the prayers and tears of hillary

Music: Brothers and Sisters: Fortunately (2008)

I spent this morning reading old magazine and newspaper articles about Hillary Clinton's remarks shortly before the New Hampshire primary last January. I then thought about these articles and essays as I worked-out, waterproofed my patio furniture, shopped for sweat pants and free weights, and bought a buttload of water slightly flavored with a hint of citrus. I then wrote about the prayers and tears of Hillary, trying to make the draft of my public address talk more interesting and insightful. I wrote right through Judge Judy, one of my favorite shows. I started to get a headache and decided to make dinner (an Omaha New York Strip, and this on a Tuesday, thank you very much Low-Carb for my Fat Ass Lifestyle---that's LCFMFAL for short, not to be confused with ROTFLMAO, which I don't do anymore on account of a deep, soul-wrenching sadness and the extra animals in the house and the damage they do to the floor. Wouldn't it be great, though, if you could literally laugh your ass off? I would laugh my beer belly off too).

After a hiatus working on an impossible butterfly jigsaw puzzle while listening to House and Prime Time Medical Mysteries about this guy who has a wart disease that made him look like a tree, I decided to think and write some more, while I have the luxury to do so. School begins next week---or, at least, the meeting part of it---and that usually means for me that research comes to a screeching halt until the holidays, especially because I've got a new prep.

The phrase "the prayers and tears of Hillary" is a play on a book I enjoy by John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. I first discovered Caputo's work trying to work through Kierkegaard's dissertation and have been a fan ever since. In many ways Caputo helped me to break-out of the deadlock of my own religious past to think about religion in a different way. Prayers and Tears is Captuo's attempt to explain Derrida's late work in terms of "religion without religion," in terms of certain dispositional postures toward others or the Other (and these shadow-dancing with Levinas). What's interesting about the title is the image it is meant to reference: a sight of Derrida praying, then affirming, then raising his head to reveal tear-stained cheeks. Moving piety from an avowed atheist; what does this mean, then, the prayers and tears of Hillary?

It means a candidate who had nutcrackers marketed with her image on them is capable of deep emotion, that beneath the composure there is someone buried whom the mass media was desperate to unearth. It means to reference the public release of emotion as a final hail Mary---one that worked, but not enough.

To understand why, it's important to recount that the pie-eyed celebration Obama's oratory stands in very sharp contrast to the repeatedly printed sentiments about Hillary, many of which replaced Rodham with "Shrill." Hillary's Witchypoo voice was so parodied that she eventually decided to laugh at herself:

"Do I really laugh like that?" asks Clinton, and then quickly assents. Perhaps a better way to go than let the Guardian keep describing your "forced jackal laugh." After the SNL appearance, Tucker Carlson of MSNBC asked, "could you actually live in this country for eight years having to listen to her voice?" And as I've blogged before, Public Radio International ran a news story in which they hired a British acting and voice coach to perform a comparative analysis of Obama and Clinton's voices.

As the work of Karlyn Kohrs Cambpell has suggested, Hillary has been victimized for her failures to properly perform femininity, a terrible catch-22 to be in as a female politician. An attention to Hillary's vocal delivery, however, demonstrates how these performances are principally vocal and related, not to arguments, but to tone. This implies that the ideology of sexism is much more insidious, much more deeply ingrained than many might suppose: we don't simply think in discriminatory ways; we hear in those those ways. Much brain research as suggested that the very first form of likeness we learn is gender, and that this discrimination is not based on sight---thank you very much Freud---but sound. Affect comes before the signifier.

This implies that feelings and affective rapport is prior to representation (or what Diane Davis would term "identification"). It suggests that our first, hard-wired habits of discrimination thereby get articulated to gender norms first, before race, before name, before faith, so "early" that in fact our habitual responses to gender-in-voice are of the knee-jerk variety (but would differ, of course, from one culture to the next).

The knee-jerk quality of discrimination based on vocalic tone are easier to see/hear in the case of Hillary's oratory. The ideological underpinnings of tone and gender were perhaps no more obvious than in a Portsmouth coffee shop a day before the New Hampshire primary last January. The headlines that day ran as follows: "Hillary Clinton Gets Emotional"; "Play of the Day: Hillary Chokes Up"; "Teary Eyed Clinton Vows to Fight On"; "The Tracks of Her Tears"; and the most popular headline, "The Crying Game." When asked by a fan how she keeps so "upbeat and wonderful" while campaigning, she answered:

Clinton cinched the primary, and reporters were quickly to claim her quivering voice was to blame. Until that day, reported Time magazine, "Clinton seemed to carry herself like a President trapped inside a woman's body." Notably, the words chosen by Clinton deliberately confronted any easy separation of public and private, busting open the domination of the signifier with what was undeniably genuine feeling: "This is very personal for me," confessed Clinton, "it's not just political. It's not just public." What accounts for the "just" is the personal and private, the publicized conflation of the two.

Hilary's Affective Coming-Out garnered ambivalent reactions: many polled said they changed their mind about her, while the already committed found firmer resolution. The press was more divided; while much of it was positive, the more cynical argued that "political crying has gone form anathema to acceptable to mandatory," becoming the "latest political calculation for attention." Despite the fact nary a tear dropped and that Hillary was in control of her speech, countless newspaper headlines suggested sobbing and crying. And the NEW posterboy for hypocrisy, John Edward, implied Clinton's emotional display made her unfit for the "tough business" of the presidency.

So, what's the point with these examples? The point here is that tone is deliberately pointless, but it is not normless; assuredly, for example, on this side of language tone is gendered: as the cultural reception of Hillary demonstrates, aggressive tones are less permitted in the female voice than they are in the male voice. But these examples also show how difficult a line Hillary's speech had to tow---and I think how the maternal figures centrally in that double-bind. The coffee shop break and its controlled emotion helped Hillary in the polls, but it was too late. In retrospect, this firm by "soft" Hillary might have helped her campaign (something that started with that 60 Minutes interview some years back but which too many people forget).

It would seem the old adage, that politicians don't cry or show emotion, no longer holds today. It may very well be "crying" or "emoting" is a requirement, as some cynical journalists have suggested.

I didn't have time to finish researching it today, but some social scientists at Penn State have a forthcoming book about crying. I read today they have discovered a dramatic shift in attitudes toward the public displays of emotion, especially after Nine-eleven. Hillary's quick and VERY controlled display is evidence of a changing attitude, on her part and that of the public, about showing emotion. Obama does it with his voice modulation and tone; he seems to relate to people as people. Gosh, I'm so tired I cannot complete the thoughts I had hoped to pull together for the blog. Sorry. I'm going to bed. Maybe I'll cry on my pillow. If I do, I'll try to film myself and post it on YouTube.