Hillary Clinton, Macha, Pneumonia, and Great-Grandmother Ferguson

[NOTE: Almost all of this is a slightly updated version of some paragraphs I wrote for my blog on OpenSalon, before the Salon.com book-burners closed down the site. Since it's from one of a collection of essays submitted to Wildside Press in Winter of 2014 — and which they will publish apparently when they damn well get around to it — it was definitely written without Hillary Clinton in mind.]

One day back in the late 20^th century, back when I was teaching writing courses, a student staggered into my office, sneezed, coughed, wheezed, and dropped off a paper on my desk, only somewhat spotted by her bodily fluids. She rasped, "Here it is," and waited for my thanks and appreciation. She didn't get any; I said something like, "Okay, now go home and get some sleep; I would've given you an extension." I wasn't going to thank her. I wasn't going to be impressed. What was going through my mind was (1) that she'd exposed me to Whatever Is Going Around — although I'd probably been exposed already (students are disease vectors) — and (2) that far from being impressed that she'd trekked over with the paper, I thought her socially unskilled that she couldn't get a friend to drop it off and/or unsophisticated about modern technology that it didn't occur to her to just send me the essay as an e-mail attachment.

I discussed this matter with some women colleagues, and they told me the problem was Great Grandmother Ferguson.

They'd all been brought up on some version of Great Grandmother Ferguson, "who dropped the twins while plowing the south forty; bit through the umbilical cords; put one twin to each breast to suckle; finished the plowing; then went home to nurse a log-cabin-ful of cholera victims; and you, you little weakling, you're complaining about some minor appendicitis. Woman up! You're whining like a boy!" The rule was, "Real women don't get sick," or they don't allow a little pneumonia to get in the way of getting housework done: that's for boys and men, who "never have to go through a three-day labor like I had to for you — and then you ripped me apart!"

My colleagues explained to me, "Girls are brainwashed, Rich; it's the Macha Creed, and you just have to tell them that times have changed, and we're winning the Revolution, and now women and girls can take a day off to be sick the way men always could. Or at least rich men."

I thought that story and line were great, and I repeated them back to the class, to which several young women responded, "Right! Boys are wimps! If they get sick they go to bed!" And I repeated the point to rather militant stares and repetition of "Boys are wimps!" and finally just said, "All right — all of you! If you're sick, don't come to class. I gave you a roster with contact information; you're divided into groups; get someone to cover for you." And we moved on.

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            So: There may be some convoluted Machiavellian reason(s) why Hillary Clinton in September 2016 hid the fact that she had pneumonia; or it may be just Great Grandmother Ferguson, lying moldering in the grave, but hoo boy! her spirit marches on.

Butlers and Speaking Fees and Missing Major Political Points

         We've missed a key point with the stories that Donald Trump's butler emeritus (Anthony Senecal) is a racist. Equally important is that Trump had and has staffs big enough to require management and therefore has had (and still has?) a butler. Bruce Wayne has a butler, Alfred Pennyworth, who is succeeded in some Batman versions by "Aunt Harriet" Cooper — thanks to my friend Dave Taylor for that bit of Bat-trivia — but neither Alfred nor Aunt Harriet manage a staff of servants or function as alpha-lap-dog for an entourage.

         Similarly, we miss a key point if we succumb to the temptation to view with alarm the high speaking fees received by Bill and Hillary Clinton and miss the larger point that no speakers should be receiving huge honoraria. Universities have better things to do with their money than lure in Big Names for prestige, PR, and minimally-targeted marketing; big businesses are either wasting stockholder money or buying access — or paying bribes.

         I was taught, and taught correctly, that the two great over-arching political theories of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were class on one hand (most extremely with Marxists) and race on the other (most extremely with Nazis). In the United States, class and race have been intimately intertwined, and if we do very poorly discussing race in America — and we do very poorly — we don't do much better on class.

