What the Hell Happened?

Her Real Self

You may have heard that Hillary Clinton's "highly anticipated" new book is due out in September, so set your countdown clocks to Zero Hour and get buzzed on all the buzz. From what little has officially leaked out so far, Hillary will portray herself as a circus acrobat with no other safety net than her stash of hundreds of millions of dollars:

 In "What Happened," the former Democratic presidential nominee will discuss the roles of former FBI Director James Comey and Russia in her loss to Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with the book.
“In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down," Clinton writes in an excerpt from the book's introduction.

Why the declarative title What Happened, as opposed to the interrogative What Happened? Or for that matter, What the Hell Happened? 

In an exclusive interview with Sardonicky, Hillary explains it all in her own words. (The following remarks were lightly edited for something resembling clarity.)

  I chose What Happened because it sounds so authoritative. Put a period on it, it's done... by me, Hillary Clinton. Nobody puts Baby in the corner. What, you were expecting Great Expectations or something? No cobwebby old Miss Havisham jokes from the haters of the vast right wing conspiracy, thank you very much.  Plus, if I made my book title into a freaking question, I would then be forced to answer it, not to mention inviting more tiresome debate. But if you really insist upon knowing, the only possible answer is: Shit Happened. To me, Hillary Clinton, not to the citizens of this country. I will do just fine with my long walks in the woods and my slugs of fine wine.

Of course, if I really wanted to be truthful, I would call it Bullshit Happened. And if I wanted to be really, really truthful I'd put it in the present tense: Bullshit Happens. After all, I am the one writing this book. And since the unproven trope "Russia Meddled in My Campaign, a/k/a Our Democracy" will be a main theme of my book, I will probably leave out the part where my DNC operatives mysteriously refused to let the FBI investigate our computers, lest evidence of an Inside Job destroy our whole Putin-Did-It narrative. Especially now that this narrative threatens to start World War III.

 If I wanted to be really really really truthful, I would also admit that I am paying (depending on sales and if he's very lucky) one of my former speechwriters to write my book for me. We've been flying back and forth between coasts at regular intervals to collude, I mean collaborate.

 And I wasn't about to call it Something Happened, because that is a brilliant, albeit forgotten, novel by Joseph Heller. Although it is fiction, it is way, way more honest than anything I could ever bullshit my way through, even if my very life depended on it. As a matter of fact, if you read Heller's book, you will discover that his satiric observations on bullshit come bleakly and uncomfortably close to who I am and how I ran, or didn't run, my campaign. For example, in the following section, Heller perfectly captures how Team Clinton put way too much stupid faith in polls giving me a 99% chance of winning, and how we relied on outdated demographics and algorithms instead of paying attention to people's real problems:

We had no way of knowing whether the information on which we based our own information was true or false. But that didn't seem to matter; all that mattered is that the information came from a reputable source. People in our market research division were never held to blame for conditions they discovered outside the campaign that placed us at a competitive disadvantage. What was, was - and they were not expected to change reality, but merely to find it if they could and suggest ingenious ways of disguising it. To a great extent, that is the nature of my own work, and all of us worked closely with the sales department and the public relations department in converting whole truths into half truths and half truths into whole ones.

  In any event, Something Happened (!) is far too exclamatory and singular, and it implies that only one bad thing happened to spoil my victory dance. Since I am Hillary Clinton, and I have whole shitloads of blame to lob at so many people, my book will be about the many many horrible things that happened to the singular woman who is me, Hillary Clinton.

 Unfortunately, the title A Singular Woman has also already been taken. It's the biography of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham.  I am also thinking of blaming her, simply for having spawned the first man with the effrontery to steal the presidency from me. But you'll just have to wait for September when the book comes out to find out how much ink I will actually spill on direct Barry-blaming. (Hint: my publicists have already planted the story that No Drama Obama deliberately ignored RussiaGate before my publicists thought to invent it mere days after I lost my second election, to Donald Trump, whom my publicists had planted in the press as one of the Pied Piper candidates it would be a cinch for me to beat.)

 But Goldwater Girl that I am, and for purposes of the austerity (for others) which has been my whole life's work, I am sticking to What Happened, Period. It gives out the perfect whiff of control and personal agency while also passive-aggressively absolving me, Hillary Clinton. of any accountability for my decisions. It also leaves enough space on the book jacket for a photo of me for a possible second and last printing. For now, though, we're going with the appropriately stern plain vanilla look. My publicists were leaning toward that now-iconic silhouette profile, which sends the message of a singular woman who holds her nose very proudly in the air so as to avoid actually looking at such things as middle class voters. So stay tuned. There may be multiple covers available to mirror my multiple reinvented public personae. One thing I can promise my readers is authentic high grade glossy paper milled from genuine dead trees.

Meanwhile, since I'll be heading out to the Vineyard and/or the Hamptons in the next couple of days, you won't see me in the woods around your neighborhood. But not to worry. I will be hard at work putting the finishing touches on the galleys. I will work my heart out for you, and continue my SuperPac fundraising for other centrist Democrats as they tout their new inspiring slogan, A Better Deal.

As my beleaguered millionaire pal Nancy Pelosi said just the other day, it's not the Democratic Party's de facto agenda of steak for the wealthy and crumbs for the poor that matters - it's the way that they put out their message. "We'll be making not a course correction, but a presentation correction," she announced.

It's not the economy stupid after all. It's the propaganda stupid.The main course of the feast for the Haves will stay exactly the same.

That is such a profound observation by Nancy I might even fit in my book somewhere, most likely in the acknowledgment section. That's the part, after unloading brick by brick my entire shitload of blame, where I air-kiss my myriad donors, celebrity fans, and enablers. It will take up at least a third of the entire book. This will give my memoir the appearance of intellectual heft and thereby justify my charging an outrageous sum of money for it.

We corporate Democrats are walking a mighty fragile tightrope these days. The danger is getting swept away by our own virtue-signalling.  When "they" go low, we go so high that we get oxygen-deprived sometimes. I don't mean to say that's a bad thing, because our enthusiasm for tiny incremental solutions becomes so contagious that it usually infects enough of the people at least some of the time. We only lost about a thousand national and state seats in the past decade, after all.

So as I so coyly teased in my leaked preface, we always run the risk of completely losing our balance performing such a multitude of verbal stunts as we seek public office. Especially when one is as clumsy as I was/am in the trickery department. And, channeling Joseph Heller again, when we lose sight of the fact that our bullshit is bullshit, we start relying too heavily on our version of the truth. We forget that the Big Lie has to be constantly honed to achieve maximum effectiveness. We get lazy and sloppy and self-satisfied, even after we lose one here or there. We nobly walk in the woods of our estates and guzzle our Chardonnay and attend many Broadway shows to prove to other wealthy members of our class that we're okay and smarter than the average bear.

Nonetheless. we have trouble distinguishing between the private positions we share with our patrons and donors and colleagues in the global finance capital cartel and the public positions we share with the hoi polloi. We become focus-grouped and poll-tested and trial-ballooned out of all rationality and meaning. We get so confused, that when we do get caught out in a lie or a grift, we have the chutzpah to channel Honest Abe and compare our paid speeches to Goldman Sachs with Lincoln freeing the slaves.

 We become mere ghosts, diminished to dictating our bullshit to ghostwriters.

Of course, that is far more honesty than my reputation as Warrior Victim Queen could ever possibly bear. 

Did I forget to request that this conversation be off the record? I did? Well knock me over with a Scaramucci feather! When I wrote in my teaser of a preface that I'd be letting my guard down and forgoing the safety net, I must have mistakenly meant what I said for once in my life.

What the hell.?!.?!