Power corrupts.
It’s an old cliché Democrats would be wise to stop imagining applies to Republicans alone.
The longer an individual plays power politics, the greater the chances they eventually succumb to its seductive charms and temptations. The bargains are Faustian, but the power offered in exchange is well-nigh limitless — infinite personal bank account expansion, board memberships for life wherever you wish, fame, fortune, groupies, adulation, you name it, you get it.
The system itself is rotten. It is based on cynical exploitation of the powerless by moneyed interests. Since we Americans are nothing if not consummately self-obsessed, we only really notice suffering when Americans experience it. Even then, we only care episodically. In the present everyone gets their 15 minutes of pain. We all feel it, move on, and forget it.
Lost your house in the 2008 crisis where the Wall Streeters all got bailouts, bonuses, and better jobs?
Shut up and quit crying. We’ve moved on.
Not able to afford health insurance, even under ACA?
Shut up and quit crying. We don’t care.
Sure, Black Lives Matter. But only within our borders. There ain’t no body cams in Africa when it all goes bad. And it frequently all goes bad, with all-American big-money corporations there every step of the way siphoning out oil and cheap manufactured goods, profiting off every war and rebellion, propping up dictators and sham democracies to make a cheap buck.
Don’t worry, they aren’t racist. They are equal-opportunity exploiters, purveying the same sick game in the Caribbean, Latin America, South America, Asia, Europe, the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean...
...where the seas are rising. Island nations are submerging. Global warming advances unchecked.
Along with it grows the massive yawning gap between rich and poor nations, which is just as grievous and nasty as the domestic income and wealth gaps are.
Meanwhile, the Big Name elites are wrapped up in their power politics. The state of global misery and the suicidal direction of human affairs does not enter into their calculus of attaining and exercising personal power.
Thus Hillary Clinton.
She has spent decades working within the system in a resolute quest for personal power. As with so many others who have done the same, she gradually came to identify with the system itself. So absorbed was she in her own story of achievement, she failed to notice how interwoven her own political self had become with the banal exercise of the power of international commerce. Or, more likely, she knew well what she was doing, but always felt that she had maintained just enough of a sliver of daylight between their interests and her own to claim she was some sort of “progressive”.
My feelings toward Hillary and the many like her have nothing to do with hate.
They are sad and empty souls for whom I feel nothing but pity. Such people never had the courage to stand strong for anything — or only in a half-hearted way, many years ago in their youth, now long forgotten.
A few years back, in an interview, Hillary once said her favorite book was Dostoievsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This seemed a bizarre departure from Hillary’s habitual (and completely ludicrous) line that her favorite book was the Bible. But then I remembered Laura Bush had previously made the same claim in an interview, saying that she sympathized with the personality of the Grand Inquisitor. A Hillary staffer must have read that interview, because they had Hillary trot out the pleasingly “liberal” line that the Grand Inquisitor represented not morality but oppressive self-righteousness.
I rolled my eyes at this silly elite parlor game of GOP staffer vs. Dem staffer, played out in jousting interpretations of a Russian literary classic by two public figures I doubt very much ever read the book (and if they did, failed to understand it). After that, I forgot all about it.
Then a few months ago, a profile of Hillary’s reading habits popped up in a NYT interview! This time Hillary provided a more honest recitation of the various best-seller series and ghost-written politician vanity books on her virtual nightstand. Under some pressure for what classic she liked, she once again referred to...The Brothers Karamazov. This time, she didn’t pretend to really know the book at all, offering no insights or interpretation, saying instead she remembered reading it in college and that it really made an impression. She said she’d like to read it again one day, should she ever have the time.
It was the most honest thing I ever heard Hillary Clinton say publicly. It almost made me like her a little. The all-consuming pursuit of political power does terrible things to human beings. It disallows them the pursuit of knowledge or virtue as their own rewards. They can’t even make time to read or experience cultural objects in themselves.
Everything becomes instrumentalized. Everything. What they read, what they watch, what they say, whom they speak to, what they do, second by second, minute by minute. Does it build their power? Does it add to their influence? Life for them becomes a calculated choreography intended to perpetuate the myth of their own personal dominance.
What kind of life is that?
A rich one, yes.
But a poor one as well. And one to be pitied.