Con-gen-i-tal, adj. Belonging or pertaining to an individual from birth; resulting from one's heredity or prenatal development; as a congenital disease, a congenital deformity. (Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd Ed.).
If you read William Safire's "On Language" column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, you know this is a man who believes in choosing his words carefully. Woe betide anyone who uses a word or phrase with other than strictest linguistic accuracy. So, how to account for the following in Safire's Jan. 8 op-ed "Essay":
"Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -- a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar."
Could the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist have meant congenial? "1. Having the same tastes, habits or temperament; sympathetic. 2. Suited to one's needs; agreeable. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language).
That would seem to fit the usually sunny, outgoing Hillary Rodham Clinton, who reportedly charms everyone she meets. "Congenial" is listed immediately above "congenital" in most dictionaries, so maybe this was a case of simple human error. We awaited a "correction" or even a "clarification" from West 43d Street in the ensuing days. Alas, there was none, and we are forced to conclude that Safire meant what he said.
And what he seems to be saying that the tendency to lie is imprinted in Hillary Clinton's bones. If Safire meant "congenital" in the heredity sense -- that lying runs in the Rodham family -- that's quite a smear, even libelous perhaps, against Hillary Clinton's living blood relatives. But then Safire, former speech writer to that most accomplished and proven of liars, Richard M. Nixon, learned from a master. And, of course, should the Rodham family seek legal redress, he would be the first to scream "First Amendment!"
More likely, Safire probably meant it in the sense of a birth defect, like a cleft palate. What he meant to say was that Hillary lied from the moment she opened her mouth. Maybe she lied before then -- you know these girls and their lying eyes. She lied in kindergarten, lied in high school, lied at the dinner table, lied on her law school application. Every day of her lying life, she lies. It's congenital.
In Hillary's case, however, it is a defect to be scorned rather than pitied. And Safire's attack seems motivated less by the veracity -- or lack thereof -- of Hillary's versions of Travelgate, Whitewater, the Vincent Foster affair and her commodity trades, than by the kind of visceral hatred leveled at Hillary and Bill Clinton from the moment they entered the White House. Rhetoric like Safire's is inflammatory and poisonous, and it creates a climate in which the less silver-tongued feel free to act more directly.
Surely Safire considers himself above the likes of Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy and the other maniacs of the airwaves. But he, more than most, should know that words have consequences.
Are the attacks on Hillary motivated by a desire to expose wrongdoing -- or political hatchet jobs? Go to Table Talk's Issues category to speak your mind. (Remember to register if you haven't already done so.)
Waiting to Exhale:
A crack high for the female psycheIt's a measure of the media's drive-by approach to race relations that certain events make news for showing us what we should have already known. Just as last October's Million Man March drew huge acclaim at least partly because 800,000 black men came together without violence, "Waiting to Exhale" is the blockbuster film of the hour mainly because it's showing black women as beautiful, savvy professionals with disposable incomes and gorgeous clothes, instead of welfare-dependent mothers with too many children.
Now I don't know what kind of rosy-colored, Prozac-in-the-water planet I live on, but I wasn't expecting violence at the Million Man March. It was exactly the moving, spiritual event I thought it would be. And I didn't need "Waiting to Exhale" to show me that most black women are striving and succeeding, despite racism. I know plenty of women like that. If black America thinks the nation needs those affirmations, I'll concede that my notion of where we're at racially might suffer from liberal white-girl optimism. But I won't cede my right as a female to observe that the male-bashing taken to an extreme in "Waiting to Exhale" is starting to seem a little like crack for the female psyche, exhilarating in the short term but ultimately crippling and dangerous.
Attacks on the film have centered on the bleak portrayal of black men, but black women don't fare much better. Three of the four heroines are trouser-chasing, champagne-swilling, bustier-wearing whiners who make obviously wrong choices and then blame the nearest available target -- black men, white women, gay men, their mothers -- for their troubles. The movie made me want to run an outreach and intervention program for women leaving theaters across America, to counteract the values portrayed on screen. My program would be based on the following five principles:
Nobody is obligated to love us. At least two of the women in the film are patently unloveable unless they spend some time on the couch, or with a minister, a shaman, or a straight-talking girlfriend who helps them work through the combination of immaturity and female rage that's driving their bad choices. No healthy man, black, Chinese or purple, is going to put up with their drama.
Contempt is not an aphrodisiac. Several of the audience's favorite scenes involved our heroines having extremely bad sex with selfish men, the type who get on top and grunt for a while and roll off -- wham-bam without the thank-you-ma'am kind of lovers. This is portrayed as typical of the injustice our girls must endure. But the women in question don't much like the men they're bedding in the first place. In one really disturbing scene, which the audience howled at, the lover-to-be is a short, fat, bespectacled brother who was extremely dark-skinned, in contrast with the gorgeous light-skinned heroine -- an ugly touch, I thought, in a black movie. She swallows her revulsion and fakes an orgasm, and later fakes love, because the overweight lover's got a nice big...house. Why do these women expect good sex from men they don't like? Which leads to my next principle:
It takes two people to have bad sex. I learned this in my 20s, and I haven't had bad sex since. These women seemed to think their role in the act involved lying around looking pretty in a push-up bustier, like a hormone-enhanced turkey on a platter. As RuPaul says, "Girl, you better work."
Married men who cheat on their wives are bad bets for a commitment. Enough said.
White women are not the problem. The film opens with a black man -- a cardboard cut-out, filthy-rich scumbag -- leaving Angela Bassett for a white woman. I won't minimize the pain in that, nor deny the creepy social and psychological factors that propel some black men to marry outside their race. But the simplistic, good and evil portrayal of black-white relationships is appalling. Normally, racial scapegoating in films follows a predictable, morally reassuring if unrealistic trajectory: In the end the character realizes that the race of his or her adversary isn't really the issue, and comes to some new self-awareness. Not in this film. Relationships between black men and white women are depicted as just plain wrong, sick, revenge against black women, case closed, and there's absolutely no insight or epiphany to soften that kneejerk judgment. In fact there's a disturbing psychological subtext -- the only good white woman is a dead white woman -- when later in the film Bassett hooks up with a black man whose white wife is dying of breast cancer.
Male-bashing can be good, clean fun after a hideous breakup. Personally, I enjoyed the scene where Houston dumps a drink in her married lover's lap -- there are several men in my past whose laps are still crying out for a nice, cold drink after all these years. But as a way of life, a philosophy of relationship, it's destructive. It exonerates women from the bad choices we make, and lets us forget that we usually get the men we deserve.
Unfortunately, we get the films we deserve, too, and the fact that women of every race are flocking to "Waiting to Exhale" is a disturbing glimpse of our unreadiness for movies that tell the truth -- ensuring we'll get more cheap thrills and psychological lies masquerading as social commentary.
Is Joan Walsh right that "Waiting to Exhale" is a cheap exercise in male-bashing? Or are the thousands of moviegoers who love the film responding to something else? Go to Table Talk's Movies category to join the discussion. (Remember to register if you haven't already done so.)
