Hillary Clinton to Council on Foreign Relations: “It’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department… I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing”
July 19th, 2009Via: U.S. State Department:
Thank you very much, Richard, and I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.
Research Credit: Rmohanx
Posted in Elite | Top Of Page
Yowza. That was as straight-forward and, well, prosaic as can be. The CFR calls the shots.
The masks of Empire are just being completely torn-off in every field anymore, aren’t they? Part of me clings to the hope that somehow that means we’re nearing the end of this era, but honestly, I don’t have a clue whether that’s true or not. Or if that’s even a good thing or not.
But it seems clear that something major is ready to shift, and only needs the right shove.
I can’t help remembering now what I believe is the most important line Shakespeare ever wrote (yet tellingly, also one of the more awkward):
“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be.”
To me is says: there IS a force that guides our fates, but despite what we think we know, we really don’t know shit about it. So be attentive, and be ready, but let go.
As an addendum….I suppose I’m waxing rhapsodic tonight because I feel it’s unusual lately how many people around me have begun to sincerely express how frightened they are. And I don’t think it’s necessarily as simple as “the bad economy” or “the gloomy news” or their job worries or their debt worries or anything, although obviously those things are all part and parcel of the whole spectrum. No, rather I wonder if people seem to be finally letting in the glimmer of light that, perhaps, everything we’ve known and grown up with is really far more fragile than we could have believed.
And I suspect people are getting more comfortable expressing their uncertainty because they sense that other people feel it as well. Indeed, people seem quite eager to bring it up, in my experience, whether it ties into the conversation or not.