The concession speech that Hillary Rodham Clinton needed to give

Karl Winkelmann Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 9, 2016

It was a pretty vanilla concession speech in a lemon ice-cream world, melting in our hands.

Delivered with grace, and moments of levity, but not entirely unlike her campaign: an ikea version of a concession speech, a campaign with a few screws left over and the known qualities of a generic formula, individualized by splurging on a few of the options.

This may be deliberate: tempers are flaring, it’s the closest the US has come to the abyss. Stoking the fire may not be called for. Generic is good. Generic gives closure, closure starts healing.

I can’t shake the feeling this was a missed chance, nonetheless. Let me try, and probably fail, a more daring few paragraphs.

[Enter HRC, clear throat, long pause]

“I could not be more proud, for I had the best campaign anyone, anywhere, could ever hope for” is the second-to-last sentence my speechwriter wanted me to tell you. But that would be a lie, and everybody would know it’s a lie, and there just doesn’t seem a reason to lie anymore.

We failed. Mostly me, sometimes you, and, at the end, the entire country. I coasted to an easy victory in the primary because I deserved it, as I knew and (for some reason) you all knew as well. This was a bland effort, paralyzed by the fear of failures, adjusted to a low level of risk deemed appropriate, considering my opponent was somewhat challenged at times, even in regard to that whole “reading” thing. Contrary to your believes, I do have convictions, and opinions, and plans. But this was not the time to talk about those. Let’s get this behind us as smoothly as possible. It’s the lesson I learned: there are people after your life because they do not approve the location of your E-Mail server. There are nutjobs who think Bill could spend eight years in the oval office and not get a blowie in each of its corners. Yeah, sure, I was appropriately disappointed. The face is easy — it’s the same you use for public prayers. So: smile, read, be all folksy, and don’t get in Donald’s way when he’s doing hist shtick. Then: New Years, Motorcade, Bible, Repeat after me. Mdm President. Breathe. Work. History.

Didn’t quite work out that way. The pain is unbearable because, let’s be honest, I deserved it. Barack had no right to be better than me, but at least he was better. This? Shameful…

But let’s talk about an even bigger failure: you. us. US

For as long as I remember, I have been fighting the other side. With each cycle came escalation, a never-ending crescendo taking us from debate to argument to conflict to a war of two cultures, to today. Each sea change seemed unthinkable — where should it go from here? How can the body politic withstand more pressure, when it’s already bursting at the seams? I still do not know the answers, but it did, somehow.

Today, the limits of physics are reached. Possibly. It certainly feels like it, again. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Because today is the end of my life in politics, and there’s no downside to honesty.

Honestly: I do not see a further escalation that is not a civil war. For decades, we have reacted to pressure with counter-pressure. To nastiness with nastierness. Escalation is our habit, automated as much as entering your PIN — the only way to fail is to allow it into your consciousness.

And it’s all fun and games, until it starts a civil war (in this country. Foreign civil wars are still mostly fun and games, but I digress)

This is it. Crunch time. Hour zero. The Singularity of disfunctionality.

I am not going to ask you to invest more power in public service, whatever that may be, as the script calls for. That power just turns to heat in the zero-sum game we call politics. Power without thought is just a Tesla on autopilot: exhilarating, fast, and bound to be your undoing at the slightest abberation. It’s what we have always done, and it has always produced the desired effect, and adding all those up we’re now up here, and the view is beautiful, although not quite the Grand Canyon, and one more step will kill us.

We hate them.

I remember really caring about those polar bears, back in the 80ies. Now I could watch them drift off on their small ice floe /all/ /day/ /long/, because they really aren’t that cute up close and who am I to say death is worse than the brutish realities of life?

But I still love to talk about climate change because the term itself causes /them/ almost physical pain. You can see them squirm, and prepare their rehearsed rebuttal, and once you’ve proven yourself you may even be in a position to have their mic turned off and you can repeat the term, and watch them, and repeat and repeat. Climate Change Climate Change Climate Change UN UN UN compassion compassion compassion.

Their people are even worse. Vulgar, red-faced, no-necked homophobes. The pretentious ones listening to Ayn Rand Audiobooks in their Hummer H8 with those golden rims. Deplorable! The primitive ones, wasting their time, money and morality as reborn christians, as if their first birth wasn’t traumatic enough for humanity. Jerry Springer, 20 chicken McNuggets and maybe, once a month, sneaking anal if the neighbor needs a bit of support with her crack habit.

Also: they hate you. And me, obviously, but that you already know.

Now I’ll let you in on a secret: they don’t actually care about homosexuals one way or another. Yeah, it’s kinda icky and lets not let anybody in on the research you’re doing, but if the pursuit of happiness sometimes includes a bit of docking, who is God to argue with America?

