Right ascending: Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas

Now one can anticipate enormous
animation in post mortems of last
night's debate in Las Vegas, as 
further revealing that unbridled
unfitness of Donald Trump for gov-
ernment in a free society. And no
denial of this need be considered.

But I think historians will turn
to Hillary Clinton's presentation
of herself, on that stage, as the
turning point, indeed the bridal
turning point, in her acceptance
of political responsibility. The
departure from her veiled past
may have been occasioned by the
imminence of her selection, and
it may have been enabled by the
staggering haplessness of her 
nemesis. But it was a shift of
momentous revelation, not forti-
fying so much as introducing a
credibility in relation to that
office, which is incontestable.

I have never heard so untram-
meled, uncribbed, uncrabbed a
defense of unconditional free-
dom of reproductive choice in
the many years since I read 
the words, Roe v. Wade in the
newspaper on the day of its
publication. Splendid it was.
Unexpected, unimagined clari-
ty, yielding no ground to the
prospect of working together
with extraneous authorities,
government only first among
them, to trifle with a right.

No professions of its rar-
ity, no confessions of its
temerity, no concession to
its disparity with dogma.
This was a right embodied.

Here was the unveiling, what
the Greeks call the anakalyp-
teria, of the female being as
human policy, and who could
not exult to see it done be-
fore that gender's foulest de-
tractor ever to be exposed to
light, his intimidations quar-
tering him on prime time TV.

And we have come too far

                      to have that turned back

                      now. And, indeed, he said

                      women should be punished,

                      that there should be some

                      form of punishment for wo-

                      men who obtain abortions.

                      And I could just not be

                      more opposed to that kind

                      of thinking.

This is the diction of a

person prepared to assume

office, not of someone ask-

ing to be given it. Possib-

ly, it is structured by im-

minence, but what lasts is

its resolution. Even deeper,

however, is the genius in

this argument, to turn the
intolerably widely tolerated

Trumpian complaint of dir-

tiness in womanhood, of mat-

ter out of place, as the po-

et and classicist Anne Car-

son has it, against the in-

vasions of retrograde con-

tempt for which he stands, 
in public and in private.
Nasty woman, his soliloquy
meant for the camera, is
engraved now on the escut-
cheon of Republicanism.

The long collusion in Hil-
lary Clinton's career, of
the public to conceal the
private, fell away on that
stage. Was it the power in
the right that brought such
candor to its claim, or the
freedom to declare it as de-
light in being born to it?























Anne Carson
Men in the Off Hours
  Dirt and Desire:
  Essay on the Phenomen-
  ology of Female Pollution
  in Antiquity
Random House, 2000©


Edgar Dégas
Self portrait as a
  young man
1855

Saul Leiter
Rémy
1950