[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Monster of Ambition

[Bill Totten]

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)

www.kunstler.com (May 12 2008)


My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at
all booksellers.


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, New York, and that theoretically qualified her to run for that
senate seat. Of course, her move was a huge slap in the face to the
fifteen 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 moonshine 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/clusterfuck_nation/2008/05/monster-ambitio.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/