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2016 Postmortem
Showing Original Post only (View all)Garrison Keillor on Hillary powering through illness [View all]
From his Facebook page:
I saw Hillary once working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She had learned the art of encountering the crowd and making it look personal. It was not glamorous work, more like picking fruit, and it took the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited to see you so by gosh you can treat them right.
So its no surprise she pushed herself to the point of collapse the other day. Whats odd is the perspective, expressed in several stories, that her determination to keep going reveals a lack of transparency ---- that she shouldve announced she had pneumonia and gone home and crawled into bed.
Ive never gone fishing with her, which is how you really get to know someone, but I did sit next to her at dinner once, one of those stiff dinners that is nobodys idea of a wild good time, the conversation tends to be stilted, everybodys beat, you worry about spilling soup down your shirtfront. She being First Lady led the way and she being a Wellesley girl, the way led upward. We talked about my infant daughter and schools and about Justice Blackmun, and I said how inspiring it was to sit and watch the Court in session, and she laughed and said, I dont think itd be a good idea for me to show up in a courtroom where a member of my family might be a defendant. A succinct and witty retort. And she turned and bestowed her attention on Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was sitting to her right. She focused on him and even made him chuckle a few times. I was impressed by her smarts, even more by her discipline.
I dont have that discipline. Most people dont. Politics didnt appeal to me back in my youth, the rhetoric (Ask not what your country can do for you) was so wooden compared to so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, so I walked dark rainy streets imagining the great novel I wouldnt write and was still trying to be cool and indifferent well into my thirties, when other people were making a difference in the world.
Hillary didnt have a prolonged adolescence and fiction was not her ambition. She doesnt do dreaminess. What some people see as a relentless quest for power strikes me as the good habits of a serious Methodist. Be steady. Dont give up. Its not about you. Work for the night is coming.
The woman who does not conceal her own intelligence is a fine American tradition, going back to Anne Bradstreet and Harriet Beecher Stowe and my ancestor Prudence Crandall, but none has been subjected to the steady hectoring that Mrs. Clinton has. She is the first major-party nominee to be pictured in prison stripes by the opposition. She is the first cabinet officer ever to be held personally responsible for her own email server, something ordinarily delegated to anonymous nerds in I.T. The fact that terrorists attacked an American compound in Libya under cover of darkness when Secretary Clinton presumably got some sleep has been held against her, as if she personally was in command of the defense of the compound, a walkie-talkie in her hand, calling in air strikes.
Extremism has poked its head into the mainstream, aided by the Internet. Back in the day, you occasionally saw cranks on a street corner handing out mimeographed handbills arguing that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but you saw their bad haircuts, the bitterness in their eyes, and you turned away. Now theyre in your computer, whispering that the economy is on the verge of collapse and for a few bucks theyll tell you how to protect your savings. But lacking clear evidence, we proceed forward. We dont operate on the basis of lurid conjecture.
Someday historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after womens suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, a woman was required to run for office wearing concrete shoes. Check back fifty years from now and if Im wrong, go ahead and dance on my grave.
So its no surprise she pushed herself to the point of collapse the other day. Whats odd is the perspective, expressed in several stories, that her determination to keep going reveals a lack of transparency ---- that she shouldve announced she had pneumonia and gone home and crawled into bed.
Ive never gone fishing with her, which is how you really get to know someone, but I did sit next to her at dinner once, one of those stiff dinners that is nobodys idea of a wild good time, the conversation tends to be stilted, everybodys beat, you worry about spilling soup down your shirtfront. She being First Lady led the way and she being a Wellesley girl, the way led upward. We talked about my infant daughter and schools and about Justice Blackmun, and I said how inspiring it was to sit and watch the Court in session, and she laughed and said, I dont think itd be a good idea for me to show up in a courtroom where a member of my family might be a defendant. A succinct and witty retort. And she turned and bestowed her attention on Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was sitting to her right. She focused on him and even made him chuckle a few times. I was impressed by her smarts, even more by her discipline.
I dont have that discipline. Most people dont. Politics didnt appeal to me back in my youth, the rhetoric (Ask not what your country can do for you) was so wooden compared to so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, so I walked dark rainy streets imagining the great novel I wouldnt write and was still trying to be cool and indifferent well into my thirties, when other people were making a difference in the world.
Hillary didnt have a prolonged adolescence and fiction was not her ambition. She doesnt do dreaminess. What some people see as a relentless quest for power strikes me as the good habits of a serious Methodist. Be steady. Dont give up. Its not about you. Work for the night is coming.
The woman who does not conceal her own intelligence is a fine American tradition, going back to Anne Bradstreet and Harriet Beecher Stowe and my ancestor Prudence Crandall, but none has been subjected to the steady hectoring that Mrs. Clinton has. She is the first major-party nominee to be pictured in prison stripes by the opposition. She is the first cabinet officer ever to be held personally responsible for her own email server, something ordinarily delegated to anonymous nerds in I.T. The fact that terrorists attacked an American compound in Libya under cover of darkness when Secretary Clinton presumably got some sleep has been held against her, as if she personally was in command of the defense of the compound, a walkie-talkie in her hand, calling in air strikes.
Extremism has poked its head into the mainstream, aided by the Internet. Back in the day, you occasionally saw cranks on a street corner handing out mimeographed handbills arguing that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but you saw their bad haircuts, the bitterness in their eyes, and you turned away. Now theyre in your computer, whispering that the economy is on the verge of collapse and for a few bucks theyll tell you how to protect your savings. But lacking clear evidence, we proceed forward. We dont operate on the basis of lurid conjecture.
Someday historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after womens suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, a woman was required to run for office wearing concrete shoes. Check back fifty years from now and if Im wrong, go ahead and dance on my grave.
https://www.facebook.com/garrison.keillor.14/posts/10154046259773892
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she is a WOMAN--a smart, competent, dedicated, non-subservient WOMAN, and not a puke, to boot.
niyad
Sep 2016
#21
True judge of character. Bless his heart. Garrison Keillor is the real heartland.
Laser102
Sep 2016
#15
Odd perspective some have that determination to keep going reveals a “lack of transparency”
Festivito
Sep 2016
#25
Work becomes BAD. Rest becomes BAD. Silly. But, ignore, no! Answer, like Garrison does here.
Festivito
Sep 2016
#32