Judith Warner gets it mostly right, but "the tide of trivialization that washes over all things 'Hillary,'" is not just Hillary's problem; it's drowning all of us. (And as Jezebel points out, no one epitomizes the tide of trivialization better than the Queen of Shallow -- Tina Brown.)
There could have been no more dramatic setting: Overruling the security fears of her aides, she traveled to eastern Congo, where hundreds of thousands of women have been raped over the past decade. She visited a refugee camp and met with one woman who was gang-raped while eight months pregnant; she heard of another who’d been sexually assaulted with a rifle. She was told of babies cut from their mothers’ bodies with razors. She spoke of “evil in its basest form.” She promised $17 million to fight sexual violence.
And back home, all anyone could talk about was Bill.
. . . And it isn’t just that her historic mandate — to equally empower the other half of the world’s population, to chip away at the forces “devaluing women,” in the words of Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s new ambassador at large for global women’s issues — is so huge and vague and seemingly overwhelming. It’s also because the tide of trivialization that washes over all things “Hillary” is just so powerful. That tide threatens to drown out anything of substance Clinton might attempt for a population whose problems have long been obscured in the androcentric world of diplomacy. And that’s a huge pity.
Tell Hillary you support her -- offer your thanks for all that she is doing for women and girls across the planet -- here. Or you can text her - 90822.
