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you, I have been watching with fascination as our sleek, svelte,
coiffed, poised, ever-smiling ex-First Lady turns
into a grim-lipped, shapeless, stringy-haired old bag in a muu-muu.
I am not even going to attempt to draw any inferences about
Mrs. Clinton's state of mind. Even less am I going to try to deduce
what this style collapse tells us about the inner dynamics of the
Clinton marriage. Like everybody else, I have long since given up
trying to figure out what that is all about. I just want
to indulge in some personal nostalgia, and pass a few general remarks
about the world. Look, this is a web magazine. As his colleague
says to Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, when DeNiro has scoffed
at the guy's garbled attempt to answer some large question about
the purpose of life: "Whaddya expect — Bertrand Russell? I'm
a cabbie." And anyway, if you were paying attention, I actually
gave you Bertrand Russell last week.
I grew up in a small English country town. For an intelligent teenager,
there were only two political scenes going. One of them was the
Young Conservatives/Young Farmers crowd. (The two organizations
were consubstantial and coextensive. Pas métayers à gauche,
in England at any rate.) The other was Young Socialists/CND. "CND"
stands for "Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament," a movement that urged
the British government to abandon its nuclear weapons. CND ebbed
and flowed through the '60s, '70s, and '80s in Britain, depending
on the requirements of Soviet foreign policy. It was, of course,
a wholly owned subsidiary of the KGB, though there were some sincere
people in it (including, in an earlier phase, Bertrand Russell!
— I can't seem to shake off the old goat these few days).
The YC/YF crowd drank beer, drove Land Rovers, played rugby, listened
to soft pop, wore tweeds and brogues (the men), pretty dresses,
cardigans and pearls (the women . . . though in later life the women,
too, have gone into tweeds and brogues, I notice). The YS/CND people
drank wine, drove Deux Chevauxs (you need a plural of a plural
here…I give up), played chess, listened to Edith Piaf and wore
black turtle-neck sweaters. In such a small place you couldn't avoid
considerable contact with both sets, but they were philosophically
and culturally at opposite poles. They were Guelphs and Ghibellines,
Cavaliers and Roundheads, Yankees and Mets, matter and anti-matter.
The main thing that caught my febrile adolescent attention was the
very striking difference in the female population of these two political
tribes. The conservative women were much prettier, but the socialist
girls were much looser. The star of the latter set was actually
a girl named…well, never mind her name. Her nickname
was "Nookie", and for very excellent
| “I
have shaken off my youthful leftism, but not the conviction
that conservative women are prettier, and more moral,
than their sisters on the Left.” |
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reasons. Though far from being a beauty queen, and even further
from being obsessive-compulsive about personal hygiene (regarded
in this set as a contemptible bourgeois affectation), this young
lady, not to obscure the matter behind any veil of false delicacy,
banged like an outhouse door in a force nine gale. Well, youth has
its own priorities. I became a socialist, and remained one well
into my twenties.
I have shaken off my youthful leftism, but not the conviction that
conservative women are prettier, and more moral, than their sisters
on the Left. Possibly my perceptions on this matter, after so long
a residence in my psyche, are now hopelessly colored by partiality.
During the recent election fiasco in Florida, when the media lefties
started bad-mouthing Katherine Harris, I was baffled. She had struck
me, from her first appearance, and with due allowance for her age,
as a very attractive woman.
Still, I think I could make an objective case for the general proposition.
Just line them up, for goodness' sake. On the Left: Janet Reno,
Donna Shalala, Hillary Clinton (you can take her before or after
the style crash, far as I'm concerned), Madeleine Albright, Barbra
Streisand, Rosie O'Donnell, Katie Couric, Anna Quindlen, Andrea
Dworkin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nina Khrushchev, Mao Tse-tung's last
wife…. On the Right: Margaret Thatcher, Condoleeza Rice, Linda
Chavez, Katherine Harris, Laura Bush (a cutie, in my book, though
I wish she'd get the squint fixed), Suzanna Gratia Hupp, Heather
Nauert (oh God), Paula Zahn, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan, Grace Coolidge,
Elizabeth the First, the last Tsarina, Eva Peron…. I rest my
case.
