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Hillary Clinton as Walking Eagle
A "Native American" Tale
True story . . .
Senator Hillary Clinton was invited to address a
major gathering of The American Indian Nation two weeks
ago in upper New York State. She spoke for almost an
hour on her future plans for increasing every Native
American's present standard of living, should she one
day become the first female President.
She referred to her career as a
New York Senator, how she had signed 'YES,' for every
Indian issue that came to her desk for approval.
Although the Senator was vague on the details of her
plan, she seemed most enthusiastic about her future
ideas for helping her 'red sisters and brothers'.
At the conclusion of her speech, the Tribes presented
the Senator with a plaque inscribed with her new Indian
name - Walking Eagle. The proud Senator then departed in
her motorcade, waving to the crowds. A news reporter
later inquired of the group of chiefs of how they had
come to select the new name given to the Senator. They
explained that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird
so full of shit it can no longer fly.—Renee
Gaines
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Response
The urban legend that President
Bush (or Hillary Clinton) was given the name "Walking
Eagle" is an urban legend. Follow the link:
Urban Legends. Whenever a story seems "too good to
be true," it probably is—Wilson
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Other Websites on
Walking Eagle
It All Started
with John Kerry as the Butt of the Republicans’ Joke
Snopes
From Truth or Fiction?
Truth or Fiction
Yahoo News [A Year Old Indian Joke re Hillary]
Answers.yahoo
Hillary Clinton Jokes
No Hillary for President
But Go Ahead—You Decide!
http://www.Soda Head
But Believe It—It’s a Bloody Joke!
Forums
All the Urban Legends We’ve already Passed Off as
truth or Rumor
Urban Legends
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Native Americans
and the Trickster Tradition
The so-called red
people, of which I am one by 1/16th, never trust pale
faces. The trickster figure of many original nations,
Coyote, like African tricksters Fox and "Bre'er Rabbit,"
always play tricks like the "Walking Eagle" trick the
Seneca played on Clinton.
The Kiowa Comanche
of southwestern Oklahoma are legendary for verbally
responding to pale faced politicians' remarks with
shouts of "wakalatonga!" One such visiting politician,
after such an enthusiastically greeted speech, gingerly
avoided the numerous cow piles in the pasture where he
held the rally. He remarked to his guide about the
cattle dung, and his guide replied, "Yes. Be sure not to
step in the wakalatonga!"—Ralph
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Universality of
Tricksters
Dear Rudy,
The first trickster
legend I ever learned was, naturally, Brer Rabbit. But
by the time I was in fifth grade, I had become aware of
Heracles, Pericles, and Ulysses. In high school, I
learned about Wagner, so naturally the Germanic God Loki
became another favorite. Everyone knows Chaucer's
retelling of the European folktale of Chanticleer and
Reynard. Signifying Monkey is a mixture of West
African and the same European legend that Chaucer
adapted in the Nun's Priest's tale. My mother
introduced me to le Roman de Reynard, whose foxy hero
appears in Ellison's Invisible Man, where
Rinehart reincarnates Reynard.
One reason the
Walking Eagle joke is so successful is that Hillary,
with her escapades on the Chicago commodity exchange and
at Whitewater is already known as a trickster, and we
particularly enjoy a joke based on the idea that the
trickster gets tricked. In the case of Brer Rabbit,
the trickster is fooled by Brer Fox's clever hoax of the
Tar Baby, but Reynard the Fox is fooled by the wily fox,
with his story about the briar patch. Bugs Bunny is a
reincarnation of Brer Rabbit.
If Hillary receives
the Democratic nomination, the gloves will be off. The
Republicans will not be as gentlemanly as Obama has
been. They will throw the kitchen sink at her,
including Whitewater, the Chicago Commodities
speculations, the Bosnia lies, Vincent Foster. Her
White House "experience" will be as much a liability as
an asset at that point, and the world will appreciate
for the first time how Obama pulled his punches.—Wilson
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That sounds
wonderful, so much so that I'm inclined to ask Obama to
step aside. But I pull back from the more devilish side
of my personality. All of Hillary's elitist and
hypocritical behavior will be over in a few months. This
episode of primary politics will be reduced to a
paragraph in high school text books and will be seen
with little significance of how racism of a presidential
family became exposed.—Rudy
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Airing Dirty
Laundry
In ethnic
subterfuge from whatever side, one can always find an
individual of a particular race to say things
nonsensical, idiotic, and hurtful, as is now being shown
by the Clintons in the 2008 primaries. Finding someone
to belittle and exploit has been going on since the
beginning of time, as we know from the Cain and Abel
story. But the commercial media and its millionaires
love and thrive on such "racial" conflict.
Here's a concluding
statement by Ishmael Reed in his book
Airing Dirty Laundry (1993):
"The complex racial
background of those who are referred to as black
Americans has seldom been submitted to serious scrutiny.
One could understand why the Identity Crisis nonfiction
is a popular genre among assimilated intellectuals, but
the fact that I could obtain as much information as I
did for only $100 indicates that Identity Crisis
intellectuals aren't seriously interested in discovering
their roots, or are afraid of what they might find."
[Look at Jeremiah
Wright, he looks more Italian than a Nigerian black or a
Sudanese black. . . . Reed hired a genealogical expert
and found he had Irish men on both sides of his family.
One Irish friend who invited him to an Irish gathers
dubbed him an Irish poet. That same writer said if one
drop of black blood makes you black, why wouldn't one
drop make you Irish. That's how idiotic the whole racial
matter is in America and how easily race is used to
generate racial conflict here in America.