But they love homos for how easy it is to annoy liberals by hating theme. Any twink a voodoo-doll for the liberals. Just mention how much they deserve God’s magnificent glory and you can see their pulse rise, at least if their iWatch is on. Actually any minority works, so try them all for a bit of variation. If you’ve exhausted them, try arugula, or any organic food, or let them know that most modern art is no better than your last paint-by-numbers, except for that red one, that would really go well with the drapes.

Trickle-down is the most brilliant creation of those sick fucks who read The Art of War before they lost their virginity. It’s divine —how it lets you hurt yourself, and watch them cringe in pain. It’s Zen. Pure, blissful, repeatable, mindfuck.

How did we get here?

At some point we had people in cities, and people on farms, and college professors and deadbeats and everyone in between and they were all different and some liked dogs and others liked ice cream and nobody cared and life was good.

But, let’s say you find a picture of an ugly prom dress, size has-to-put-out-to-get-a-date, and it may be white or possibly purple and really who cares? Well, turns out a lot of people do, if you just show them how much fun it is to argue about it. Have some scrawny scientist with a phd but without the ability to grow a beard argue that it’s provably(!) white and by the way here’s the dress and it’s obvious case closed nonbelievers are degenerates.

Find a mouth-breather to say his cousin actually wore that dress to prom, and he remembers how the purple reflected in the garbage cans behind the Wal-Mart when he ripped it off her and by the way have you accepted Jesus in your life?

Suddenly, it’s like the Swiss had sucked up all the neutrality in the world, because they actually need it for the next batch of Toblerone. It’s wonderful. There’s a completely arbitrary line, invisible, yet unmovable. Sometimes, it runs between identical twin brothers, once separated by two minutes. Now, you give them purpose, and force, turning inert material magnetic. An invisible, repelling, universal force. The chaos of society, by the simple rules of hate and attraction, self-organizes into the neatest, parallel lines, soldiers without identity, fighting over identity,

Give one side a newspaper, one of the black-and-white ones, with a format to big to actually read anywhere, but great for wrapping arugula-to-go. Give them an arbitrary name. Arbitrary values. Arbitrary rituals. Call them Hutu, or Treckies, or intellectuals — it’s all greek anyway. Watch them enjoy their dominance.

It’s all downhill from there, in the input-free acceleration way of escalation. They’re better, others must be worse. They’ll find the smallest difference, completely random facts, or ideas, or activities. In the greatest feat of cooperation that capitalism can’t comment on, they’ll work gloved-hand in dirt-hand with the enemy to magnify the distinction to proper proportion. A slight unease about penises once admitted by that guy over there can, within a few days, bind everyone in his team to an eternal contract to hate all gays, including themselves if they’re especially unlucky.

The enemy, meanwhile, spends valuable time professing solidarity with the collateral damage that’s an unfortunate byproduct of Otis the manufactured escalation, and he knows no judgements it’s all good why don’t you girls make out a bit and we watch you but no I just don’t feel like even looking at his dick, it’s just more natural for girls to be bi and yes you always wanted that yourself, oh you’re so hot, oh yes yes touch her I love you all dude nohomo see you tomorrow lets show solidarity pride2016!

That’s the system. I know it because I’ve played it. I only ever reacted, never escalated, though sometimes I may just have been really good?

Now I want you to find a way to stop it. It doesn’t matter to me, actually. I have 10 more years and enough Bills to last me a lifetime.

You need to break the cycle, kill it, because it’s behind you, it’s got speed, it will kill you, us.

You were assigned the role of “smart”, eating it up like a soldier willing to die for an abstract idea or a piece of cheap sheet metal pinned to his chest. What sounded like fun, and power, is your curse: you cannot communicate without insulting. You like dark chocolate, obviously, because sophisticated is sophos is something something you-wouldnt-understand. Go find a degenerate, tell him as much, and watch him squirm, defend milk chocolate. Try it! Be nonjudgemental! It really doesn’t matter, after all. All a human beings worth is in no way related to his choice of candy.

Except it kinda is, isn’t it? Yeah, thought so.

That’s how we got here. How to get back? Up there, the land of some, years ago, called civil society? That is the singular task of your generation. I couldn’t even. It’s wrong. It needs to be done.

Do not compromise on your core values. Justice, opportunity — you need to set these aside. Cherish them, but do so privately. The chocolat — not a principle. Drop it. Don’t mention it. You are not the chocolate you eat. All chocolate is created equal. Football is an acceptable sport. Soccer may or may not be fun, it’s not worth it to fight over now is it? Drop all tribal signs of identity. Bend, bend, bend, but never break.

Hope for reciprocation. Take the hits. Bend Bend Bend, let them get tired. Survive, don’t break, heal, seek common ground first, high ground later.

Rebuild, or die.