The Jaundiced Spotlight of the Also-Ran

On not giving attention to people who demand it

I did something pretty shameful when I was ten, in that I faked another stomach ache, this time so convincingly I wound up in the hospital. Was I a little surprised when the emergency room doc said, “We’ve got to get that appendix out NOW!”? And should I have maybe said something as they wheeled me into surgery? Well, sure. But I didn’t. The operation was performed, and if anyone thought, this sure looks like healthy tissue to me before plopping it in the waste bin, I wouldn’t know. I only know that I woke up the next day very thirsty and began about a week of boredom on the children’s ward of St. Vincent’s.

One wonders if Hillary Clinton was bored after she lost the 2016 presidential election. While I am sure there were things to do, the position of also-ran was so unanticipated I imagine her momentarily unmoored, floating without agency off the edge of the screen. I imagine people around her not knowing what to say, wondering, maybe, if they could peel off without much fuss, or if they would be expected to stand pat, to say soothing things to, let’s face it, the person who should have been doing the soothing. Did Hillary Clinton want to be the mother of the country, or the child that must be stroked and paid attention to, including for things that are not real?

Yesterday, Ms. Clinton showed us it would be the latter, that she would, again, require the spotlight, by offering a MasterClass, the video for which features her becoming emotional when remembering her mother’s difficult upbringing, and reading from the acceptance speech she was never able to deliver. As reported in the Washington Post, the speech contained the platitude “the American Dream is big enough for everyone,” as well as Ms. Clinton remarking, “I’ve never shared [the speech] with anyone. I’ve never read it out loud.”

Leaving aside the dubiousness of those final claims, is this a speech anyone needed to hear? Whom, other than herself, does Ms. Clinton, more than five years after her stultifying loss, believe she is serving with this latest bid for relevancy? And why does she think that it is she, at what hopefully is the end of a global pandemic and the beginning of the holiday season, upon whom we might bestow our attention? Are we meant to applaud this unearned victory lap, and if so, where does it lead?

I can hear fans of Ms. Clinton getting all puffy about this. Why shouldn’t we continue to pay homage to a woman with a storied career, as well as the first woman to almost become president? To which I say, because it is boring and because she is offering nothing new to chew on, but hey, if people want to spend $180 on a Masterclass membership, go forth. (I recommend the one taught by Anna Wintour.)

It is possible that I saw the byline on the Washington Post article and sensed we were in for more logrolling. Staff writer Felicia Sonmez, too, has demanded recognition for situations she believes are deserving and others adamantly do not, has required emotional recompense while mining the tragedies of others; who will not, as Ms. Clinton will not, let you forget that she has been wronged, that you will show fealty or else.

It is possible, too, that, I am extra-tired this week of people receiving unearned accolades, of writers who, after seeing the Beatles documentary Get Back, re-form Yoko Ono, silent and lumpen throughout the film (except when she’s screaming) into a proto-feminist-artist-icon, someone who, “skillfully redirects the eye away from the band and toward herself... engaged in a kind of passive resistance.” What I saw was a woman committed to her own needs, someone, by design or not (she and John Lennon were addicted to heroin at the time), impervious to the beauty and hurt happening all around her, and unwilling to offer sweetness or succor to anyone other than Lennon, such as that was.

I neither have it in me nor think it holistically sound to stand by as people continually turn the mirror toward themselves, to play nursemaid to stories engineered to become more golden in the retelling. That doesn’t make them real, and it’s a child’s game to pretend otherwise.

I was ten years old when I stopped asking for attention for things that did not happen. The hospital was quiet in the afternoons and there was little for me to do but walk the halls. The door to one room was partly open, and I could see a mother, sitting by a crib. Sometime before, she had been home boiling sugar syrup, the toddler had grabbed the handle, and by the way she stayed by the crib all day and into the night, I could feel her wanting to stitch back time, to take them back to the place where this had not happened. And I never had another stomach ache after that.