The ever clever Mark Steyn, makes an astute observation on Hillary Clinton’s new book:
…Hillary’s constituency doesn’t want soul-baring–that’s playing on Ken Starr terms. They want dullness–the dullness that reassures them that Hillary, once you dig her out from the cigars and Gap dresses of posterity, is still the serious thinker and feminist icon they told us she was in 1992.
…Hillary’s fans will buy the book, open Chapter One, and read, ”I wasn’t born a first lady or a senator. I wasn’t born a Democrat. I wasn’t born a lawyer or an advocate for women’s rights and human rights. I wasn’t born a wife or mother . . . ” and think, well, that’s just like the early bits of the Old Testament, all the begetting, or in this case all the things she wasn’t begot as, so I’ll just skip ahead to Chapter Two, and I’ll bet it’s really crackling along by now.
And Chapter Two begins: ”What you don’t learn from your mother, you learn from the world’ is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya.” And you think, well, isn’t that just wonderfully diverse, and she heard it from an actual tribe in Kenya! Any tribesman in particular? Or did they all yell it out in unison as her motorcade passed by? Either way, it’s the sort of soothing multicultural sentiment that separates an enlightened progressive from rabid knuckle-dragging redneck Clinton-haters, and that’s all you need to know. So you put the book up on the shelf and never open it ever again. [Mark Steyn, Sun Times, “Hillary yawner never gets to the good part”, June 15, 2003]