Posted in: Pashmina news
I’ve never been entirely clear about the point of books like these, and never less so now that I’ve read Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s quasi-autobiography “Know Your Power.”
Subtitled “A Message to America’s Daughters,” the 21-year congressional veteran says she means to do two things by detailing her life story:
Pay homage to the women who smoothed her path to become the first female Speaker of the House and second in line to the president. And offer insight, advice and inspiration for women trying to find and use their own power. (Unfortunately, what she mostly did was constantly remind me of a tepidly received Dennis Quaid/Jessica Lange movie from 1988, but more on that later.)
However well-meant, though, what has to be said here is that “Know Your Power” is mostly a chronicle (and not a particularly intellectually demanding one) of how Pelosi found her power — and not much else. And while this perhaps was predictable, it was still disappointing.
But more than that, it was a bit scary. Scary the way it was last January, when Sen. Hillary Clinton tried to explain how personal the election was for her and suddenly found her eyes teary and her voice quavery; she was suddenly, achingly and undeniably real. And then it was gone. Even though her poll numbers skyrocketed over that, that Hillary never came back. Her people didn’t get it.
Scary that way.
Because Americans know “real,” and they know truth when they hear it, see it and read it. In fact, they’re dying for it — some of them literally in Iraq and millions metaphorically in their yearning for a president who doesn’t set off every hard-working citizen’s b. s. meter the minute he opens his mouth.
Yet time after time, politicians and their staffs, handlers and data insist upon giving us their own version of “real” — thin, sanitized, crowded with banalities and platitudes — and think we either won’t notice or won’t care.
Speaking the truth
Pelosi devotes literally half her book to her charming coming of age in Baltimore’s Little Italy, replete with tales of family, Catholic duty, service and the de rigeur John F. Kennedy meeting. The rest is an occasionally feisty but generally trite accounting of how she got elected and what it all means.
Raw realities? Shrewd advice on how to find, keep and wield power? Inside truths? Good luck.
Why is this? Why is it that those who cloak themselves in the pashmina of “speaking truth to power” have such a hard time simply getting the “speaking truth” part down?
In Olympic-speak, that’s called nailing the compulsories. And if pols with power like Pelosi’s can’t (or won’t) nail to a few hundred pages some raw realities and blunt advice, then who and what are these books for?
Does she truly not understand that inside the Beltway, D. C. insiders will roll their eyes over this, if they read it at all?
Or that outside the Beltway, readers likely will give it a few chapters before erupting: Who gives a &@#%$, lady? I’m about to lose my house, my wife’s depressed, my kid’s sick, I have no health insurance and my nephew just came back from Iraq missing a leg and most of his mind. You got power? Fix these! Heck, fix one! I’m OK with that! DO something!
I suspect Nancy Pelosi knows her power perfectly well — and not the type of power she spends precisely half the book describing as having been achieved despite blushing protestations and Who-Me? astonishment. We’re talking the steely kind that comes from being a millionaire many times over, a 21-year member of Congress, the first female Speaker of the House and the highest-ranking elected woman in American history.
The kind that comes from being, in short, a woman of substance, contradiction, complexity and craftiness, which is the kind of person anyone would want to read about. And yet here, she has chosen to not be that person.
I kept thinking about that scene as I paged faster and faster through Pelosi’s book.
Words such as “bipartisan,” “organize,” “constituents” and “coalition” kept popping out, and no Krispy Kreme glaze ever covered a doughnut more heavily than those words glazed my eyes. Stories about races, legislation, trips and tradition rolled on and on.
They must have mattered to her.
But they didn’t to me. These weren’t the stories I wanted to read about, stories we should know, stories only Pelosi could tell.
Which brings me back to that Dennis Quaid/Jessica Lange movie, “Everybody’s All-American,” which despite a Frank DeFord-based script and Taylor Hackford directing, was called corny, dopey, boring and worse, but which I found incredibly engrossing and heartbreaking.
Toward the end, some 25 years after Gavin Grey has faded from stardom as a Louisiana football star, he sits on his porch and plays for a guest a taped memoir of each play of each game he ever played. Grey is lost in each detail; the others are lost in boredom. It’s an excruciating moment, until his beauty-queen college sweetheart and longtime wife, Lange, softly urges with exquisite compassion, “Turn it off, Gavin. Turn it off.”
It matters deeply to him; not to anyone else.
Missing information
From Pelosi, I would’ve liked to have learned:
• Just how she’s managed to stay married for 45 years. It’s been written that her schedule gives them about a week per month together, which, if true, is definitely something women and their daughters should know. What’s more empowering than saying bluntly: “Look, frankly, once the kids are grown, take at least half the month to yourself, more if you can. You’ll find out who you are, and boy will you get along if you see each other only a week at a time”?
• The grittier details of having had five kids in six years, the mere thought of which triggers a cluster headache behind my right eye. The sheer brutality, organization and endurance that was required had to have prepped her for the snake pit of D. C. better than anything. But the closest hint we get is a chirpy, “Some days I didn’t even have time to wash my face,” which strikes me as a tad dainty when most mothers I know will cop to consecutive days without showering at some point along their parenting journey.
• More about the blasphemy of America’s health insurance system from Pelosi — more anger, more ideas, more everything — instead of merely this: “Think of it — 40 days in Iraq could pay for 10 million children getting health care in America. And the president says we can’t afford it.”
• But above all, I am dying to know (and, to stay on-message, I think modern women and their daughters would be well-served by knowing) exactly what went on at the pivotal moment of Pelosi’s political life when she was elected speaker, which, bizarrely, gets a mere paragraph at the end of Chapter Nine: “I immediately went into action and called over 150 Democratic members to personally ask them for their vote, and in 24 hours I had the votes I needed. And I was ready to be their leader.”
Pelosi’s book could have included all these things, and more.
But it didn’t. It may be because it didn’t have to — which is why this seems less a primer on how to know your own power and more a flaunting of Pelosi’s own.
For with everything she could have clocked us with, right across the psyche, she inexplicably churned out what seems little more than a political resume leavened by name-dropping, homespun froth and policy banalities — and then she had the front to market it as an homage/empowerment guide for women and daughters everywhere.
Or, as the news release describes it: “It is a keepsake to turn to again and again, when you need to be reminded that anything is possible when you know your power.”
And when you squander it.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Thank you for your help!
Comment by Laura — April 4, 2009 @ 5:07 pm