I don’t believe I’ve ever titled a blog post about a specific individual before, but there is a first for everything. HRC is back in the news this week as she and her entourage float yet another trial balloon about a supposed third run at the office of President. Once I stopped chuckling I thought about her life and legacy. For Republicans she is the gift that keeps on giving.
Her thirst for power is such a remarkable quality she seems to US politics what Vlad the Impaler was to international diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. I am not sure if she is so ruthlessly calculating that she and her advisors have a true master plan, or she is so petty she intends to destroy what little remains of the old guard in the Democratic party as she slowly wilts away. But I have to give it to her, she does have a Dorian Gray quality as she works so hard to market herself to the radical left.
I was driving yesterday when a song by Merrilee Rush came on the radio. In the late 1960’s Angel in the Morning was a feminist anthem about how a woman was strong enough to accept the consequences of her actions regarding a one-night affair. As I look at the modern movement that HRC has been such a central part of for almost 30 years, I can only wonder how we’ve evolved from that “free love” age to the “#metoo” generation and how her involvement in defending the predatory nature of fellow Democrats while using it as a club against her political opponents has really brought us to a point today where everyone is confused.
I am so old I can remember a time in the United States Air Force when Generals thought women were not suitable to fly airplanes. This was well after the Amelia Earhart, the WASPs of WWII, and Jackie Cochran proved otherwise. It was the same mentality that said Blacks should not drink at the same fountain as white folk. That all finally changed in the 1970s and women have gone on to prove they are every bit the equal to men in the operation of complex equipment in demanding stress environments. There remains a biological issue of the physical strength that would suggest there are some things that might be too demanding for the gender, but let’s not debate that here.
There is no lack of study on the topic of feminism and woman’s rights, it’s been an on-going issue since its beginning in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848.[1] The funny thing though is how the whole issue of equality has gotten twisted into one that mirrors the outrages of select groups in all social matters. It also suffers from the fact a faction of the movement has pronounced themselves as the one true voice and are so narrowly focused on their political agenda they refuse to consider legitimate opposing voices within their own gender.
Since her rise to national prominence in the early 1990s HRC has been one of the key voices leading to this divide within the feminist culture. A movement which now demands not only equality, but expects the government to fund their moral choices, and force those with opposing views do so as well. She and her party have fostered voices that demean women who don’t fit within her political sphere and encourage abuse of those women for political gain. For example, her current defense of her husband and why he was right not to resign fly’s directly in the face of the #metoo mantra that men in power who take advantage of that power to gain a sexual advantage are plain and simply abusers of the helpless and defenseless women.
Since she entered the national stage -- her views of the feminist movement seem to evolve with the political needs of the party. How she viewed her role as the First Lady was significantly different than all her predecessors, and successors for that matter. We saw in her attempt to ram universal health care through the Congress during President Clinton’s first term that she viewed herself as an elected official, but without the legitimate clout or charisma to persuade even her own party of the value of such legislation.
Since those heady days of the Clinton White House, she has inspired others towards the extreme. Take, for example, Kyrsten Sinema, Democratic Candidate for Senate in Arizona, who made this declaration in 2006, “These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they're choosing to live that life.[2]” Making it clear that women who choose to be mothers aren’t really suitable to deciding what is and isn’t important to feminism. By the way, she has also shown her disdain for the entire state she proposes to represent. The question for me is does she really enter into this political process to serve the needs of all the state, serve the needs of only a few, or to basically enrich herself? At this point, she seems to be following in the HRC model where the office is a means to power and wealth, but that’s just my opinion.
No comments:
Post a Comment