It Takes a Village
Clinton, Hillary Rodham
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "It Takes a Village" Hail to the Chief that is, to discuss a piece of literature. Both efforts are dismally inept. Apropos of Dinesh D'Souza's paraphrase, "Across the lawns the scholars come and go, talking of Proust...
...The brutal father in The Great Santini is an authoritarian...
...But my favorite "humanizing image" comes in a chapter with the perky title "Kids Don't Come With Instructions...
...then on to descriptions of its sumptuous banquets, and a disquisition on the layered pagan and Christian meanings of its emblem...
...And she believes that the welfare state is the solution to, not the cause of, the problems associated with illegitimacy...
...77 Indeed the book has been called "conservative" by many reviewers, essentially because it is one long exercise in moralism by a practiced virtuecrat...
...And who illustrates a weak, permissive parent...
...Here Hillary tells us about being in her hospital bed, attempting to breast feed the newborn Chelsea, when all of a sudden foam started coming out of the infant's nose...
...Paying attention in her English classes wouldn't have done much good...
...Wheatcroft crafts a spectacular set-piece that includes elaborate descriptions of halberds and ballock-knives and the wooden crests atop the helmets of noblemen...
...Despite Hillary's twenty-five years of expertise, gathered as an attorney and board member at the Children's Defense Fund, and her many legal articles advocating children's rights, much of the book was ghost-written by Barbara Feinman whom, with characteristic diplomacy, Hillary failed to acknowledge...
...I suggest Professor Steiner pay a visit to a garden sometime...
...Naturally, he has left things out...
...There's no comma after "Petals...
...Her view is that there are only suffering children who need help...
...petals `on a wet, black bough.'" As the author of such labored obviousness, Steiner is no one to call D'Souza, or anybody, unrhythmical...
...She more adamantly refuses to acknowledge that childrearing was not a crisis when mothers were able to stay home to raise their children...
...The apparition' —which apparition...
...As she, unwisely relying on memory or a later Pound memoir, gives it, the poem reads: "In a Station of the Metro / The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough...
...Billed as an essay on how our society can do better by its children—a timely, indeed urgent subject—it is also much, much more...
...teach discipline...
...Does the First Lady believe that Americans have something to learn from Africa about raising children...
...Men, I guess, have patriotism to hide behind...
...Atk' The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire Andrew Wheatcroft Viking / 384 pages / $34.95 REVIEWED BY Francis X. Rocca Since the early eleventh century, when two brothers in northern Switzerland built the Habichtsburg, or "Castle of the Hawk," the Habsburgs have had their ups and downs...
...authoritarian — strict but arbitrary...
...So (not that she discusses it) Hillary's generation rebelled with a vengeance and ruined the society in which they flourished...
...On page one Hillary claims that her authority on children derives primarily from being a mom to Chelsea Victoria, whom she loves very much...
...I have often remarked to my husband that we might have had more children if we had taken more vacations...
...The very real problems of family life in America need more than slogans —and more than stale government programs, too...
...Apropos of Dinesh D'Souza's paraphrase, "Across the lawns the scholars come and go, talking of Proust and Michelangelo," Steiner solemnly informs us that this is an echo of Eliot, whose lines she gives as: "In the room the women come and go, / Talking of Michelangelo...
...use car seats and seat belts...
...Of course raising children is more difficult than it should be, and families are in trouble...
...Hillary's worldview is nothing if not class-driven, and she does not mask her contempt for the stupid, the weak, and the undisciplined...
...Of course they are the wedge that will allow the state to take over the role of parent: As always, though, coaching parents is the first step...
...Actually, that's my view, not Hillary's...
...The book is also part campaign document: No piece of domestic legislation her husband has signed goes unheralded...
...Oh, and, by the way, what ever happened to the nonjudgmental liberal dogma that there is no such thing as a misreading...
...She says the poem could be viewed as "a manifestation of racism" on the grounds that the faces in the subway must be exclusively "white, pink, or perhaps yellow in order for the petal metaphor to work...
...The book must also be understood as the summa theologica of the most brilliant woman ever to grace the nation's capital, someone who has thought hard for a quarter century about remaking society and improving those who populate it...
...watch less TV—and monitor the content...
...First, the title—the first line—should be in caps...
...Is there any place on the planet where a child has a smaller chance of reaching adulthood...
...Neighborhoods weren't integrated, and women were expected to stay home and raise their children...
...Fair enough...
...In the U.S...
...Steiner misquotes the poem, putting in a comma where none belongs, and shows herself tone-deaf to the mild irony in D'Souza's paraphrase...
