Hill's Climb

Hill has a problem in this race. She uses her gender like a weapon. Sometimes keenly edged, othertimes bluntly. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

Or at least that how it comes across to a lot of people. Our society (still) has a problem with gender, especially female gender and public identity or persona. You either have to be the virgin or the mother, the matriarch or the whore, as Joan of Arc combustibly learned.

And you can’t be the crone – our society is wickedly uncomfortable with crones. Whether this was fear mongered into us from medieval witch burnings, or goes even farther back when patriarchal hegemonies took over the spiritual doings of most western proto-societies, I don't know. Crones have been relegated to crinkly caricatured clichés – and the main reason we fear them so much is that they remind us of our death. Or perhaps more importantly, they remind us of the entire life process, and even the death of our loved ones. And we fear being alone even more than we fear our own death.

Western societies of all stripe dispensed with the natural triad of maiden, mother, crone. We’re now so far removed from watching anyone age naturally, let alone a public figure, that we're confused by this. And Hillary, a powerful woman, who doesn't quite fit into any of those types, confuses us even more.

And to make matters worse, she has the one archetype challenging her that all the fairy tales has triumphing over the wicked crone: the young Hero. Obama the shiny knight, on his steed of change has come to save the kingdom. And with his trusty cute sidekick, Sancho Edwards of the South, they just might be unstoppable.

I have to pause here and say that I didn’t intend today’s blog to seem like a conservative pundit’s rant. You all know that my personal politics are the farthest from that raving pack of frothy mouthed baboons as possible. So don’t get me wrong – this is not an endorsement of Hillary, or of any other candidate for that matter just yet.

It all just fascinates me – Americans are such a young psychology study in that we have to do things all or nothing, all the time. And here in this race, we have a black man and a woman vying realistically for the first time that either could be president. And so we’re stirring all these issues and social insecurities up at once, and I think a lot of it just gets confused and thrown into the bin by most folks out there, simply because they don’t want to think about it.

Hillary still has a hold because she has the experience. And we tend to not want to allow an older woman this, because we’ve blurred the lines so much. But she does have charisma. So, my problem lies that whether or not she cries in public, whether or not she gets testy in a debate, we as a public need to not judge every behavior as if it’s damning or the first time we’ve seen it. We’ve always accorded that privilege to other candidates. (Howard Dean not included.) And I’m certain that her speech of “I found myself by listening to you” in New Hampshire was as calculated as her crying and voice cracking was not. But being a good politician means being calculated. And at least she is responding in real time, and isn’t the dense stone wall of “I’m the Decider”. We’ve seen where that’s gotten us.

It will be very interesting to see what happens in the coming days. I couldn’t be happier that the top three contenders for the Democratic nomination are progressive, albeit in different intensities. But they are going to give it everything they’ve got. They’d better.