Hippies for McCain: Is Bill the New Eleanor?

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/28/07

"I'd rather be dead than cool." - Kurt Cobain

Argentina, it appears, will be the first of our neighbors to circle the drain in the spiraling descent to tribal monarchy, as First Lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is elected President by a wide margin. For this they need elections?

‘Tis only in imitation, of course, of the tall, handsome, organized and oh-so-rich white people in the north and of the continuing folly which is Clinton, where hubby Bill threw a birthday party for Hillary this week with characteristic third-world monarchist hubris and the gaudy taste of a fascist South American dictator.

Crisis approaches in this strange turmoil which brings us together spiraling into the dual millennia of Aquarius: What’s black is white; what’s up is down. Yet it comes as no surprise that Wife of Bill wants to be President. It is the classical, symbiotic marriage of the mercurial trickster man and the dominatrix woman – the trickster needs Big Nurse to control his random inner child and arrested sexuality. And Big Nurse sees the world as satyr, the goat boy running naked in the world. She needs to bring it to order. Bill needs to be brought under control: He is the world and the world is goat boy.

As the Democrats continue their descent into nostalgia, they model on a perceived misunderstanding. It is a kind of a ritualized dress-up; an “acting out” of Franklin and Eleanor. It comes as no surprise that Hillary would want (need) to be Bill or Franklin, Leviathan II, coming just after Wilson, but what is kind of odd here is that Bill seems to really want to be the new Eleanor Roosevelt. As he told a British newspaper last week, thrilling to the idea, Hillary really wants him to go around the world as soon as she is President to put the world back together just like it was when he was President. (Way back in the Second Millennium - did somebody say Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo?). I can just see it now with Bill traveling the world and the country as Eleanor did, going deep into the mines to pitch Hillary to the harden and seasoned men: “I am my wife’s legs,” he will tell them.

Not surprising; like so many men with unsure and arrested sexuality, they marry big, bossy women and prefer the life of chamber music, art or saving the world by giving speeches to the blue-haired elderly women of church or party with a whole lot of money. It’s kind of a syndrome.

But it is not going to work. The press has sentimentalized Bill Clinton’s illicit sexuality by comparing it to Betty Ford’s drinking, or the sad case of apparent compulsion of Larry Craig; things we in New Hampshire would deal with and forget in the character of men and women otherwise honorable and competent, as Ford was and Craig is. But Bill Clinton’s acts of sexual dominance and submission in the Oval Office were entirely intentional and fully orchestrated to please and impress his generation. They bring the celestial high point of 200 years of nihilistic political symbolism; a long path that shifted its idea from engaged murder by Anarchists in the 1880s, to sexual dominance, territoriality and exhibitionism like that of the “nihilist saint” Jean Genet in the 1950s.

The nihilist agent seeks to territorialize in conspicuous symbolism that even the proles can understand – in the Sixties it was called Mao Theater. A good expression of it was the famous Life Magazine picture of the student radicals called Weathermen who had taken over the Office of the President at Columbia University. One of the students was sitting behind the President’s desk smoking a cigar. Had he had sexual congress with the President’s secretary on the desk would have been even better; or dominating a police officer in a homosexual act as in Genet. But nothing in this shadow tradition is so rich and primal in counter-culture symbolism as Clinton’s act of sexual dominance in the Oval Office.

Here is the difference between Larry Craig and Clinton. Here in New Hampshire we would see Craig as someone who wanted to do his duty and struggled in the dharma path of life with a mild possession; something to which he was ashamed and in denial of as it hindered him in his duty to family and country; his duty to himself. In New Hampshire we would probably reelect Craig because many things drain the joy from our lives as we struggle on our varied paths. We would respect Craig because in spite of these things he kept to the path. It is a story on which some of the world’s greatest religious texts have been based including John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Mahabharata. But that is not why the Clinton supporters like Clinton, at least the ones of his generation. They like him because he had sex in the Oval Office: They think it is cool. They think it is counter culture. And so does he.

The accusations of sexual misconduct by the President didn’t end with the impeachment trial, they just stopped: The country just needed to move on. But the country will not now or ever move back to a Clinton White House and if it starts to get close, the accusations of sexual misconduct will return. There were rumors rampant of misconduct with other interns among college administrators at the time of the tabloid events; events which with any suggestion of plausibility would have sent any college vice president or district manager at Wal-Mart packing before sundown; there are still unaddressed and unresolved sexual assault accusations against the former President; and there is still the glib defiance, a positive assertion to the faction of his generation whose development stopped at Woodstock. They like it because it is counter-culture.

But Youth Wants to Know and if this former President wants to return to the White House a new generation needs to clearly understand his actions and the purposes and intentions of his actions without guile, sentimentalism or bullshit: Did the President of the United States actually pull his pants down when an attractive female staffer entered the room? Did he do this often? Are you serious?

This week, John McCain was right to invoke Woodstock as a milestone and turning-point event in the generations since WW II. Senator Clinton this month asked that one million dollars be spent in her state to build a museum to the Woodstock event at Yasgur’s farm in 1969. In a charming and touching political ad here in New Hampshire McCain said he couldn’t make the scene because he was “all tied up” at the time. This race is about a generation and who and what of that generation will come forth; Hillary Clinton and hubby Bill, the first representatives of the Woodstock generation? Or John McCain who was shot down over Hanoi 40 years ago this week. It will also decide which will be left behind for good.

It has long been forgotten, but between the acts at Woodstock was a simple and sincere Hindu guru, Swami Satchidananda, who offered the world a simple message: “One truth, many paths.” It was an exotic awakening and brought some culture shock at the time, but such events tend to demystify that which is strange, foreign and alienating to us. It is easy to make fun of the Hari Krishnas, Beatles' guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the others who became popular in the Sixties, but those event have become acclimatized and assimilated and have made possible the welcoming of new immigrant groups to America who add spice and character to the American condition. They also made for the sincere and genuine friendship of my old Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina with the Dalai Lama 25 years later and the compassionate understanding of my current Senator John E. Sununu who this month joined with 26 other Senators in cosponsoring a Sense of the Senate Resolution condemning the violent government crackdown of the Burma junta against the brave and peaceful Buddhist monks who marched unflinching to certain death and imprisonment.

As one prominent conservative scholar and commentator has written, Woodstock and the Sixties were not about politics; they were spiritual awakenings and cultural transitions. And as the Christian Master has said, the things of God and the things of Caesar are two realms and two sides of the coin. The Clintons have not a clue to this. As Sixties types they see instead the communists and the anarchists who commandeered the day. They are “Rubin Democrats” – not the kind who follow the economic cues and insights of Goldman Sachs’ Robert Rubin - but Jerry Rubin, the Marxist revolutionary who told the young ‘uns to go home and kill their parents, but after the draft was passed urged them on to Wall St. He was, he said, a “pilot fish” of his generation and he was, but only to that part of the generation, including the Clintons, which misunderstood the basic premise.

McCain was the flip side of the coin. At its core, war is a test given to a new generation; if you pass the test you are allowed to go on in the universe of your life and generation to other tests; and if you pass the next and the next, you might even get to be President. If you fail or if you avoid the test it costs in later life – your actual successes are always fraught with breakage and defaulted by embarrassments and you are cursed to live out the far side of your life like Elvis; vain, feminine, fat-in-the-face and drugged and unfulfilled, with oiled and blackened hair singing in trashy Vegas bars in the god suit; or charming the elderly and adoring women of church and political party with sentimental and adolescent visions of saving the world.