She’s not done with us yet – if ever. There will always be a Clinton in your life, ready or not. This is a family that just won’t quit. There is even talk that daughter Chelsea may run for something. So come hurricanes, floods, eclipses, tornadoes, there will be Clintons for your children and grandchildren. The Clintons will outlast us all.
Did you know she’s written a book? I mean Hillary. Yes, another one. Did you know it’s already a bestseller, even though it hasn’t been published yet? Well it has been published but won’t reach a bookstore near you until later September. Simon and Schuster paid eight million -- that’s dollars, American -- for the privilege of publishing her manuscript, a woe-is-me titled, “What Happened.”
I’ll tell you what happened. You lost.
It’s that simple. Now can we all go home and call it a day? Not a chance. Hillary needs the money, more money.
If you think eight million dollars is enough, then you don’t know the Clintons and you don’t know the world of Big Publishing.
It’s about celebrities getting rich while real writers starve…(and I refer you to both Bukowski’s “Post Office” and my own “Slot Attendant – A Novel About A Novelist” for what you’re up against as an outsider facing the heartless world of New York Publishing – but damn it feels good when you succeed despite them.)
That same eight million could have gone to a thousand different writers, distributed in much smaller sums of course, but enough to keep the pot boiling.
But Hillary has it all, all to herself, as do so many other Celebs who trade their fame into a book and suddenly get themselves introduced as “authors.”
Nothing like that for you if you’re a real writer sweating each word toward the great American novel that’s most likely been turned down by 25 different publishers. That’s because you’re a nobody. You have no name You have no fame. You are not Hillary Clinton. You have no dirt to spill.
They’re calling it a memoir. I’d have suggested a better title: “Hillary’s Complaint,” if Philip Roth wouldn’t mind, though big bucks often come for books that kvetch.
They’re calling it a memoir. I’d have suggested a better title: “Hillary’s Complaint,” if Philip Roth wouldn’t mind, though big bucks often come for books that kvetch.
Dirt? Well, word has already been leaked about her troubles with Donald Trump, and even her own husband, Bill.
To find out more, well, you will just have to pay up. Well, no. You will not have to pay eight million dollars.
But wait a minute. If you want to Meet the Author, now we’re talking real money again. Yes, for the privilege to “meet and greet” Hillary, the 20-second schmooze will cost you in some cases several thousand dollars, in some places only hundreds, depending where her limousine Book Tour takes her.
Naturally if you are a Liberal, or if you love anything Clinton, or if you admire her “because she is a woman,” you will be there with bells on. You will blush and gush simply to shake the hand of your hero – possibly the most corrupt politician ever produced through the American political system.
But she is a Clinton, and that’s all that counts…and she is a woman…and it was HER TURN…but those darned Deplorables came and took it away.
Donald Trump took it away. Was that fair? No, and she will tell you all about it in her eight million dollar new book. Oh the pain of it all!
Never mind writing. Can it even be called typing what she has produced for the suckers who will buy anything if it comes with a shiny label?
On writing, Hemingway and Salinger bled for the proper word.
The great Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel put it like this: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just in the right place.”
That’s when Writing was Art, and not some slimy scheme to get rich.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and the ground-breaking inside-journalism thriller “The Bathsheba Deadline.” His latest is “News Anchor Sweetheart.” He is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com