This is my first attempt at blogging. I'm going to allow myself to blather freely. I assume no-one will ever read this, so why not?
I suppose it's hard to avoid thinking about the Democratic Presidential battle on the day after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. I used to be a fan of Hillary's. When she was first lady -- particularly during Bill's first term -- I thought she was smarter than The Man, had more integrity, and leaned further left, which is where I lean -- live -- myself. Now, judging by virtually every comment I've ever read or heard since that Hillary's attempt to create universal health care, I may be the only living human who actually considered her failed effort a remarkable achievement, simply because she did something that was so obviously the right thing to do, went right after it, damn the torpedoes, and in so doing enraged the Republicans, panicked the HMO's, and royally pissed off the drug companies, insurance companies and apparently just about everyone else in America who should instead, in my opinion, have been genuflecting and not ridiculing.
Well, maybe that's a huge part of why that Hillary has long since left the building. Or maybe it's simply that she went pro. Whatever. Now she's a political operative going about her business in a way I find astonishing only because I can't help reflexively trying to connect her back to that Hillary. Today's Hillary just wants to win, and she's going to do anything she can imagine doing short of getting arrested (read: getting caught) to undermine the first candidate in my memory with the potential to help us heal what may be our deepest, oldest, most intractable national wounds -- still-festering, still aching at the root of our collective soul. Because as Faulkner said, the past isn't dead -- it's not even past.
So imagine it -- an African American President. Named Barack Hussein Obama. Possessing a genuine brilliance to match Bill Clinton's, but with a personal authenticity which runs so much deeper than Bill's ever seemed to, matched by a natural eloquence that it's possible could actually rise to a rhetorical power that's at least analogous, in our vernacular time, to Abraham Lincoln's in his.
Reconstruction as intended never happened; Jim Crow happened. African Americans, born with the impossibility (for most) of ever evading the fact of their ancestry even for an instant's rest, learned that "all men are created equal" at the same time that they began to understand their historical relationship with their white neighbors. This wasn't just coming face to face with an upsetting paradox -- it was coming face to face with madness, the madness at the core of our history. The worship of liberty, the belief in the rights of humans, expressed with such rhetorical eloquence by men whose quill pens had just been brought to them by human slaves. Imagine the rage and shame and confusion young African Americans must have felt in the days of Jim Crow -- the acid that must have burned inside with enough force to obliterate young hearts and minds across the last century. Relegated to kitchens, to bathrooms, to basements, to separate water fountains, to that only slightly sanitized slavery, while all around them the popular media caricatured them without dignity, pride or even (some must have felt) the right to pride. If you're white like me and you try to imagine the countless ways so many must have suffered, you kind of start to go blank in the face of it.
So what, right? It's old news. What's my point? Only that in the face of all these obstacles, isn't it astonishing that so many managed to find a way to thrive and fight, and that in the end they had so much success that somehow today, 40 years after Dr. King's assassination, we have an African American standing on the doorstep of the American Presidency.
So you really have to ask what the hell the Clintons are thinking. Because there are no excuses for Hillary now except the oldest one: naked ambition. What else could it be? There are no real policy differences between their platforms, no symbolic points demanding to be made, no dangerous incompetence or anti-intellectual hubris on display (having now lived through 8 years of both we'd smell them a mile away; though, I remind myself, our national "we" actually embraced them both. Twice, even. Twice.)
But no, there's none of that in this race. In this race there's only -- race. And this era's Hillary wants to be President. And cannot let go of that fantasy, no matter the cost to herself or her party or her country or her world.
One can almost imagine this Hillary nodding curtly to the re-release of Lee Atwater's Willie Horton ad.
Well, ok. Let's go there, Hillary. Let's say you and Bill actually pull it off. Let's say you're somehow able to yank the perfect backroom strings, press the most powerful underground buttons, gather back all those "defectors," strongarm your way to the Presidency. Hillary, let's talk. Exactly what will you have won? More to the point -- why will you have won it? Don't you think these will be the questions echoing furiously back at you every time you glance in the mirror? Yours could never be anything but a soulless presidency because let's face it, you're in the process of selling your soul right now, piece by piece.
It's downright Shakespearean -- I swear I just watched your drama enacted by Patrick Stewart. You're becoming Macbeth -- Bill makes a fine Lady, doesn't he? -- and if you "successfully" walk this path you'll have committed a murder just like the one in Shakespeare -- granted, a spiritual rather than a physical murder, but one that seems just as vile, and will inevitably leave us with the same sort of impoverished, soul-sick "leadership" the Scottish murderer wound up delivering. Drain away your humanity, Hillary, and what's left? Zip, right?
You also have to face something else, because it's already become an historical fact: however it happened, right under your nose, Barack Hussein Obama quickly came to represent for a number of us our most desperate political hopes. Kill him, Senator, and that's what you're killing for millions of otherwise disaffected, cynical, humiliated fellow Democrats. We're all still rubbing our eyes trying to absorb the impossible reality that George W. Bush and company have actually done all they've done to our beloved national legacy. And part of the power you have to kill our rekindled hopes lies in your naked willingness to do it. Because you were once a source of a similar kind of hope. You and Bill, I mean.
So Hillary, take a breath and answer this for yourself: don't you think -- if only for the sake of your old, pre-professional pol self -- that it's time to start helping a remarkable person get a miraculous shot at helping to inspire the birth of a new America? Just imagine it -- true liberty for all at last, true Reconstruction a century and a half after the Civil War, under the stewardship of the first African American President. And you helped by rising to the best parts of yourself.
Please.
