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April 30, 2007

Hirrary is Rike Godzirra

Everyone's having fun with Hillary Clinton's fake Southern accent. The Arkansas News calls it "Sensational, sappy and stupid," the New York Post is reporting that Hillary thinks America is ready for a multi-lingual president, and WorldNet Daily has a hilarious editorial entitled, "Repubricans are rike Godzirra. As for me, I can't help but think of another obnoxiously phony woman, whom I dislike nearly as much as I do Hillary – Madonna, who has also been ridiculed because of her "pseudo-English, rich snob, 1930's film star" fake accent. And it's not just the phoniness that bugs me about Hillary. It's the total self-absorption that it betrays.

I don't have a problem with fake accents per se. I can put them on myself and have on a number of occasions. I learned how to do it when I spent a year teaching English in Zimbabwe during college. The day I arrived on campus I was called before an assembly of students to introduce myself. I gave my little hello speech to roars of laughter. I was terribly embarrassed because I couldn't understand what I had said that was so funny. When I sat back down my guide explained to me that they were laughing because they didn't understand a word I had said. I learned during the time that I was there that laughter also comes more freely to Zimbabweans – they don't view laughing at someone as the insulting thing that we do. They seem capable of recognizing that people are just plain funny, and that's OK.

Anyway, within a few months I was speaking English with a distinctly Zimbabwean accent, and the reason for it was because I was trying to teach these kids and they flat out couldn't understand me any other way. To this day, when I'm speaking with foreigners, which I often do because I travel quite a bit and meet a lot of people from other countries, I speak more slowly and with greater enunciation so they can understand me. I've had a number of people tell me they understand me better than just about anyone else they've met since arriving in the country. My point is, taking on an accent for the purpose of helping your audience understand you better is a good thing. But that isn't what Hillary is doing.

Hillary is trying to go the next step and make her audience believe she is one of them so they will support her and vote for her – it is entirely motivated by selfish interests. And the fact is that she isn't one of them and she doesn't understand them. That's why she makes mistakes like this:

On Monday, Hillary Clinton likened Harriet Tubman's legacy to her struggles with a malfunctioning microphone.

"There may be some bumps along the road," Hillary said at a fundraiser. "You know this reminds me of one of my favorite American heroines, Harriet Tubman. For when she made it to freedom after having been a slave and she got to New York and she could have been so happy to just stay at home and just breathe a big sigh of relief, but she kept going back down South to bring other freed slaves to freedom. And she used to say, 'No matter what happens, keep going.'"

And then there was this beauty:

Her latest offense occurred while trying to rev up the crowd at Al Sharpton's National Action Network Conference in New York last weekend. "When I walk into the Oval Office in January-two-thousund-and-nine, I'm uhfraid I'm gonna lift up the rug and I'm goin' to see so much stuff under thar.

"Ya - ya know, what is it about us, always havin' to clean up after people? I ask ya to join me on this journey. But this is not just going to be pickin' up socks off the floor. This is going to be cleanin' up the guverment," she told the crowd.

I suspect that she's got a very skewed view of African-Americans and she doesn't even realize it. In trying to "connect" with them she is vocalizing some truly degrading stereotypes. And it's really odd because frankly, she sounds more like the blue blooded Barbara Bush than someone who wasn't born into privilege.

And typical of Hillary, when asked, she comes up with a whopper to explain it, saying her Southern drawl is the result of having spent a good deal of time in Arkansas, as opposed to being intentionally cultivated for political purposes (and someone needs to tell her that fake accents aren't her forte - she's no good at it).

Which brings me to the "Godzirra" editorial, which begins by accusing her of doing "an incredibly insulting political version of 'Mammy'" and trying to "till more plantations than Robert 'King' Carter." And it asks – and answers - the question we all want to know: "Who is Hillary Clinton really? Why, she's whatever you are, unless you have a well-oiled B.S. detector."

Apparently, the Left is going to let all this phoniness slide. Hillary's implication that black people all clean up after white people should have prompted outrage from Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, but it didn't. Like so many prominent religious leaders on the right, these two are simply partisan hacks, playing their loyal followers for all they're worth. As this editorial asks, if Hillary can say to a black audience, "What is it about us always havin' to clean up after people?" would it be OK for her to say to a Hispanic audience, "What is it about us always having to care for peoples' lawns?" or to a Japanese audience, "Repubricans are rike Godzirra – they must be stopped." Of course, not (at least not since 1946).

Posted by Becky at April 30, 2007 09:42 AM