Flyover Nation by Dana Loesch

Author:Dana Loesch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-20T16:21:30+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Degrading Yourself and Calling It Equality

The second man to ever screw me over was William Jefferson Clinton. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. I was a frizzy-headed eighth grader who, the summer before the fall election, applauded enthusiastically as he played the saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s show. He was everywhere I was: He was on MTV and VH1; he hung with the celebrities I followed; he visited late-night talk shows; he was pop culture. Democrats knew how to talk to the youth and that’s why I liked them. They were the brand of youth, races, and women. At least, that’s what I thought.

Flash forward to my freshman year of high school. Ever the Clinton supporter, I donned a Clinton/Gore pin on my backpack. I had Clinton/Gore stickers on my Trapper Keeper. I thought about how awesome their administration was while I slathered my face at night with Noxzema and blared Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” on my purple ghetto blaster. And then she happened. Paula Jones. My girlfriends and I had already learned the art of cruelty in seventh grade, so we were certified mean girls by the time we were freshmen. We mocked her hair, her face, her determination to take down our president simply because she was forlorn. I had no idea about the rape accusations, the harassment accusations; all the media told me was that this fat white guy named Ken Starr was taking all of our money and spending it on graying President Clinton’s hair. We discounted Juanita Broaddrick’s story, dismissing it as the sordid tale of a jealous woman.

“All of these women are coming out of the woodwork because Clinton became president,” we gossiped over the lunch table, repeating what we’d heard on TV. The Democrats had their lock on us because of what we thought they were, not for what they were in reality.

When Bill Clinton shook his nonaccusatory sausage knuckle at the cameras and intoned that he “Did. Not. Have. Seckshul. Relations. With. That. Woman,” that woman being Monica Lewinsky, we all believed him.

“Of course there is a reason!” we enthusiastically conned ourselves.

“She’s horrible,” I told my mother while setting the table and listening to Tom Brokaw recite headlines in the background.

“Well, of course,” my mother agreed. They had her too.

Feminists boisterously supported Clinton. Gloria Steinem, from behind her dinner plate–sized rose-colored hippie sunglasses, condemned the ravenous women who clawed at the president. Feminists supported him more than they supported his wife. That was the first thing that stood out to me. How must Hillary have felt?

Hillary held his hand during the interviews and stood beside him when he spoke, nodding her bob like a Dixiecrat hype man for Clinton’s one-man act. I felt bad for her. Her story resonated with a thread from my childhood, a woman rendered defeminate by what began sounding like her husband’s personal indiscretions.

Clinton’s story unraveled, and all of us girls who had so wholeheartedly believed that he was the target of that “vast right-wing conspiracy” were politically stood up.

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