Hillary Clinton: The Thrill is Gone

"The thrill is gone/ The thrill is gone away/ Oh, the thrill is gone/ Baby, it's gone away/ You know you done me wrong now baby/ And you'll be sorry someday."
B.B. King
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You see a pattern now. In the North Carolina, you saw over 90% of black people vote for Sen. Barack Obama over opponent Sen. Hillary Clinton. You saw it in South Carolina. Before South Carolina's primary, pundits were scratching and shaking their bowed heads, utterly perplexed as to why Blacks had not taken a shine, so to speak, to the skinny black guy with the funny name, to one of their own. But that was all before former Prez Bill Clinton came to town. That was before "the black president" pulled the race card, suggesting that the skinny black guy was just another Jessie Jackson without a big afro, suggesting, indeed, that the skinny black guy's entire campaign was nothing but a "fairytale." Since then, black voters have said to Hillary and Bill in no uncertain terms: "We don't like you anymore, and we're not going to vote for you."

So, to paraphrase the great singer Roy Orbison, how do you say "it's 0-ver?" You could say "Parting is so much sorrow," but do you really want to resort to the actions of which you accuse Hillary and be dishonest.

You could, like the great African American poet Langston Hughes, ask rhetorically "What happens to a dream deferred" then answer dramatically, "Maybe it sags like a heavy load...Or does it explode?"

Perhaps you could opt for a more elegant, though bitter-sweet, transcendence and recite this poem by the great Palestinian poet Samih Al Qassim :

A s h e s

Don't you feel we have lost so much that our " great " love is now only words , that there's no more yearning , no urgency, no real joy in our hearts, and when we meet no wonder in our eyes?

Don't you feel our encounters are frozen ,
our kisses cold,
that we've lost the fervor of contact
and now merely exchange polite talk ?
Or we forget to meet at all
and tell false excuses . . .

Don't you feel that our brief hurried letters
lack feeling and spirit,
contain no whispers or dreams of love ,
that our responses are slow and burdened . . .

Don't you feel a world has tumbled down and another arisen ? That our end will be bitter and frightening because the end not fall on us suddenly but came from within

Or,

Like B.B. King, you could just start singing a song that, unfortunately, we African
Americans know all too well:

"The thrill is gone..."