Whatever you think of her politics — Camille Paglia is an earnest Bernie Sanders supporter — her insights into human character and foibles are usually spot-on.
So it’s with not a little trepidation that I must correct Paglia on a point of Hillary Clinton’s character in her latest Salon column.
Here’s the bit that caught my eye:
Trump’s boisterous, uncensored id makes a riveting contrast to Hillary’s plodding, joyless superego. Listening to her leaden attempts to tell rehearsed jokes is collective torture. Hillary is not now, nor has she ever been, a member of the Comedy Party. [Emphasis added]
Hillary does indeed seem to be exactly what Paglia describes — plodding and joyless. But I wouldn’t be so sure that it’s superego to blame.
My impression is that Clinton’s campaign persona is contrived and over-rehearsed precisely because she does not dare risk revealing the hungry id which drives her towards the White House.
That’s why her unaffected laugh, on the rare occasions when one escapes her, sends ripples up your skin like the feeding noises of some H.P. Lovecraft beast.
What I see in the former secretary of State is reckless desire just as earthly as her husband Bill’s, but without all the nasty fleshiness.
Most of all she sees power as hers by right, as payback for enduring Bill’s all-too-public humiliations, decade after decade. Unable to unshackle herself from her Enabler-in-Chief, Clinton instead chose to humiliate in return the women Bill used and abused behind her back.
She wants this payback, she needs this, and she will play any part, assume any role to get it.
But as we saw in Emailgate, Hillary’s appetites far exceed her reason — why else risk everything on a sloppy homebrew email server?
Superego is the flimsy veil Clinton wears to hide the Cthulhu underneath.
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