What did she see?

Have you taken the walk around the

lake at Wellesley College with your

sweetheart, after a Sunday at the

MFA and profiteroles at the Ritz? I

think you should. The place is beau-

tiful, which never hurts; and she is

very likely to be finer than bright,

cultivated, which can sometimes hurt

but tends rather to inspire, instead.

I know, I did it, I was betrothed.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was a sophomore

at Wellesley College, when she woke up

one morning in April to see this photo-

graph in the Boston papers. She had al-

ready been drawn to the Civil Rights

movement for African Americans, she had

already been weaned from Republicanism

by the last war we would ever fight in

the plain view of citizens, because of

the draft.

But I think, this is a sight one would

carry in one's heart, as the most friv-

olously unjustified abuse of talent re-

siding in gender, one would ever need

to see, to devote oneself to equality.

Here, despite no clear rule to the con-

trary, Kathrine Switzer is assaulted

and detained by officials of the Boston

Marathon, simply for running with men.

Things happened in this American life,

to everyone I've ever known who went

through it then, which spawned tremen-

dously paradoxical later careers. No

one I know, can surpass the paradox of

a marriage with Bill Clinton. Everyone

I know would leap to extract a damsel 

from it, not to be patronising, but to

be humane.

I am very doubtful that Mrs Clinton

conscientiously capitulated to cyn-

icism on the scale we associate with

those who do business with Mr Clinton,

but she denies against every visible

rubric, that she is a caricature now 

of her youthful idealism. Possibly,

she has never grasped the distinction

between remedy and progressive change.

Possibly, her sympathy for the runner

has diminished her awareness of the

passer-by. Imperceptibly, perhaps, a

blizzard of policy term papers and a

fine sense of justice have condensed

into the only two planks visible in

her platform, anymore: I deserve it,

and, you can't pin anything on me.

Yet, what supports this collapse is

a picture she saw in her youth, in a

beautiful refuge from Boston. Who

would not cling to that spectacle of

outrage, to suffer the life she en-

tered? Who would not think it urgent,

to assuage her deprivation of remedy?

But is a Presidency an office to seek, 

to soothe oneself?

Now youth, betrayed in Boston still, 

have heard about the bucolic lake.

Male or female, together, they know

and thrive in their equality, already.

Many do not possess those propulsions

of possessivism, which so well channel

her archaic grievance, enough to ac-

cept the mercies of the rushing gorge.

    

Gilbert Stuart
  portraitist of Washington
Sir William Grant
1782