We know that Skip
Gates, author of
The Signifying Monkey, has now made a business
out of race by chasing down individual DNA African
connections with his (The
Root), while de-emphasizing the white and
Indian DNA his customers possess. He has established
this Afrocentric enterprise through a
relationship with the Washington Post. Afrocentrics and
other "black" intellectuals and "black" celebrities
allow him to escape unscathed. Why? Because he's at
Harvard and a "successful" Negro. Being a millionaire, one can do no
wrong, especially when you are doing it to blacks who
have been programmed for such exploitation.
On the other hand,
if there were millions of dollars in being black (as in
reparations), according to Charles Siler (in one of his
political cartoons), America would be a black man's
country.]
Reed continues:
"Besides, millions
of dollars are involved in continuing the black-white
polarization. Think of all of the journalists and op-ed
writers, along with the profit-feeding media, that would
be out of business were there a fresh and revised look
at race in America. If one allows the Native American
ancestry of blacks, then W.E.B. DuBois's theory of
double consciousness, which has thrilled black
intellectuals for decades, would fold.
"I still haven't
pieced together all of the strains of my identity, but
I'm much closer than I was before that day when I
decided to ask my grandmother about her father, and his
father. I know now why it took me so long to ask her the
question. I also know that there's no such thing as
Black America or White America, two nations, with two
separate bloodlines. America is a land of distant
cousins" ("Distant Cousins," p. 273).
We on all sides
should cut out the racist and provocative rhetoric. There's really nothing that we can discern by
the color of the skin that is worthwhile. There's just
too much generalization on who's
who beneath the skin.
The Indian folktale
"Walking Eagle" that includes Hillary and others is a
shorthand of how too many of us are involved in the
racial business, while the rich gets richer. For
instance, how many know
Hillary is on the board of
Wal-Mart, the union buster, while she's behaving in Ohio and Pennsylvania as
if she is a staunch supporter of the working man and
woman.
We are led to the question: "Who is tricking whom?" More ink and air time have been spent on her gender than
on her corporate connections. These facts seem to be
much more important than she is a "white woman" trying
to be the first female president of the United
States.—Rudy
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Corporate vs
Grassroots, Global Feminism—The sense of progress
unraveling is profound. "What happened to the
perspective that the failures of feminism lay in
pandering to racism, to everyone nodding that these were
fatal mistakes—how is it that all that could be
jettisoned?" asks Crenshaw, who co-wrote a piece with
Eve Ensler on the Huffington Post called "Feminist
Ultimatums: Not in Our Name." Crenshaw says that,
appalled as she is by the sexism toward Clinton, she
found herself stunned by some of the arguments
pro-Hillary feminists were making. "There is a myopic
focus on the aspiration of having a woman in the White
House—perhaps not any woman, but it seems to be pretty
much enough that she be a Democratic woman." This
stance, says Crenshaw, "is really a betrayal."
Frances Kissling,
the former president of Catholics for a Free Choice,
attributes this go-for-broke attitude to the mindset of
corporate feminism. "There's a way in which feminists
who have been seriously engaged in electoral politics
for a long time, the institutional DC feminist
leadership, they are just with Hillary Clinton come hell
or high water. I think they have accepted, as she has
accepted, a similar career trajectory. They are not
uncomfortable with what has gone on in the campaign,
because they see electoral campaigns as mere instruments
for getting elected. This is just the way it is. We have
to get elected."
The implications of
all this for the future of feminism depend significantly
on the outcome of the primary, says Kissling. "If
Clinton wins, the older-line women's movement will
continue; it will be a continuation of power for them.
If she doesn't win, it will be a death knell for those
people. And that may be a good thing--that a younger
generation will start to take over."
Many younger women,
indeed, have responded to the admonishments of their
pro-Hillary second-wave elders by articulating a
sophisticated political orientation that includes
feminism but is not confined to it. They may support
Obama, but they still abhor the sexism Clinton has
faced. And they detect—and reject—a tinge of sexism
among male peers who have developed man-crushes on the
dashing senator from Illinois. "Even while they voice
dismay over the retro tone of the pro-Clinton feminist
whine, a growing number of young women are struggling to
describe a gut conviction that there is something dark
and funky, and probably not so female-friendly, running
below the frantic fanaticism of their Obama-loving
compatriots,"
wrote Rebecca Traister in Salon.
It's not just young
feminists who have taken such a nuanced view. Calling
themselves
Feminists for Peace and Obama, 1,500 prominent
progressive feminists—including Kissling, Barbara
Ehrenreich and this magazine's Katha Pollitt—signed on
to a statement endorsing him and disavowing Clinton's
militaristic politics. "Issues of war and peace are also
part of a feminist agenda," they declared.
In some sense, this
is a clarifying moment as well as a wrenching one. For
so many years, feminists have been engaged in a pushback
against the right that has obscured some of the real and
important differences among them. "Today you see things
you might not have seen. It's clearer now about where
the lines are between corporate feminism and more
grassroots, global feminism," says Crenshaw. Women who
identify with the latter movement are saying, as she
puts it, "'Wait a minute, that's not the banner we are
marching under!'"
Feminist Obama
supporters of all ages and hues, meanwhile, are hoping
that he comes out of this bruising primary with his
style of politics intact.
The Nation
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posted 27
April 2008 |
