The people who attain the highest offices in the U.S. government are human beings: not gods, not saviors, not all-knowing. They share with all of us certain limitations that show up in our blindness, our fears and our hypocrisy. No one is invulnerable to these and the resulting inconsistencies. This is an argument for limiting their powers drastically and restricting the scope of their assigned tasks to well-defined and narrow channels like protecting property rights, if there is to be a government. The U.S. Constitution and/or the people have not done this, and the result is that we invest high officials with vast powers. This opens the door wide for their weaknesses to be amplified across the nation and the world, producing truly horrendous results.
Our blindness may let us think that Italy’s Mussolini, Germany’s Hitler and Russia’s Stalin are examples of this phenomenon, but that America is exceptional and has been spared the catastrophes of leadership in those countries. This is not true. The beam is in our eye, not just the mote in theirs. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski is now recounting certain evils of states: “Periodic massacres of their not-so-distant ancestors by colonists and associated wealth-seekers largely from western Europe (countries that today are, still tentatively at least, most open to multiethnic cohabitation) resulted within the past two or so centuries in the slaughter of colonized peoples on a scale comparable to Nazi World War II crimes: literally involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of victims.” He alludes to the U.S. in a limited but significant way: “In Vietnam, recent estimates suggest that between one and three million civilians were killed from 1955 to 1975.”
Hillary Clinton is quick to call Donald Trump a racist. Without exploring her own complete record on this subject, let’s examine but one instance, her “superpredators” remark. That can be seen in context in a campaign speech that she gave in 1996 in Keene, N.H. The excerpt is less than 2 minutes long.
A reasonable discussion of her comments can be found here. From this we learn that the term “superpredator” and the idea of it had been suggested 2 months earlier by a Princeton political science professor. The theory of it was later discredited and the professor admitted he was wrong.
This episode indicates a number of possibilities about Clinton. The most important one, in my view, is that she brusquely tossed aside all her ideas about children, helping children, and such. Even though she was speaking about less than fully developed not-yet-mature youngsters, not adults who are fully developed, she demoted them to the status of conscienceless beasts. This is all the more striking in that she had devoted the earlier part of her speech to programs designed to help children. Yet her heart hardened drastically in talking about gangs of children. To me, this shows blindness, fear, hypocrisy and inconsistency all coming to the surface. Her remark about bringing them to heel offered another animal metaphor. She was saying they’re dogs. This showed a fear of crime and perhaps a fear of black crime and black male crime specifically. She was also simultaneously playing a political card, a fear card, to rally voters. Her speech was defending Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, after all, which was exceptionally tough on black men. Her remarks may also suggest gullibility in jumping onto the professor’s theory, or political opportunism in doing so or both.
She mentioned the drug angle, even linking inner-city gangs to the drug cartels. Yet she was completely blind to the fact that the war on drugs was driving the profitability of the drug trade that she was aiming to suppress.
Recently, a young woman unfurled a banner at one of her stops that read “We have to bring them to heel”. Clinton had the opportunity to react as a person or as a candidate who is accountable or as someone who has thought through this matter before or as an understanding adult dealing with a young woman who was speaking up to power or even as someone who will think on her feet. This little private event was not that important from any political standpoint. It’s only a small bunch of well-dressed people. Instead, Clinton tried to go on with her prepared remarks. She tried to control the situation, offering to “talk about it later” (when the cameras weren’t running?).
The woman (Ashley Williams) persisted. What matters in this exchange is that 20 years later, a girl who at the time was but a tyke by the looks of it, wants an apology from Clinton; and Clinton cannot improvise and doesn’t want to. She wants to control the situation and stick to the script. There is a gulf that separates the girl from the candidate. An attempt at some sort of democratic interaction on equal terms fails, even if it’s a clash, not least because Clinton cannot really handle it.
How will Clinton handle confrontations with the leaders of other nations? Will she revert to her “script”? To her prepared positions? Will she fall back on hastily adopting some theory of some professor or advisor?
3:56 pm on August 26, 2016