...She claims it was written in 1916...
...But my guess is that the most important unacknowledged contributor was Dick Morris, the Republican strategist now working feverishly to help the First Couple recover their conservative camouflage.44 Hillary does not mask her contempt for the stupid, the weak, and the undisciplined...
...Mrs...
...Yet the House of Austria, as the family is also known, remains a going concern, if for the present a discreetly scaled-down one...
...To repeat incessantly that "it takes a village" to accomplish this or that social or political endeavor is really to say nothing at all...
...urge children not to have sex...
...She labels D'Souza's amusing variant a rightist "misreading" and smugly huffs: "On both interpretive [sic] and rhythmical grounds we might wish that he had paid more attention in his English classes...
...if society's economic organization was not hostile to family life...
...As less affluent and educated parents become aware that their own children can benefit from the kinds of experiences more privileged children get...they are more likely to...demand help with the immense responsibilities a technological society has so casually assigned them...
...if public institutions, including schools, were able to imbue traditional morality without fear of litigation...
...It would be better if we did not have to contend with an all-pervasive, violent, smutty, coarse culture...
...World War I rates nothing more than a remark by Franz Joseph (1830-1916), ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the war would destroy...
...Since everything in society impinges on children, everything is fair game: we should eat less and exercise more...
...the faces 'in the crowd...
...For Hillary's purposes the proverb means that children will only thrive when all of society, not just individual parents, act in their interest...
...But why an African proverb...
...Thus their characteristic "fat and pendulous lower lip" became a common sight on the crowned heads of Europe...
...She doesn't even much like the term "mother," preferring to use "parent" or "caregiver...
...the station `of the Metro...
...the apparition 'of these faces' —which faces...
...Hillary, cribbing from some child development book (there are no footnotes, bibliography or index, despite many passing references to studies and experts), tells us that there are three types of parents: permissive — weak and unable to instill 68 March 199 6 • The American Spectator Little Austria and the Imperials discipline...
...Then there's family life, characterized by polygamy, promiscuity, and, of course, genital mutilation for girls...
...On another occasion Steiner offers a five-page analysis of a short Ezra Pound poem...
...and built monuments, most notably the Escorial in Spain, in which to bury their dead and enshrine the idea of their dynasty's divine mission...
...In fact, she does not feel there is any virtue to having mothers at home—day care is more professional...
...and authoritative —teach internal discipline by enforcing rational rules...
...He barely alludes to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and dismisses the defenestration of Prague as a "well-worn story...
...half of his State of the Union Address apparently came straight from its pages, and the rest of her program suggestions are ripe to become a second term agenda...
...Carlos left his realms to the French Bourbons and not his Austrian cousins, yet the author maintains that the Habsburgs regarded all their lands as one "collective possession...
...In 1979, we scheduled an appointment to visit a fertility clinic right after a long-awaited vacation...
...The colon should be a semicolon...
...Mexico's would-be emperor Maximilian was executed in 1867...
...eat more grains, and less beef...
...None other than her late mother-in-law Virginia Kelly, whose coddling allowed Roger Clinton to get away with being a drug addict...
...the overused metaphor is but a mask for Hillary's lack of vision...
...To deflect questions as to why she didn't have more children...
...Pound sent it to Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine in 1912 and it was printed there in 1913...
...These days the account of a single presidential campaign can easily top a thousand pages, but Andrew Wheatcroft has told the story of one of the world's most important families in a third of that...
...Regarding an equestrian portrait of the Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), he moves from the Golden Fleece around Charles's neck to a history of the chivalric order of that name...
...Wheatcroft is above all concerned with how the Habsburgs saw themselves, and persuaded the world to see them, during their centuries of power...
...In fact this pointed multiculturalism occurs throughout the book, as U.S childrearing practices are compared unfavorably to their counterparts in various Third World nations...
...Hillary's "village" is a settlement house where bluestockings instruct the rest of us in living properly...
...the phrase is used exclusively in left-wing children's welfare advocacy circles, and the word "village" is interchangeable with "tax dollars...
...It Takes A Village And Other Lessons Children Teach Us Hillary Rodham Clinton Simon & Schuster /318 pages / $20 REVIEWED BY Lisa Schiffren Like its author, Hillary Clinton's first book has many missions...
...Would that the book's illustrations, several of them a sickly greenish yellow, met the standards of Wheat-croft's commentary...
...wear safety helmets on bicycles...
...To counteract this and other unfortunate impressions the public has of herself, the book is salted with personal anecdotes intended to humanize her...
...Lo and behold, I got pregnant during that vacation...
