IT TURNS OUT that Hillary Clinton loses her temper when things aren’t going her way. This is news? No more so than her being pleased as punch and twice as nice when things go as she pleases. She’s been known to stop yelling at the help when she’s riding high. She turns all sweet, and can be more than cooperative then-a good friend to every old FOB and a wise counselor to all her clients. But then she’ll turn into the same old shrew when she imagines that those of us with what Orval Faubus used to call Them Lyin’ Newspapers are out to get her. And the lady has a very active imagination.
Remember how she pitched a hissy as L’Affaire Lewinsky exploded all around her? At first she said it was just a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” to use her furious phrase at the time. A relic of that old fury turned up this week in her friend Diane Blair’s dusty papers. And was immediately fastened upon by the Drudge Report and other such tabloidesque outlets, then by more high-tone retailers of old, even very old, “news.”
By now Ms. Clinton may regret having called Monica Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon”-which sounds like a description of too many young climbers in the nation’s capital and in American politics in general. You know the type: all fresh-faced with their new law degrees but same old ambitions.
According to Diane Blair’s notes, her friend and First Lady thought of the press, the vaunted Fourth Estate itself, as a collection of “big egos and no brains.” Ooo-wee. Speaking as a member in uncertain standing of that group, we must say her comment comes uncomfortably close to accuracy. She may have us pegged. Goodness, ma’am, must you cut so close to the bone?
Our own reaction to all this hullabaloo: very little. Or as Our Lady of Benghazi herself explained as the facts didn’t arrange themselves to fit her cover story about the massacre there: “What difference at this point does it make?”
And yet even a scrap of history can retain its interest-even and especially when it comes to light at an inopportune moment. Just when you think everyone’s forgotten some old embarrassment, it makes the headlines again. This scrap came complete with a snide remark about an Arkansas jurist known far beyond Arkansas, at least in legal annals: The Honorable (and honorable) Richard Arnold.
Somewhere the late Richard S. Arnold, ever succinct and judicious, a jurist who knew the ways of both the Clintons and the American press, and is now routinely described as the greatest judge since Learned Hand never to have served on the Supreme Court of the United States, must be smiling. But only in that quiet, judgment-deferred way of his when he was thoroughly amused or just thoroughly absorbed in an appellate hearing or a good baseball game, reserving judgment till the last inning-if not beyond.
How did he do that? Maybe it was because he knew all this was just a passing show, that there is a higher court, and, whatever our sins, its presiding Judge loves us. Maybe it helps to have some Latin and Greek, and Hebrew, too, as the Hon. Richard S.Arnold did. It lends perspective. And makes it even clearer that this latest “news” is scarcely the Good News.
TELL US again that a liberal education, one that includes a classical language and even those twin glories of Elizabethan English, Shakespeare and the King James Bible, is no longer relevant in our oh-so-advanced, multi-culti, post-mod times that have rendered the works of dead white males obsolete-and females, too, considering the likes of the late Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson.
As for those of us who deal only with ephemera, aka the news of the day, doing our best to separate the wheat from the chaff before printing the chaff, this much we are grateful to Ms. Clinton for: She has given us cause to think again on Richard Sheppard Arnold, and no day or concern can be petty when we do.
Like the best of editorial comment, Judge Arnold always seemed to go to a second and higher level in his deliberations, lifting the rest of us with him, inviting us to see ever further, beyond petty malice and old hurts. As if he saw things from afar, yet clearer for the distance, his concise ideas bright with penetrating light, not heavy with just heat and old angers. In the words of the poet Stephen Spender, “I think continually of those who were truly great . . . . Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun/And left the vivid air signed with their honour.” God rest you, Your Honor.
Editorial, Pages 14 on 02/13/2014