The Clintons have surfed this psychotic cultural and generational wave into the White House.
The attempt has been made to understand Bill and Hillary Clinton, particularly Bill, in terms of classical neurosis from abusive childhoods. But much of what is seen in the Clinton generation has made that model obsolete, although many from that generation, including psychiatrists and psychologists, desperately hold on to it to relieve themselves of any personal responsibility.
The truth is, Bill and Hillary Clinton have not suffered a bit of inconvenience for nearly 40 years¾including, for Bill, the inconvenience of military service. By his freshman year in high school Bill found he could manipulate people with showy glibness and deception, and nobody would call him on it. A good memory for acting lines would carry him through easy courses in the most prestigious schools in the country without effort or necessity to learn seriously. From there, he went almost immediately to being the boy governor of a state, and on to the presidency. It was all done with a little empty talk on a level that could be found on any high school debate team.
Hillary has led a similar life of ease and is now being pushed to take a senate seat and run for the presidency in 2004 on a platform of angrily confronting a vast right-wing conspiracy¾ which essentially consists of making accusatory and sarcastic remarks at you and me through a TV screen to the delight of angry women, spoiled angry leftists, and angry minorities. It isn't a bad life for an untalented spoiled brat who, without the world of TV and alienated politics, would be lucky to hold a job as a waitress in a truck stop.
The problem with the both Clintons is that they were long ago licensed to think and act at primitive, immature, and irrational levels of functioning. Much of this was a self-conferred licensing by a generation which has continued, and which has been the root of most of the political, economic, and social problems in this country.
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Robert L. Kocher is the author of "The American Mind in Denial." He is an engineer working in the area of solid-state physics, and has done graduate study in clinical psychology. His email address is steiner@access.mountain.net.
from... The Laissez Faire City Times(link), Vol 3, No 7, Feb. 15, 1999