When it comes to the 2016 presidential election, is the throne there for Hillary Clinton’s taking?
God Save the Queen
The 1970s: The decade began ripe with babyboomer hopes and dreams, forged from peaceful, violent, and collective protest. It wound down after being turned utterly meaningless by the same boomers, who’d cashed in, shoved it up their noses, and danced their angst and guilt away in idiotic discos, aborting the dream and creating club culture. All this nonsense was shoved down my throat (I’m a “tweener”—too old to be Gen X, too young to be a boomer; there are a few years’ worth of us, from the time between when the birth rate started dropping in 1960 and when the media collectively decided the baby boom had to be 20 years long) at the university where I, like my fellow tweeners, bought into—hell, went all-in, gave all in ser vice of—the early boomer bullshit (the “hopes and dreams” cutout), while the boomers themselves were running away, figuring out what comprised “child support,” utilizing their PhDs, setting up 100 different programs for 100 different “addictions,” and “taking care of No. 1.” Themselves. We tweeners couldn’t get past the door guys and the velvet rope at the club we were taught to loathe, but about which we were curious. Of course, now it’s all clear. The joke was on us. The boomers owned the club. Baby-boomer culture is the Skull and Bones/Freemason/[pick your secret society] of the United States. Not a member? Fuck off.
“God save the queen.
She ain’t no human being.
There is no future,
and England’s dreaming.”Sex Pistols (1977)
In Britain, it was much different: The decade started in a rioting hell and ended in a rioting hell. No hopes, no dreams. The monarchy was in horrible shape, as inflation and the First World’s financial meltdown hit the U.K. particularly hard, especially given the state safety net that both Tory and Labour promised and at tempted to deliver. The royals were met with disgust by a generation sick of watching a peculiar and somewhat inbred family live in different castles and pay no taxes. (In a brilliant PR move, the royals were rehabilitated less than 20 years later, after turning the tragic death of a bulimic, con fused young girl/princess into some thing they could own and use [“we grieve, too”] to become a part of the people because she was “of the people” and they had welcomed her, until she figured out it would end badly, and so did they. Thus, the royals folded their hand while she bailed out. But they kept her in death. That was part of the deal. Diana’s brand became the royal brand, and the nasty tax issues, for the most part, were excused. Now, our bat-shit-crazy desire to follow the uterus of every young female royal has turned both the U.K. and the U.S. into a collective Dorothy lost in royal Oz. Except we don’t want to go home. We’re happy and warm, comforted in that womb, where we don’t have to think about our hell for, say, ninemonth segments. Prince Who? Princess What? Awesome! Keep cranking ’em out! Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth stays on the throne, still going strong at some bizarrely old age, as most of them have some genetic predilection toward living 30 years longer than anybody else. Her son will take the throne when he’s 112. It’s all good. Helen Mirren tells us so. And wins awards for doing so.)
Back to the seventies: This was also the decade that produced, and I mean produced, Hillary Rodham. She didn’t let go of the seventies dream until she realized it ended on a culde-sac in [choose your suburbville]. The Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass; Richard Nixon was fully reborn an elder statesman, not the conniving criminal she attempted to prosecute and incarcerate. The seventies dream was cut up in lines and straws were handed out; it was all depressing and regrettable. And where does one go when the dream croaks, when the hopes are dashed? One goes to Bill Clinton, the real no-dreams deal. One becomes Hillary Rodham Clinton. He was in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship when the hell began over there and she realized the painful, awful truth: It’s done. It’s over. The seventies was the bastard child of the sixties, and that child chose the wrong side of the tracks. But if she threw in with Bill, they’d rule the world. He’d outflank her on the right; she’d outflank him on the left. He had some troublesome habits—compulsions, really—but did that matter?
Hillary Clinton is the Vin Diesel of the Democratic party: She’s fast, furious, get out of the fucking way. Having locked down every interest group and cause, she’s basically covered the spread.
Apparently, it didn’t. The first political calculation was made manifest in 1975, in front of 15 people and a Methodist minister in the living room of a Fayetteville, Arkansas, home. Her new home. Might as well have put her on Mars. And unlike the tragic princess, Hillary stayed the course and was duly rewarded and punished: wife of a governor, wife of a player/banger/ baller, wife of a president, all the while carving out her territory, all the while protecting herself and her child from the pestering public and media circus obsessed with her husband’s … habits. Any other clear-thinking woman (or man, for that matter) would have been knee-deep in alimony after 20-some-odd years of that nonsense, but not Hillary. Why?
Well, the story really writes itself. There was going to come a point in time when the female population decidedly outnumbered the male population and the narrative of a “first female president” would and could make sense. She could run away from Arkansas, gracefully exit the White House, grab a Senate seat in New York, and wait for the inauguration. The historic inauguration. Except a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The historic inauguration was not hers, but rather that of a man named Barack Obama. Had you told Bill and Hillary in, say, 1998 that, ten years hence, a man named Barack Hussein Obama would be president of the United States, they would have pissed themselves laughing. Hey, at least when the rock star took the oath of office and became President Obama, the Clintons had good seats at the swearing-in.
Now, Hillary is our Statesman Nixon meets Queen Elizabeth. She’s not baking cupcakes in her dotage in Fayetteville. Trust me. She’s taking the throne. She gigged with President Obama for four years as secretary of state, apparently wanting Osama bin Laden more dead than the others who simply wanted him really dead, and now she’s the Vin Diesel of the Democratic party: She’s fast, furious, get out of the fucking way. Having locked down (in what is a curious and anonymous political gang bang) Wall Street/high finance, labor, law enforcement, and immigrants, and every interest group and cause, she’s basically covered the spread.
Having left forlorn Joe Biden at the curb, she’s up against an elderly Democratic Socialist who can’t explain to the satisfaction of many what Democratic Socialism is (odd to me, since I was or am a democratic socialist … you are, too, if your grandma’s on social security or Medicare, or you pay state tax for services rendered; Democratic Socialism is Britain in the 1970s without the rioting), the “fun, folksinging” former mayor of Baltimore, and a man who wants to re-litigate the Vietnam War (as of this writing, Jim Webb has dropped out of the race, which was surprising as I don’t remember when Jim Webb dropped in). Then she’ll have to take on a Republican party that is having a public nervous breakdown—the throne is ripe for the picking. MSNBC, which, by nature, should have been Bernie Sanders’s mouthpiece, knows when to keep its mouth shut. Hillary’s got it all locked down. Throw your best punch. She’ll kick you in the political balls and not bat an eyelash, leaving the American public wondering not whether she can be beaten, but rather when we will be beaten into submission, for good or ill, and dropped off in a dirty alley, our eyes fixed on our devices watching a coronation, er, inauguration.
God save the queen. There’s even a place at the table for atheists.
I know how disappointed you feel, because I feel it too. And so do tens of millions of Americans who invested their hopes and dreams in this effort. This is painful, and it will be for a long time. But I want you to remember this.From Hillary Clinton’s concession speech — November 9, 2016
SPOILER ALERT: People did not remember. … Y’know, sometimes you can learn a great deal looking back at how people thought just a little over ten years ago. You may not love what you learn, but that happens. You can watch the entire shocked/sad, yet undeniably civil, speech with ABC via YouTube. If you want our advice, though, you will have more fun learning how to be “The Winner” an entirely differen way via that same public service outlet.
