--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Marek Reavis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > I chose to make a point, *my* point, regarding > Clinton's use of the Rocky Balboa analogy, but you believe I > didn't understand her use of it. I did, of course, but chose > to point out a humorous (or tragic) flaw in it.
>From the Corrente blog, by lambert: I have to admit that when I first heard that Hillary Clinton was comparing herself to Rocky my first thought was, But Rocky lost! My second thought was, Oh no, is she calling herself a great white hope? But both thoughts were reflexive and have more to do with my own upper middle class white liberal intellectual prejudices than with the movie itself. Rocky, I had to remind myself, isn't about winning and losing a simple, single contest. It isn't about race. It's about an individual surviving with his integrity and his dignity intact when the whole of society, including himself, is set up to think of him as a joke and a tool and doesn't really care about what or who he is except to the degree he is useful. It's about class, as Susie Madrak points out in her post The Tao of Rocky, but maybe you have to live in Philadelphia to get that. http://www.correntewire.com/what_susie_said >From "The Tao of Rocky" by Susie Madrak, on the blog Suburban Guerrilla: Rocky lost. Oh, the laughter! Oh, the snark! Of course, they missed the point. Of course they did. To Philadelphians (and the thousands of "Rocky" fans who flock here every year), this movie isn't about winning - it's about class. It's about invisible people, living in forgotten, decaying neighborhoods. It's about the search for dignity. It's about making people see your life... She sees them. She sees them, and not like a particularly distasteful bug under a microscope, or as a bunch of bigots (as convenient as that might be for some to think). This woman who has spent her entire life in public service connects with working people. Well, why wouldn't she? They know life is hard and courage means to get up every day and keep trying. Sometimes showing up is the only victory they'll ever know. They know college graduates look down on them. They know there's a whole world out there they'll never touch. They see those well-to-do people sometimes, in the expensive seats at the ballpark or on TV, but their lives don't intersect much. Hillary Clinton talks to them as if they matter, when they haven't mattered for a very long time. And of course the academic bloggers find this just a littleĀ icky. They use their grad-school argument skills to ridicule the people who find hope in her. (Who are these pathetic people who will settle for mere dignity when they can have transcendence? Or the Unity Pony?) When you have the luxury of living in a world of irony, there are some things you'll just never get. http://susiemadrak.com/2008/04/02/22/07/the-tao-of-rocky/
