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Granted, Tim, the timing is convenient for Patti Solis Doyle's mommy crisis. But couldn't both versions of events be true for Hillary's former campaign manager? Say your life's work is going down in flames—to the point that One Life to Live seems more realistic all the time, and that storyline about waitressing in Paris, Texas, not altogether unappealing. And just when you're at the absolute snapping point, the one bright spot in your life ... wants Daddy? Not that this is a historical first, no, but when you're overwrought, I could see it being a moment of clarity, just as Hillary needed to make a change. (And as Paul Begala said on CNN the other night, when a campaign is in trouble, you can't fire the candidate, so somebody else has to take the hit.)
"The kids needed me'' may be poll-tested, but it's also a narrative I can't say no to—unless, and this is absolutely unfair—a man is telling the tale. For instance, I heard George Allen on the radio Tuesday saying how it was worth losing to Jim Webb because his 9-year-old daughter made him pancakes last Saturday, and that I found pukatrocious.
As for the crazy goddesses, I'm just as fond of them all the same as I was of my Aunt Ginny who spoke to dead people; they've earned those off-the-meds moments, and may even feel they are required. Though snits like that do suggest that somebody's power is being threatened, which is why I also take them as a sign that the abortion lobby worries that Obama—who is 100 percent pro-choice, despite Hillary's claims to the contrary—might fail to get into the kind of big pointless fights that raise a lot of cash for interest groups.
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Yesterday, Erica Jong argues the current feminist equivalent of the Jews control the media. "Unfortunately the Hillary-Haters are in charge," she writes in Huffington Post. "They monopolize the networks, the newspapers, the talk shows—both radio and TV. They are crossing their legs for fear of castration."
Crossing their legs for fear of castration? I mean, come on. Who talks like that anymore? Jong's earlier piece in the Washington Post was a relatively sane defense of women of her generation, who had to fight twice as hard to get half as much. In this new post, she's gone off the deep end. God, I don't even know where to start.
First, it's the usual—they make fun of Hillary's thick ankles and wrinkles. They say she pimps her daughter. They say she slept with Vince Foster and then something about bees and royal jelly, which was over my head. Then there's some subtle racism about Michelle Obama (a blind spot which seems to afflict women of a certain feminist generation). Then: "They believe HRC boils eye of newt with unborn baby's hair and little Jewish children not yet circumcised."
And that's not even the best one. The best one is: Hillary Haters Can't Spell.
Well, which one is it, they're in charge or they can't spell?
Unfortunately, Jong is not alone. Ever since Hillary lost Iowa, the icons of pop-feminism have been going crazy—Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong. Either they can't stand to watch Hillary lose, or their publishers are urging them into a crazy war, a la East Coast and West Coast rappers.
Its not that the zipless fuck was War and Peace or anything. I guess I just want my feminist icons frozen and preserved in their era. It is such an absolute pleasure to watch Germaine Greer and the rest of the feminist street poets take on Norman Mailer in that 1971 town hall, which I recently watched on video. Nothing they are saying is at all relevant to my current existence. Greer is going on about the oppression of housework (which I rarely ever do), and the rest are slamming about their vaginas and the pleasures of lesbian sex, and they are sexy and kick-ass and not faintly ridiculous because that's what it was all about back in the day, and you can watch the good NYU girls in the audience practically ripping their bras off as they stare at Greer in awe.
But that same rant fast-forwarded to the Hillary age DOES seem ridiculous and out of place. A woman is a viable candidate for president, for God's sake!! I cringe to think of what a Germaine Greer tirade about Hillary's oppression would sound like now. In fact, maybe as an exercise I'll watch the video again tonight and rewrite it substituting "Barack" for "Norman," just to see how crazy it sounds.
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