Hillary Clinton was romping the American stage for a year,
exposing her weaknesses for all to see: her overarching artificiality, her attempt
at cleverness, her desperate ambition, her constant prevarication, her
unethical deeds, they were all nakedly in sight for a full year. Even the solitary
fig leaf of so-called ‘work experience’ began to slip off during the long
exposure to media lights: it could be seen that she had risen to her full level
of incompetence.
But that is for those who wanted to see. Unlike the naked
emperor’s story where his staff did not speak out of fear, and the populace did
not speak out of respect, the two categories of people here who refused to see
or speak were the establishment elite, and the feminists.
The establishment is
of course a reference to the entrenched elite who have their hands in the till
– the politicians, the bankers, the lobbyists, the media – who profit from one
of their own winning the election, and who are very nervous of anything or
anyone disturbing the status quo. They saw the naked empress, but refused to
speak.
The feminist group, on the other hand, refused to see. These
were the older feminists, more my contemporaries, who are so emotionally
attached to the gender issue that it side-blinded their moral and rational
acumen. To them it was as if the empress was wearing a bright jewel of
feminism, and the dazzle of that jewel blinded them from noticing that she was
wearing little else. But as I said, this was the case only with the older
feminists: the urban, educated, left-leaning, independent ones. Because the election
results show that a lot of the younger women and also the older, non-college,
non-urban women, could see clearly the naked empress, and have announced so to
the world through their ballot.
Poor Hillary. If only she had friends who could tell her the
truth, and not let her get delusional about her talents or her chances of
winning.
Interestingly, the person she was challenging was one who
constantly directed attention to his own nakedness, maybe that is because such
is his personality. For this, he was derided by both friend and foe. So lucky
Donald. He had more people than he wanted telling him precisely what he was.
Even though his ideas may sound delusional to many of us, he himself had a fair measure of what he could achieve.
For feminists seeking a symbolic victory, this is a double
blow. Not only is a woman not the winner, but the man who won has been openly
labeled an enemy of women, and further, he took 53 per cent of white women’s
votes (to Hillary’s 43 per cent). But most of all, what the feminists will regret is
that they have also lost all their other progressive ideals – about
minimum wage, about the environment, about racial integration; all that too has
been sacrificed for the greed of having a mere symbol, that too a very faulty
and degenerate symbol. If not for this desperate greed for a symbol, they may have had today in the White House a strong, progressive, feminist, human being in the form of Bernie Sanders.
Maybe the older feminists, many among them my good friends, need to take a relook at this divisive binary of woman as an opposite of man, as opposed to man, as a category exclusive of man. It is dehumanizing, in a way. Maybe we could learn something from the younger millennial women, and the non-college women, who think, and vote, differently.
Maybe the older feminists, many among them my good friends, need to take a relook at this divisive binary of woman as an opposite of man, as opposed to man, as a category exclusive of man. It is dehumanizing, in a way. Maybe we could learn something from the younger millennial women, and the non-college women, who think, and vote, differently.