Kevin Williamson of National Review Online takes aim at Hillary Clinton’s “illiterate slogans.”
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were remarkable for one line:
“The future is female.”
That line caught the attention of Le Figaro, which breathlessly headlined a report: Hillary Clinton: “Oui, l’avenir est féminin!” It is likely that the editors at Le Figaro are better-read than Mrs. Clinton is and recognized the sentiment from the contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq, who used the line in his dystopian novel The Elementary Particles. Houellebecq, an aging hedonistic intellectual who writes very sad novels about aging hedonistic intellectuals, imagined a future in which sexual rivalry and unhappiness between the sexes both have been abolished with a single master-stroke: the abolition of the human race and its replacement by an engineered successor species that reproduces asexually and is entirely female.
Perhaps that is not what Mrs. Clinton has in mind. …
… In the English-speaking world, “The Future Is Female” has had a different sort of career, having been taken up as the motto of lesbian separatists in the 1970s and then reborn as a popular T-shirt in recent years — which, Americans being Americans, has given rise to litigation about who owns that daft phrase.
My bet is that Mrs. Clinton took the line from the T-shirt, or rather that one of her minions did. (Speechwriter for Mrs. Clinton must currently be the saddest job in all politics.) A T-shirt is about as deep as she goes. Like Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton likes to talk about the importance of art (or “the arts,” as such people habitually put it) and culture and the like but does not seem to have read very many serious books in the past 40 years or so, or to have thought very seriously about anything she has read. Progressives enjoy the life of the mind a great deal . . . in theory. Michael Tracey of “The Young Turks,” one of those predictable lefty types who like to go on about how much they love science and how deeply they care about the environment, took to Twitter earlier this week to ask for help in identifying an exotic bird he encountered in Texas City. It was a pelican.
Darwin, yes; Audubon, not so much.
