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Hillary! Hang It Up!
By Bruce | March 14, 2008
“While we’re on the subject…Could we change the subject now...”
– Modest Mouse
In a time of great interest there’s a sense of the mysterious in everyday life. A walking, daylight, dream-like perception sitting just off the mind’s eye, creating an anxiety-filled view of just about everything — going to the grocery store, picking up the mail, turning on a bedroom light.
Each small, individual motion, no matter how mundane, trival or habitual, has its own feel, its own sensibilities, and carries a large whiff of sad despair.
People are worried.
Whether or not the great, mindless wad of Americans are keeping track of the news, this country has become ensnarled in what might become the greatest disaster in all of history, while at the same time, also the strangest. On just about every front there’s a negative downturn — fuel prices climbing with oil at $114 a barrel, the environment seemingly becoming worse with each passing day (science studies on global warming, species extinction, etc, seemingly try to out-negative previous reports), food now approaching critical mass on a family’s budget (wheat increased 173 percent in one year), one out of every 100 Americans are in jail (the most imprisoned people on earth) — and the list goes on and on as it becomes more personal, one-on-one in everyone’s daily lives.
And, of course, there’s the two wars. The 2000 presidential election appears as just an opening segment in a great and terrible tragedy. President George W. Bush was most-wrong guy for the right time. And the coincidence of 9/11 and the Bush adminstration is as horrible as any Orwellian plot in all of fictional literature.
The invasion of Iraq, coming upon its fifth anniversary, might just turn out to be the greatest blunder ever. And into that horrifying sinkhole rides the planet.
Life has become queer. Even the word “queer” is mysterious and strange, and it just doesn’t mean homosexuals. A most unique look at the word “queer” arises in James Joyce’s Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which I read as a way-younger man. Joyce writes about the sound of word and how it’s carried through the air when spoken. A difference in saying, but meaning different.
Now, of course, when spoken or writted the word “queer” means only one thing.
And into this queer life comes Hillary Clinton. A ravashed presidential candiate who clings to some despairing illusion of returning to the White House. And she can’t see the forest because of the trees. If she does see that forest, however, she’s a cold-hearted, political animal, proving finally once and for all, women have indeed become equal with men.
The trees is the movement. The forest is Barack Obama. And really not just Barack Obama, but a movement for change: Change the way this government operates. Probably the only true, real endowment from American history is the Constitution, flawed greatly in so many ways, but yet a very-well-proven arena.
Until the Bush adminstration. A document-based government is fragile. In just eight short years, Bush and his various people might have ended the republic.
And into this came the voter. In Novemeber 2006, in a wide, emotional display, tried to bring about change, especially in Iraq by pulling the lever on the war. However, nothing really happened. A lot of sound bytes, bits of this-that-and-the-other, and suddenly the US is in a “surge,” not a withdrawal.
The lies, corruption and just plain hard-headed arrogance of the Bush operation is now so obvious to so many different kinds of people, the swelling tide of voters have found an outlet to get rid of this bunch of dumb-ass bozos and have jumped on the Obama bandwagon.
I first felt the sense from Iowa. The large turnout and the feeling of a rolling thunder revue played across the ether. Although there was a bit of crying in New Hampshire, Obama’s train has since added cars and seems to be rolling on to the Democratic presidential nomination. However, the scene may not be as it seems. (The word ‘seems’ is also a bit queer, as in the oft-used phrases, “looks can be deceiving,” or, “This is not as it seems…”).
The big twist in the seems is Hillary Clinton. In scratching out a campaign against Obama in recent weeks, Hillary has really turned a corner and has started down a bad side of the street. She just might be the Ralph Nader of the 2008 election.
In comments both from Hillary’s own lips and from tongues of many others, she has given John McCain a boost.
And if John McCain is elected president, there will be way-more than just trouble ahead. Despite being in the limelight nearly a couple of decades, Hillary doesn’t even have near the strong, popular appeal of Obama, a practically as close to a political virgin we can get nowadays.
If Hillary steps aside, puts politics aside, and climbs on the Obama change train, the US of A Titantic maybe, might, could if we could, miss the iceberg.
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