There are a few necessary qualifications, but I don't think they
blunt my argument. They may actually strengthen it. Madeleine Albright,
for example, is said to have been a babe when younger. Well, water
will find its level, physical states return to equilibrium sooner
or later, and all lefty women, whatever attributes they may have
started out with, revert to type at last. Margaret Thatcher at 60
could still drive men crazy--I would have given my all for one favoring
glance. Those Young Conservative girls I used to know, who are now
Middle-Aged Conservatives in tweeds, manage to look good
in tweeds. (There is, in fact, a great deal to be said for women
in tweeds. There will be a future column on this topic.) But Hillary
Clinton at 60?
There is a piece of British Army slang I rather like: "double-bagger".
The idea is, that if a lady is hard on the eye, you need to put
a paper bag over her head before you can get intimate with her.
If she is really hard on the eye, you will want to have a
second bag close at hand, in case the first one breaks. There you
have it: all left-wing women are, in their innermost souls, which
will sooner or later take control of the situation, double-baggers.
(An acquaintance raised in upstate New York tells me that the American
equivalent — it may be only a localism, they are peculiar folk
up there — is "a fifty-footer". This apparently refers to the
minimum distance you can approach before being turned to stone.)
When Arthur Koestler was a Communist in Weimar Germany, he used
to have secret meetings with comrades in open public places where
a police "tail" would be easy to spot. Once he met with a female
comrade in a Berlin park. While discussing necessary business, the
woman lost her attention and began staring at the surrounding trees.
"Why is it," she suddenly blurted out, "that the leaves die wherever
we go?"
Footnotes:
(There's an academic somewhere inside this ink-stained wretch, struggling
to get out.)
Oh yes, I know, I misquoted Hamlet last week. The sentence is: "What
a piece of work is a man!" I dropped the "a" in front of "man".
Not a typo, I just mis-remembered it, and perhaps unconsciously
modified it to suit my thesis. At any rate, please rest assured
I did NOT drop the article because I think that referring
to a generalized human being as male is "exclusionary". I don't
think any such damn fool drivelling knee-jerk PC thing. The grammatical
rule I was taught, and to which I shall cleave until my dying day,
is the one pithily expressed by Winston Churchill: that, in these
situations, "the male embraces the female." I am a conservative,
for Heaven's sake.
Dropping that indefinite article puts me in good company, anyway.
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon he said:
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". At
least, that's what he intended to say, and that's what he thought
he said, according to him (according to Arthur C. Clarke). The "a"
got lost somehow, though, and one of the greatest events in the
history of the human race is now tagged with a remark that doesn't
make sense. The truly depressing thing is that hardly anybody seems
to notice.
Answer to last week's quiz-time question. Jun jun chen chen fu
fu zi zi means: "The prince should act like a prince, the minister
like a minister, the father like a father and the son like a son."
In classical Chinese words hardly ever belong to definite parts
of speech. Jun can be a noun ("prince"), a verb ("act like
a prince"), an adjective ("princely") an adverb ("in a princely
manner"), or even an honorific pronoun ("you"). Furthermore, verbs
are not required to have any mark of tense, person, number, voice,
mood or aspect. So that first jun is a noun, the second a
verb in the subjunctive mood, with a coloring of obligation. Same
for the others. You can just about do this in English, if you make
the nominatives into vocatives and the subjunctives into imperatives:
"Prince — prince! Minister — minister! Father — father!
Son — son!" Prof.
Burton Watson on classical Chinese grammar: "The student of
classical Chinese is sometimes led to conclude despairingly that…he
is not dealing with a medium for the communication of new ideas
but a mnemonic device for calling to mind old ones. Is it too much
to ask that the writer indicate at least the subject of the sentence?
he may ask. In the case of classical Chinese the answer is usually,
yes."
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