The fall of Bill and Hillary

Two or three decades ago, the phrase “reinventing yourself” became popular. Vice President Gore used it all the time and Hillary Clinton still uses it and did recently, although almost nobody else does anymore. I never liked the phrase as it suggested one’s life is situational and denied the quality of timelessness which can mysteriously press a person of influence into history’s mythic river. It always brought to my mind instead the present my generation (and Bill’s, Hillary’s and Gore’s) found under the tree on Christmas morning: Mr. Potato Head.

Mr. Potato Head would be anything we wanted him to be by pressing little plastic lips, moustaches, eyes, etc. into his flesh. Mr. Potato Head at such a vulnerable young and impressionistic age may have unwittingly afflicted us with a view of the world which was autonomous, exclusively generational and as the original paradigm played over and over again in our lives, locked in neurotic repetition. It may have led us to believe that when you moved to Texas and put on cowboy boots, as President George H.W. Bush did, you were then a Texan. Or you could be anything you wanted to be by changing your hairstyle. You had “reinvented” yourself. But you hadn’t. When you begin to think about “reinventing yourself,” you have already been through your life’s existential passage. You are already out of time.

{mosads}Clinton would find utility in the phrase; early on a “Goldwater Girl” in high school, soon to reinvent herself in the radical Sixties when she became emblematic of her generation’s rise when she was interviewed in LIFE magazine in June 1969 (just two months before Woodstock). She belonged exclusively then to the bonded abstraction which was her generation and from there on out, but was no longer from anywhere, or rather, she could no longer remember where she was from and no longer had that real primordial place that was home to return to when it was all said and done. Which, incidentally, is now.

By then, she had only Bill. But when they reinvented her again by sticking a Bible in her hands to show her Protestant, plain-folk, heartland roots, when she first thought of running for president, it began to grate.

And today she has only Bill, the object of the adoring abstraction that is the generation Bill still represents, now rapidly entering old age. Her shifts and “reinventions” are all exclusively within her generational agency. And that the wife of an erstwhile Arkansas governor would come to represent New York City as senator (as Bill’s proxy) does not speak well for New York City either. In its power days — from the reign of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (R), the “Little Flower,” to that of Mayor Ed Koch (D) — New York knew who it was and there was no need for reinvention; rebranding, re-anything. The Clintons came to New York to “reinvent it” and they did. But it was too late for New York as well. The energy, the awakenings — the truth, you could say — of America had all headed west.

America must follow history’s contours and all indicators today head west. Emphasis must shift. The generations yield today with the passage of the Clintons — possibly the most dishonest and inauthentic couple in the history of American politics — into oblivion. It will wake up America and bring forth new generations, new awakenings, new enlightenments and it is long overdue.

The century now can finally begin.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.