Hysterectomy

If we're going to have a national conversation on race, we should also bite the bullet and have a national conversation on the Hillarian Personality. You know the one:

flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological[ly] lying...

Icy, contrived, hysterical, sentimental, bitter, manipulative, self-righteous...

That, thru Drudge, is Christopher Hitchens and then Stanley Crouch summing up M(r)s. Clinton. There is no way around the uncomfortable fact that both men use the world 'hysterical' to pin the tail on a complex of emotional pathologies that's inseparable from Hillary Clinton's womanhood. As mannish as she sometimes tries so hard to be, Clinton makes no sense and would not exist as she is as a man. Her madness is a very special kind of female madness, a kind that results in a body of female voters of a certain age and a certain disposition and certain personal history to back her campaign with a steely dedication that in men would be called fanaticism but in these women probably requires some other name.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: a lot of females I know under the age of, say, 40 just don't get it. They don't get the stop-at-nothing desperation. They don't get the high-school-worthy machinations. They don't get the obsession with beating men at their own game, especially men of the caliber that dominates big-league American politics. They recoil or wince at the strategic use of the waterworks, at the knowing deployment of canned phrases and plausibly deniable 'misstatements'. At her worst, Hillary is like a fish trying to ride a bicycle. Actually, at her very worst, Hillary realizes she is like this and starts doing things in public designed to eliminate that image and prevent it from occupying the minds of voters, things which actually make the uncomfortable truth more obvious to anyone who doesn't share her psycho-historical predicament, and the quality and character of those things is what people are talking about when they talk about Hillary being hysterical.

This is a sorry state for a woman to be in, one which seemingly combines all the disadvantages of being unnaturally male with none of the advantages of being naturally female. One recalls that Halloween episode of the Simpsons where Lisa turns a frog into a prince and Bart turns a frog into an agonized mutant halfling that can't stop, um, vomiting. Perhaps that similie is a bridge too far. But Hillary at her worst, struggling obscenely to transcend her mutant condition, is so awkward and repelling that we must return time and time again to the question we've collectively striven to avoid maybe even more than the race question, which we at least acknowledge: the question of whether Hillary Clinton is an appropriate role model for girls -- whether she represents and embodies a great triumph for women or whether she represents and embodies a maniacal experiment proven horribly wrong.

I suppose there are elements of both at work in the Hillarian Personality, but stopping there is a cop-out, and people need to stand up and start admitting that the main reason Hillary Clinton is so repugnant is because she is a kind of creature that ought never have come into being. Yet here she is -- through, I would emphasize, collective fault of our own -- and it won't do to simply shunt her aside and try to shake off the yuck of the memory. No, I'm afraid we have to face up why it is that Hillary Clinton came into being. There are social causes for her appearance and persistence and desperate attempt to dominate the landscape of our lives, not just quirky personal ones. If the phenomenon of Obama can tell us something about how and how not to get over our race problem -- and, as I've said, I think he can, though probably not how the left would expect -- then the phenomenon of Clinton can reveal something important about our sex-and-gender problem.

Comments

[Charlie (Colorado)]

There is no way around the uncomfortable fact that both men use the world 'hysterical' to pin the tail on a complex of emotional pathologies that's inseparable from Hillary Clinton's womanhood.

Sure there is: the fact that most people don't think about the etymology of the word, if they know it, and the fact that the symptomatic definition includes "selective amnesia, shallow volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior", which seems like a pretty appropriate description of what they're talking about.

[Robert C. Cheeks]

Alas, re: Mrs. Bill Clinton's psychopathological condition these comments:

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/12/1/3/the-breakdown-of-the-american-polity-part-1-mrs.