         Start here, then: Bruce Wayne doesn't have a large staff of servants to avoid obvious plot problems with Batman stories but also because (1) audience members rarely ask about the lower orders in heroic narratives — Who's preparing all those feasts in Tolkien's Middle Earth? —  (2) because we don't want to reduce our identification with Bruce Wayne by looking too closely at his privileges; and (3) because for all of our pious blather about equality, we in America habitually accept as just normal that some of our fellow citizens can have a staff of menials and some of us will be those menials, if lucky enough to get the jobs. And most of us accept as normal that a rich hotshot can earn more from one speech to a banquet than two or three or more of the waiters will make in a year, combining their incomes.

         In 1993, Judy Brady did an instant-classic short essay, "I Want a Wife," which can add gender to the class/race mix here. Well, wives are okay, but more than a wife I want a staff or two, and a butler to manage the domestic one. And I want a manager and an agent from my business staff to start the bidding at $50K for a mostly-canned speech by me, plus the mana of my presence at a commencement or at an invitation-only, haute cuisine fête for the obscenely rich.

         Judy Brady didn't get a wife, and I'm not going to get a butler and a domestic staff or even just an entourage. So I'm not going to accept as normal and inevitable that a trust-fund-baby/con artist like Donald Trump can afford to indirectly pension off old retainers, or that people far less talented than the Clintons can demand and receive thousands of dollars for twenty minutes to an hour of banalities and/or craziness — or even a pretty good but not history-making speech.

Insulting Hillary Clinton (and Others)

This question introduced a long post on my Facebook page: "Why do some Bernie supporters and leftists insist on insulting Hillary?" My lightly edited response follows.

            Attacks on Hillary Clinton's record and positions are legitimate, keeping pressure on her and her campaign to do what her critics want her to do: that is how this very serious game is played. To speak to this as a non-rhetorical question on insults, though — here, I think, are some of the broader reasons.

            (1) Too few Americans spend a lot of time in actual communities, i.e., places where people are stuck with one another for the foreseeable future. This leads to the temptation to say any damn thing one feels strongly about.

            (2) Where Americans do live in communities, many of us live in the results of "the big sort," i.e., surrounded by people with similar attitudes, so saying any damn thing we feel strongly about probably will bring agreement.

            (3) Many of us spend time in virtual "communities," with "community" emphatically in quotation marks: places where we can be pretty anonymous and enter and leave at low cost, and places where we feel we can say any damn thing we feel strongly about.

            (4) We're in another age of sentiment ("Get in touch with your feelings, Luke"), where it's seen as unproblematically good to feel strongly and share those feelings with the group.

            (5) As the custom of "busting" ("signifying on," "cut contests," "doing the dozens") show, the adolescent male tradition of the flyting — insult contests — is alive and both well and ill and increasingly unisex. Insults are sincere and sincerity is good ... and again, people can say any damn thing, with extra points for "transgressivity," until they breach some still- or recently-fashionable taboo.

            (6) Relatively few Americans grow up political and so haven't learned that there are instances when one must affront the neighbors and get into arguments, and therefore one should rigorously avoid pissing others off unnecessarily.

            (7) Relatively few Americans grow up political and in real neighborhoods, so many fail to learn to never piss off the neighbors unnecessarily because you never know when you might need a favor.

            (8) Many young Americans have had their self-esteem maintained strongly and work under the idea that they can say any damn thing and insult people and still be able to ask those people for favors.

                        (The editor of The Miami Student student newspaper sent me a Christmas card, which was a nice gesture, and used the opportunity to drop my column. She reassured me, though, that all was well since she'd replaced me with a colleague of mine who was a highly popular professor who she was sure would make an excellent columnist. My friends and I joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I might write her one because at a young age she had the sort of total sociopathic insensitivity typical of real-pro newspaper editors. Within a week, she asked me for a letter of recommendation.)

            (9) The relatively hard Left and hard Right attract people who put ideas above people and put their ideas above just about any people they are not politically infatuated with. Such folk will say any damn thing they think demonstrates their love of the Good, the True, and the pretty ugly, but screw it: if you disagree, you're just wrong and evil. 

Capping Speakers' Honoraria

I write toward the end of the season of commencements and at a time when Hillary (and Bill) Clinton's income for speeches remains a political issue. So I'm going to recycle an old story and some proposals for capping payments to speakers at colleges and universities.

The story goes like this. 

