“A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.” E.D. Hill on the June 6 edition of Fox News’ America’s Pulse
When I witnessed the Obama fist-bump, I for one thought it was cute.
This couple seems to have 
a real marriage going on up in here, not just a strategic partnership. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I admire the Clinton’s relationship. Sometimes intellectual compatibility is better than great sex. Theirs is the modern day public personification of “philia,” the Greek term for friendship or amiability; a crucial component of the good life.
In contrast to the desiring and passionate yearning of eros, philia entails a fondness and appreciation of the other. For the Greeks, the term philia incorporated not just friendship, but also loyalties to family and polis-one’s political community, job, or discipline. Philia for another may be motivated, as Aristotle explains in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, for the agent’s sake or for the other’s own sake.
The motivational distinctions are derived from love for another because the friendship is wholly useful as in the case of business contacts, or because their character and values are pleasing. Friendships of a lesser quality may also be based on the pleasure or utility that is derived from another’s company. A business friendship is based on utility–on mutual reciprocity.*
That pretty much describes the Clinton union, don’t you agree?
Maybe that’s why so many people admire Hillary Clinton. Her bruising fight in 1993 to implement a universal health care plan, the way she interacted with her husband, then President Bill Clinton. I especially admired her choice to remain in her marriage despite the crescendo of voices that ridiculed and derided this courageous, intelligent, and deeply personal decision.
I admired how she weathered that humiliating media conflagration and emerged looking like someone devoted to principle rather that someone who cuts and runs. For me, throughout that difficult time, she set an excellent example, not by whining and crying and acting like a victim but by facing her problems head on, with no shame, no blame and no excuses.
She didn’t take the easy way out. She took the heat rather than get out of the kitchen. That took a depth of dignity and an intestinal fortitude that, in the less capable, would have precipitated a tawdry public pity party. She kept her eyes focused on the prize not the papers and, no doubt after much soul searching, concluded she was probably better with this man than she would be without him.
After a careful examination of twenty-three years of marriage, she could see clearly from her vantage point something all the TV psychologists and media skeptics could not. She would not throw the baby out with the bath water. Bill Clinton may have revealed himself to the nation to be a flawed man, but he was her flawed man. The decision to stay or not to stay was nobody’s business but hers. And here we all are ten years later and no weepy, salacious tell-all. She got the big picture.
“Our lives are a mixture of different roles. Most of us are doing the best we can to find whatever the right balance is . . . For me, that balance is family, work, and service.”**
What a breath of cool, minty-fresh air the Obama union portends to bring to the American political scene. It’s abundantly clear they have it going on in all areas of the love triad: eros, philia, agape. I guess Ms Hill and her associates, on the other hand, are perhaps maybe wanting in at least one of these major areas for them to be able, not only to glean a microscopic participle of terrorism out of the affection of the Obama fist-bump in Minnesota on the evening of June 3, but to open her mouth irresponsibly, to vomit out this fat, slimy, warty toad to plop where ever it may.
Now in her defense, Ms Hill very likely did not write the tease but merely read from the tele-prompter. Both she and Fox News, however, have put forward a hollow explanation of the unfortunate analogy. It still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why would Fox News feel it’s journalistically justifiable and OK to compare the Obama’s display of support and mutual affection with terrorism? Is this what Fox is calling the news?
Tell Fox News this is appalling and unacceptable, and demand an apology from Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.
Get off your butts and do something!
*(Source: http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/love.htm#SH2c )
**(Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/firstladies/hc42.html)
Post title from The Message | Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five | 1982