...There are things one doesn't need to know, but since she raises the matter, it's hard not to speculate about the real obstacles to conception at home...
...Interestingly, when Hillary wants to illustrate what she regards as most closely approximating the kind of real (not federal) "village" that is most appropriately child-centered, she tells us about her idyllic childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois...
...One recalls the response from Hillary's friends when Dan Quayle made these points, and thinks: It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the poll data blows...
...FRANCIS X. ROCCA is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...But he also devotes his first sixteen pages to the fourteenth-century battle of Sempach, at which the Habsburgs were defeated by Swiss peasants...
...Why is she telling us this...
...The book's title, for instance, comes from an African proverb—"It takes a village to raise a child...
...They claimed Roman emperors and Roman Catholic saints for ancestors...
...enforce curfews...
...there are illuminating flashbacks to other battles, and a reflection on the vast medieval breach "between those who 'bore arms' and those who merely used them...
...But of course there was a dark side...
...try harder not to get divorced...
...The (federal or state level) "village" should be willing to provide more pre-natal care and intensive parenting instructions to those parts of the population who can't or won't behave responsibly...
...Petals' — which petals...
...She never mentions high taxes—though she suggests many instances where more spending on nationalized day care staffed by childcare experts, or massive worker training, would solve family problems...
...Apart from showing once again that no experience is too private to be used for political ends, the anecdote illustrates how difficult having children is, even for people who have "read all the books" and had excellent care...
...In the end, there is nothing here besides the decades-old liberal Democrat's wish list of programs and regulations...
...Or you can have a multicultural society, where we pick and choose the institutions that suit us, and feel no obligation to pay for each other's choices...
...She also offers her readers this: "Most of the stressed syllables are nouns chained together by prepositional phrases that draw us from one to the next: 'In a station' — which station...
...read to our children...
...immunize them...
...The rest of the book is the same way: discursive, non-chronological, and vividly imagined, like the best family stories...
...Then, to bolster what may seem like a bizarre claim, given her previous emphasis on professional status, she offers this rather intimate tidbit: Bill and I had wanted to start a family immediately after we were married, in 1975, but we were not having much luck...
...Her views on class also explain one of the more startling moments in the book...
...make sure children who are having sex understand contraception...
...Most interesting, to those of us weirdly fascinated by her, the book is Hillary's presentation of herself as she wishes to be seen: America's First Power Lawyer Spouse is now America's "Magnificent Mom," as her husband told a dumbstruck nation...
...Hillary panicked, until a kind nurse showed her how to hold the baby...
...When the line of male succession came to an end in the eighteenth century, the emphasis shifted from ancestry to posterity, with the fecund Archduchess Maria Theresa (1717-1780) playing mother both to her country and her thirteen children...
...Inbreeding may explain why the sickly Carlos II (1661-1700) could not sire an heir to prolong the family's two centuries of rule over the Spanish empire...
...Families would be in better shape if our tax code didn't push married mothers who wish to raise their own children into the labor force, in large part to pay for a welfare state that encourages unskilled, unmarried teenagers to bear illegitimate children the rest of us must support...
...This is a stunning claim...
...Do lower class parents "demand" that the state train them to raise their children — a task that has neglectfully been left to them...
...Like everything else concerning Madame, her book shouldn't be taken at face value...
...commissioned Titian, Rubens, and other great artists to portray them as the defenders of Christendom against Protestantism and Islam...
...LISA SCHIFFREN, a frequent contributor, wrote about the Clinton tax returns in the August 1993 American Spectator...
...Clinton seems unwilling to face the fact that you can have neighborhoods, with genuinely shared, usually traditional values, that have many of the childrearing benefits whose loss she laments...
...The Habsburgs drew on vast and varied resources for their mythology...
...there are no willful teenagers who conceive them because welfare is easier than independence...
...Is there no subject about which this woman will not hector us...
...All the families in the neighborhood shared basic values, and looked out for each other's children...
...Although surely some of the all-time masters of public relations, the Habsburgs The American Spectator • March 199 6 69...
...Between incessant tribal warfare, savage butchThe American Spectator • March 1996 67 ery, famine, disease, and corruption, life is not pretty in Africa...
...Naturally, Hillary is authoritative—the best kind...
...The empire of Spain's King Phillip II (15271598) once encircled the globe...
...Famous for making their greatest conquests through marriage rather than war, the Habsburgs have preferred whenever possible—particularly at the height of their power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—to marry each other...
...for women motherhood is the up and coming refuge of scoundrels...
...childproof our house...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 3