A couple or three or more decades back, anyway, back when ten thousand dollars was a lot of money, the people who ran the major lecture series for Miami University came to Miami's Student Affairs Council with a request to shift money around so they could bring in Henry Kissinger for ten grand. We had an interesting debate, with a student member of Council of the new-style conservative persuasion insisting that we should put up $10K for so famous and noncontroversial a speaker as Mr. Kissinger, and a faculty representative of old-style conservative persuasion informing the students that Henry Kissinger could legitimately be called many things, but "noncontroversial" wasn't among them. Beneath the surface of the debate might've been a liberal-pinko-peacenik desire to silence Kissinger, but it wouldn't have been much: anything that got debate going at Miami U was good for the Left, and a Kissinger visit would be a fine opportunity to have a high-profile demonstration.

Nah, opposition came from faculty, and what was at stake was the money. Not too long before, as a "Merit Instructor" at the University of Illinois (Urbana), I made six thousand dollars for a year of full-time teaching; and Kissinger was demanding — and in many places getting — ten thousand for one night's work delivering a canned speech, probably the same canned speech he'd give a couple days later in Cincinnati or Dayton, or both.

I forget whether or not Kissinger gave the speech (I think he went only to Cincy), but I do remember submitting guidelines for remuneration of speakers at Miami U, which I felt would be applicable for colleges and universities generally. I immodestly list them below.

      (1) Null case: Graduations are for the graduates and their families, and they habitually run way too long. Unless you can get something like Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, commencement addresses should be limited to a few words by the class valedictorian or other representative, as was done at Cornell prior to 1968. 
      (2) No speaker should be paid for a campus visit more than the lowest compensated full-time university employee receives in take-home pay for a year's work. 
     (3) Any speaker paid the same as or more than half of what the lowest compensated full-time university employee receives in take-home pay for a year's work is writing for hire. 
                  • The speech is to be a speech, of appropriate length but at least twenty minutes, with written copy to be submitted prior to delivery.
                         No "rapping with the group," the way Nat Hentoff did for the speech I hired him for.
                         No ad lib journey down memory lane, as ex-Senator Sam Ervin did at Miami.
                 • The speech is to be a relatively original work, not canned, and not delivered elsewhere one week prior through one week after delivery at (in this case) Miami University.
                 • The speech becomes the property of the university (etc.) for one year, with the university's agreeing to its being delivered elsewhere, outside of the two-week moratorium mentioned above, for payment of one dollar (US$1.00) to the university for each repetition.
       (4) Speakers receiving substantial remuneration should be required to mix a bit with the campus community for a day or so, interviewing with the local media, talking to a class, eating with some of the peasants — and so forth: not a "bim-bam-thank you man, or ma'am," quickie. 

If this means the college or university can't bring in A-List speakers, that may be just as well. My experience was that speakers lower down the food-chain took their gigs more seriously and delivered better speeches. Indeed, the best address given in a lecture series I ran was by a guy who wasn't paid much and who'd forgotten that he'd be paid at all. Moreover, a university with a decent faculty and robust relations with nearby schools should be able to bring in local experts cheaply and frequently.

The one apparent exception during my Miami years was a highly impressive address by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, sponsored by, of all groups, Miami's business school. The exception was only apparent, however, since the direct cost of the speech to Miami University was zip (zero dollars, nada); the b-school organizers of the event raised the money from private sources. I'm sure Mr. Gorbachev made a lot of capitalist money for his work, but whoever paid got value for that money: the speech was both scholarly and from a literally unique and privileged perspective. 

Okay, and there was Art Buchwald's commencement address, which started out reminding graduates that we, the older generation, had left them a perfect world and they damn well shouldn't screw it up. But Buchwald I would've paid to hear in an entertainment series, and I'll stick with the principle that at graduation we should hear a graduate speak (briefly, for God's sake briefly!).

Colleges and universities paying for big-name speakers are engaging in competitive Public Relations, and that's fine so long as really famous and already-wealthy speakers join the game and speak for free: not donating their fees back to the school but free. Big spenders bringing in big-time politicians are purchasing access and good will: low-key bribery; that needs regulation rather more complicated than what I recommended for Miami U, best dang school in the Miami Valley, but not a major player in US politics.