Cammy Patrician vs. Lunchbucket Hill
In her latest salvo against Hill, Paglia seems to cover every base.
…I still don’t trust her. The arrogant, self-absorbed Clintons have shown their unscrupulous hand to all who have eyes to see. Yes, Hillary may know the labyrinthine flow chart of the Washington bureaucracy, but her peripheral experiences as a gallivanting first lady scarcely qualify her to be commander in chief. On the contrary, her constant resort to schmaltzy videos and cheap entertainment riffs (“The Sopranos,” “Saturday Night Live”) has been depressingly unpresidential. Is this how she would govern? All that canned “softening” of Hillary’s image would have been unnecessary had she had greater personal resources to begin with. Her cutesy campaign has set a bad precedent for future women candidates, who should stand on their own as proponents of public policy.
Would I want Hillary answering the red phone in the middle of the night? No, bloody not. The White House first responder should be a person of steady, consistent character and mood — which describes Obama more than Hillary. And that scare ad was produced with amazing ineptitude. If it’s 3 a.m., why is the male-seeming mother fully dressed as she comes in to check on her sleeping children? Is she a bar crawler or insomniac? An obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, like Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest”? And why is Hillary sitting at her desk in full drag and jewelry at that ungodly hour? A president should not be a monomaniac incapable of rest and perched on guard all night like Poe’s baleful raven. People at the top need a relaxed perspective, which gives judgment and balance. Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.
Bloody…labyrinthine…gallivanting…monomaniac…middle manager. Can we get this on a bumper sticker please?
Now on to the substantive analysis. Paglia is noble enough to realize how gross it is when a woman outworks every man on the block to gain access to manlike powers. The flipside to this, of course, is that not every ambitious, sharp woman is blessed with the catlike cool and lesbo bona fides of a Paglia. No, some — indeed, even some lesbians — want to be Public Servants, and teaching the supercool kids of the superrich about how to scan Donne is not Public Service. You can see the weird formations of class conflict already beginning to emerge, complete with undercurrents about who’s a real patriot and who’s not.
Yet I can’t help returning to the consciousness of physical class running through Paglia’s beauteous diatribe. The connection between Obama’s and Clinton’s respective physical appearances and mental dispositions seems to challenge all our cherished (small-d) democratic ideas about the mind-body distinction. More than a few things about the kind of power Clinton seeks, and the way she seeks it, grate against the aristocratic ethos. What’s remarkable is the insinuation that these attributes are hardwired into who she is as a person, a person who can never accede even to the left banks of the empyrean clouds. Whatever it means for American democracy today, to this pair of ears, at least, that dig rings true.
I love the site. Nice piece here, with a lot in it.
There appears to be a not so subtle undertone running through the discourse about qualifications for the role of commander in chief. The notion seems to be that a certain degree of incivility and ruthlessness is necessary for someone to oversee a military. Time and again we see these sorts of ideas played out in American elections. The civil, sane, and soft spoken guy is a wimp – as if we expected him to take on America’s “enemies” in a barroom fight. The tough talking, brash guy, who appears to lack the ability to listen and negotiate, becomes the trustworthy and competent one in this discourse. It is ironic that this time the tough guy is a gal, but the discourse seems the same. And it appears that voters have accepted Clinton’s ability to play this role, regardless of sex. This is a tremendous leap.
But the notion that a commander in chief must be tough and ruthless is an absurd one, particularly when we are speaking of a contest between two candidates without military experience. For a candidate lacking military experience, as for a leader lacking experience in any area in which they are leading, their most important qualification would seem to be their ability to listen and integrate contradictory viewpoints coherently and with moral and strategic clarity. Obama clearly possesses the edge here.
Clinton sems to be a disaster. She has overseen a campaign at war with itself, pushed the party to war with itself, we all expect if she wins the nomination that the country will be at war with itself, and she has supported one of he stupidest wars in American history. As a large portion of wars are started through poor communications, the inability to coordinate one nations actions with other nations, and the failure to make sense of contradictory intelligence, my guess is that Clinton is only surpassed by Huckabee as the recent candidate most likely to lead us into a needless war.
Perhaps these perceptions have something to do with some class status of mine, but economic class has less and less to do these days with aesthetic preferences and notions of appropriateness. My own sense is that Obama is appealling most to those who are comfortable with a world of incredible complexity and overwhelming information. He gracefully simplifies things, maintaining a position, while comprehending a surprising depth of of the positions of others. Hence the support from millenials, on the web, amongst the educated, and apparently, though never spoken of, amongst spiritual aspirants and the psychologically astute. Often these people are very poor, often not. But what they understand is that tough and ruthless people do a poor job of managing complexity.
Almost all politicians are severely overworked. Some, however, do a better job of maintaining equanimity through their work. And a President without equanimity is at this globalizing stage of history adisaster.
It is ironic that the tough guy is now a gal. But nevertheless, she does appear to exhibit all of the same threats to national security that a tough talking man does.
— Theo Horesh · Mar 12, 08:52 PM · #