It occurs to me, since Hillary Rodham Clinton has been running for President of the United States, that some people might mistakenly think that I had written My Man as a parody of her and her husband. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I so admired our First Lady in the face of that vicious attack machine headed by that truly despicable Kenneth Starr—horrible man, with a special circle of hell, one can only hope, assigned to him, Karl Rove, and other like-minded weasly types of people so that they can torment each other for eternity. Now Bill Clinton was foxy, no doubt about it, and he escaped conviction, but he did not escape impeachment by the single-minded rightwing friends of Kenneth Starr and his villainous folks. Against the wish of more than 70% of the rightminded citizens of this nation, these renegades did manage to impeach this President over nothing more serious than a peccadillo, much to the shame of our nation, and to ridicule abroad.
Through this shame, Hillary Clinton stood upright and noble and strong like a lightning rod of decency and integrity. She said publicly as little as possible, and all that she did say was right and correct. It was not her shame that we all witnessed.
What goes on between a husband and wife is their private business, and no one else's unless invited into it. The Clintons, though public people, never invited anybody into their private business, and that is the way the vast majority of Americans wanted it. All shame goes to anyone, Republican or Democrat or Independent, who wanted that private business in any way exposed.
Indeed, any public interest in that debacle was either pure prurience or pure partisanship, and both are deplorable.
The wife in My Man is a bit laughable, and indeed she has the laugh on herself at the end of the song. But what is lamentable in this portrait is that she is loyal to a liar. One might love a liar because he or she has lovable qualities, but one is absolutely stupid to be loyal to a liar, in my opinion. You might just as well trust a rattlesnake. It's worse, really, because a rattlesnake will not deliberately try to deceive you. A person who is loyal to a liar is pathetic, just asking for more trouble.
Now with the Clintons, I do not know and I do not care and I do not want to know what their marital agreements and understandings are. That's their business.
I know personally women who wish that their husbands would get a mistress (or more than one!) so that they can get some peace and quiet and rest in their beds at night. That's completely and utterly their business, and none of mine. The only reason that I even know about it is because the women are my friends and confide in me, and I am full of sympathy, since I know how much I love my own sleep.
I know women who are married to gay men—some who knew the men were gay before they were ever married—and I know men who have very little sex drive yet are married to women who play around on the side, sometimes quite a lot. Those husbands and wives have come to some sort of marital agreements which satisfy them, and are no business of mine or anyone's else. They stay together because they have some sort of love for each other. That love may or may not have a sexual component, and I have no idea about that. Nor do I want to have any idea about it.
Such is clearly not the case with the woman in My Man who does feel betrayed, who does know that she has been lied to, who does know that her husband has willingly made a fool of her. She's pathetic, but I am sympathetic to her, nevertheless, because she feels trapped. She's not trapped, of course. She has many options. But standing by her man blindly, just because he is her man, is not a good option. That is what makes her both laughable and pathetic, and sad, and that is why I wrote about her.
I myself watched George W. Bush during all of his lies and wondered how on earth he could find anyone who would still believe him. These people I find pathetic in the same way that I find the woman in My Man pathetic. But for these people I have no sympathy— unlike for the woman in the song—because all they have to do is stand up and say, "We were duped," and support impeachment, and correct these wrongs done to us citizens. What could a leader do that could possibly be more injurious to his/her people than lie them into war? Yet it is being allowed, and it is not being corrected.
I don't understand this blind loyalty, and I think it is unhealthy for all of us citizens.
But that is a far cry from how I feel about Hillary Clinton in her quiet, private support of her husband, which has never had anything at all to do with me, or to the rest of the citizens of this country. Compare Bill Clinton's lies to those of George W. Bush. They are completely disproportionate. With Clinton, it was no business of the nation. With Bush, it was utterly the business of the nation. Blind partisanship and blind loyalty in the face of those facts is also important business of the nation. We need to wake up, folks, and be honest about this.
Copyright © 2008 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved