From "Ballad of a Thin Man" by BoB Dylan
You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard
But you don't understand
Just what you'll say
When you get home
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones
At the heart of the language of division is a world-view: Us vs. Them. Thus, the language only represents the vision; it is this vision, of “how the world is and works, ” and of our role in it, that determines how we think, and so, how we act.
In this way, Hillary Clinton naturally divides when she speaks, for she divides in her thoughts. She thinks, she perceives, she speaks, and she acts out of a sense of an inherent “otherness”, a sense that there is a line of demarcation between and within countries, peoples, parties, races, regions. Seeing and thinking division she cannot help but to act “divisively.”
So today she could not help but “play the race card.” She did not mean to offend. She did not neccessarily mean to divide. She called it as she sees it. She sees black and white, educated and uneducated, blue collar and elite. Only days after 9/11, she echoed George Bush in her warning to the world at large that “you are either with us or against us.”
Yesterday, she said that John Kerry had lost the "Hispanic" AND the blue collar vote. Today she says she is more electable because she can get the votes of hard-working white people, hard working blue collars. Of course, in Hillary-speak, the blue collars are whites, not "Hispanics" and not African Americans. Also, Americans are white.
In relation to these Americans, African Americans are some fringe group that Hillary need not worry about, that the democratic party shouldn’t worry about. Hillary lumps THEM all together, as though they have no occupational, socio-economic, educational differences, gradations, even of age.
In Hillary’s demographics, AA’s are excluded from any group whites are in. Whites have groups like “older whites,” and “blue collar” assumes white and “white women” and “uneducated” but HARD WORKING whites and “ educated whites” i.e. elitists. There are no elitist blacks and no black women.
Oh, and “Hispanics” are all Cuban, Mexican, Nicuraguan, Argentinian, Panamanian, Puerto Rican- Americans, as THEY are all the same too. It is no wonder Hillary, with her old school notion of demographical divisions was unprepared for
Obama’s campaign-- for that different way of thinking, seeing, acting—and for the new, emerging reality, the new demographics, TRANS demographies, in which there’s overlap and cross-mingling and blending and mixing it up so that, ultimately, a larger group of voters become available for action, and the young, they who are so good at the mixing up us older folks are as shy about as 6th graders at a dance, they, in themselves, become a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and quite multi-faceted (in religious, idelogical, musical, occupational, aspirational preferences) demographic that should be ignored only at the peril of party and country.
Also, she did not foresee the power of a vision of unity in which the traditional demographical divisions do not SAY IT ALL. This is the vision that has drawn real people to it, creating and responding to the new voting demography, those older white women, like me, who do not fit into the HRC/ MSM definitions of them OR the polarizing sense of what is American and what is not; and those educated AA’s, young and old, and those non-Hispanic Mexican-Americans, and mostly, those of us who do not vote because somonelse of our own gender or race or ethnicity or region or age group or occupation is voting a certain way.
She did not really undrstand this NEW Democracy, and how it would change politics and party. We have been growing towards this new transdemographic America for some time and now we need to unify, not divide it. In actuality, Obama’s supporters are very much a picture of this new mixing it up. Our common denominator is only that we want a better America and we want a better world. We want to do more of what is right for us and FOR OTHERS, not just OUR OWN KIND.
So we must forgive Senator Clinton for talking the old way. It’s just that the language to express the new reality, and the new vision that arises out of its imperatives, is being re-invented as she speaks. The America the Clintons thought they knew is changing. Hillary’s misconception was that change is a slogan. It is an event and it’s happening whatever she envisions, thinks, says, or does. Some things we must leave for those with fresh eyes to see and open minds to do and we must simply help. It does not mean that we are not needed. Our role changes. We help give birth to someone else's dream. That is what is needed now from Hillary, not a continued fight to fulfill her own vision of herself. This is a vision some others do share, those who think they are like her, those she thinks are like her, and then...there's all the rest of America.