to allay all previous concerns about her dark side. Further, publishing so many unappealing pictures of herself as illustrations in a book may well have preemptively taken those pictures off the table. The financial profile is simple: Living History has already justified the advance of over eight million dollars, which helps to make up for the check for $400,000 that Hillie had to write at the end of the Jones case (the one that Bill did not lie to her about because it was a Republican plot). All in all, the Clintons together earned over $39 million last year, exclusive of fundraising efforts for HILLPAC, the Democratic powerbase. The public-relations or strategic aspect of this literary production extends even to such matters as hair-styles and pastel pants suits, as the authoress herself has noted. Looking less like a witch with a weight problem than usual and perkily giggling like Beverly Sills, she has managed to exploit an exploitation, her book having also been a pretext for various television appearances, most notably in a Baba Wawa Special. In that particular nonevent, our heroine declared that a “zone of privacy” extended to the topics that she herself had arranged to address in a massively subscribed broadcast. It was little enough about nothing, but no matter how piffling the puffery, there were, for the attuned, momentous vibrations.
Before trashing the White House on the way out the door, and, before Bill attempted to upstage George W. Bush’s inauguration, Hillary Rodham Clinton was effective in 2000 as a carpetbag candidate for senator from New York. Because she knew nothing about the state, she organized a “Listening Tour” in order to finesse that issue. She ran not as a bold visionary but as a victim/celebrity, and, since then, she has laid low. Living History is a continuation of that successful posture, but just as the “’umble” Uriah Heep could not mask the meaning of his denials, Senator Clinton has not been able to suppress altogether the implications either of her vast ambitions or of her self-justifying mysticism. The muse had come upon me, not from what she calls “Hillaryland” but from some patriarchal Father Gander:
Hillary, Billary,
Bobbity Boo—
Why must the Zeitgeist
Look just like You?
My nostalgia trip had been eclipsed by thoughts of the future. Who is there on the horizon to stop Hillary Rodham Clintonista except Arnold Schwarzenegger? Hillary’s self-appointed role as the embodiment of the Zeitgeist implies that she should be, that she is ordained to be, the president of the United States. The scariest part of that thought was not that she could become the chief executive, but that our country would choose, or even deserve, such a possibility.
But as darkness deepened over the Republic, I realized suddenly that the new hit show on the Bravo channel, Episcopalian Eye for the Straight Guy, was coming on. Always attuned to matters of faith, I decided I needed a makeover and some interior decorating tips a lot more than I did any more heartfelt revelations from Hillary Rodham Clinton.
[Living History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York: Simon and Schuster) 562 pp., $28.00]
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