What do you do, when you feel something forbidden? Not just by society as a vicious, shiftless concept, but by your circle, your friends and fellow travellers? When you see her pilloried, mocked and abused by your most hated and most trusted? How do you step forward? How do you say, “I believe in her? More than him, or him, or my own feckless self, I think this woman is righteous and kind and, yes, beautiful”? Every hand holding a stone, uncertain of all but the pressing need to throw it?
A million moons ago, it was simpler: she was beautiful, not movie-star stunning but crush-worthy, wish-worthy, and more keen, focused and informed than you or I will ever bother to be. A daunting mind, behind sweet blonde bangs. Senators gushed and stammered, “She called me by my first name”. They thrilled at her understanding of our system’s laws and failings… until they realized she truly meant to change them.
Ambition. This is a curse in a woman worse than lust, worse than cruelty. A woman who is here, where we’re observing and weighing, and wants to be there, where she might one day weigh us? Ambition and political savvy are indecent, unnatural – Abe Lincoln fell into the oval office by tripping on a log, and all the while burdened by crazy Mary Todd.
Even Lady MacBeth never vied to be King.
And Hue and Cry went out, “this woman breaks the contract, she is wriggling when we would have her still”, and so many were stirred to engage: conjuring scandals about her businesses (for what woman deals in those?), her husband (what powerful man – JFK aside, God bless and protect – would stray, and what woman would drive him to it/put up with it/ever forgive it?) (Jackie aside, God bless and protect, she took up with that Greek but she never made us think…) scandals about her… wait a minute… murders? Gosh. They pitch at her, drunk with unease.
Crying: Lo! This bitch is after something.
She makes clear what she is after: power. (SHAME!) She jockeys for power, here subtly, here publicly. She would bend the world to her will. And what is her terrible will? Her power has only been used to help, expand protections, look to the overlooked, and first and always to the children.
Which should appear maternal, but Hue and his cousin Cry are fast afoot, reminding us that she cannot be trusted. For decades they will cast about, grabbing the slightest wisp of potential smear, whimpering for a word they can couple with “gate”. They will remind, rebuke: this is a woman of ambition. That word, worthy of some dripping Draculish font. Whence this unwomanly sin?
It can’t come from the disappointment of having your heart-held initiatives squashed. It can’t come from a youth spent in advocacy and activism, pulled up hard against the cobbles and spikes of partisan ossification. It can’t be that she sees what we don’t, and will be both driven and patient enough to leave us in the wake of that seeing…
It mustn’t be rage. Above all, righteous rage cannot fuel her deliberate calm… for then what would that say about all women? Please god, let no one think on rage.
(For there are women everywhere.)
This one works, achieves, and schemes. She compromises, advances – we look at the chessboard and wonder who the hell made the queen so much cooler than the king?
She works, works, racks up victories and awful calls, endures the pecking of Hue and the needling Cry. She rises, yes, she’s a force – but she commits one more great unforgivable sin.
Even misogyny, that great bi-partisan accord, hushes its voice – just a bit - before youth. But that’s past, and this woman, this political woman, is still much too present. Youth makes awkward adorable. Youth, vitality (that’s male youth – it lasts a lot longer) make stars out of fumbling bumpkins. Age, for a woman, offers many fine fates, but none of them is “First Among”.
More than time has aged her. But she weathers all, because of the work. The goal. To gain power, and fortune – as every man of either ever has – but above all to effect change, worthy change, where change was not in the offing, or ever to be offered. She has endured decades of unfounded slights and lynch-mob committees. (Others, whose advancement comes after, will breach the wire she laid upon and still look upon her with mistrust.) The internet has turned the damning choir into an inharmonious drone. Hue and Cry will delight in the scant scent of email trails. She will don sunglasses, and remove herself still more from our homespun expectings.
She is too cautious, too politic. She panders, she hides. She was never as ingratiating as her husband. (She wasn’t a lot of things he was, happily.) She was never the voice of change Obama would be. She’s not a star. (A STAR!) She’s a wonk, a hawk, a puppet, a liberal, a conservative, a criminal mastermind – if you have an issue with her, step on up. You can do anything but surprise her.
Head down, eyes up, she’s endured this noxious, fractious nation all this time so that she could get the job done.
But you don’t like her laugh.
So what do I do, surrounded by largely like-minded friends with no patience for this patient creature? With no passion for this known quantity, this raven of age, this politician – “go to the polls, clothespin on nose”, they say, nodding in unhappy accord. I’m at odds with her on issues enough to nod with them, unhappier still that I don’t know how say what’s beneath, what’s unearthed from the muck so well raked…
I can’t say “I’m with her”, because it sounds rehearsed, after so much rehearsal. I can’t say “she’s better than the other”, even though it’s true beyond any human description of truth. I can’t because it’s too awkward to tell my truth, my forbidden opinion on the issue of Hillary Clinton…
All those years. Those Hues, Cries… All that work.
I love her. I’m not “with”, or “okay with”, or anything but dazzled and devout, because this woman has done what none of us could and will do so much more before she’s through. She loves us, you see, and all her awkward obfuscation can’t hide it. She endures, and Spite itself can’t outlast whatever fuel she uses. I think it’s love. I expect some of it is rage, but they’re meant to mingle. I truly hope, for the sake of every woman I know or will, that it’s ambition. Ambition gets shit done.
I love her. Throw your stones.
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