WGBH's Chris Lydon's Sophomoric
Attempt to
Analyze Hillary Clinton
No doubt we’ll see and hear more of this as
the campaign continues. . . .
On tonight’s Chris Lydon Show (WGBH -
Boston), the topic was The
Hillary Rorschach Test How many
ways can we hate Hillary Clinton? Let us count the ways!
According to Lydon, “Has any American icon
been so variously reviled as Hillary Clinton? You hate her because she’s too
far to the left, you hate her because she’s too far to the right, you hate her
because she triangulates. You hate her for her hair, her looks, her marriage,
her career. You hate her because she wasn’t a good wife to Bill, or because
she refused to leave him when he cheated. This is what Jack Hitt calls the
Hillary Rorshach Test, a phrase that apparently originates with Hillary herself.
Hitt argues that what’s interesting is not what our intense reactions to
Hillary tell us about her, but what they tell us about ourselves.”
The experience of listening to Lydon’s
show reminded me of a course on Psychoanalysis and Literature that I
took at the University of Vienna back in the early 1970s. Nothing was what it
seemed to be, whether we were discussing scenes from Kafka or Shakespeare or
Eliot or Mann. Hillary would have felt right at home in that class. And whatever
deeper meaning we might ascribe to her constantly changing hairdos, her
sometimes combative ways in political debate, or the accommodation she has made
to Bill Clinton’s past — whatever that says about Hillary, it says even more
about ourselves. Or so Lydon and Hitt believe. Never in their world is a cigar
just a cigar, certainly not if Hillary is holding it.
Perhaps the only one on the show to see the
cigar as a cigar, was pollster Frank Luntz, who noted that Hillary
Clinton's political success will depend on her political views (surprise!) and
how well "she carries herself." In other words, how
well she comes across as a likeable person, and not as a Rorschach test
that the rest of us can use to evaluate our teetering interpersonal
relationships in a post-feminist, post Andrew Dice Clay world of sexual
ambiguity (which evidently exists more prominently in Bean-Town than elsewhere
in the Universe.)
All of this begs the question: so what’s
new? Unless we are the most fervent logical positivist, everything “out
there” has meaning that transcends its own “objectness.” A dove means
peace, a heart means love, an Elephant means a Republican Asshole. To take
Hillary Clinton’s history and turn it into a theme for Lydon’s sophomoric
thesis, does a disservice to Hillary Clinton, his listeners, and political
discourse in the US.
So let’s call that show what it really was:
one big intellectual circle-jerk. I hope you all feel better now!
Books about Hillary Clinton
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