IOWA CITY, Iowa—I come late to things. It was only last April, for instance, that I found out about steak, which had always seemed to me inedibly bland and texturally repugnant, like slightly dampened wood. I was in a supermarket in Marfa, Texas, felt an overwhelming need for a bloody slab of red meat, brought it home, googled “how to cook steak,” cooked it badly, brought it to my mouth. The satisfaction, straightforwardly sexual, erupted in waves of pleasure. This is what they were talking about, I thought, alone in the desert, eyes wide with this new knowledge, imparted to me by a blastocyst burrowing itself in my womb. I was 30 before I knew what it was to enjoy watching a sports event among other people—this time, in a Buffalo Wild Wings in Iowa—and I was so puzzled by this feeling that I wrote an entire book about mixed martial arts.
And I was older than that when I knew what it was to like a politician. It wasn’t entirely unlike the meat experience, in that it involved watching a woman sink her teeth into animal flesh. “I hope you heard what his defense was,” she says, standing right next to him. “I’ve been nice to some women.”
Mike Bloomberg rolls his eyes.
“He has gotten some number of women—Dozens? Who knows?— to sign nondisclosure agreements, both for sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace. So, Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release women from those nondisclosure agreements so we can hear their side of the story?”
“We have a very few nondisclosure agreements—”
“Oh, how many is that?” Elizabeth Warren asks, performing a kind of aggressive curiosity.
“Let me finish—”
“How many is that?”
He shakes his head, like, this lady.
“None of them accused me of doing anything other than—maybe they didn’t like a joke I told.”
Warren smiles, a little sadly, as the crowd boos.
“These would be agreements between two parties that want to keep it quiet, and that’s up to them. They signed those agreements, and we’ll live with it.”
“So wait,” says Warren. “I just want to be clear.” She just wants to be clear!
“Some is how many?” She pauses so the silence can hang over the audience. Bloomberg closes his eyes for long periods, a thing you do when you want the room to know you’re enduring something you should not have to endure.
“And when you say they signed them,” Warren continues, “and they wanted them, if they wish now to speak out and tell their side of the story about what it is they allege, that’s now OK with you, you’re releasing them on television tonight?”
She looks at him, and he looks at us.
“Senator, no. The company and somebody else—the man and the woman, or it could be more than that—they decided they wanted to keep it quiet for everybody’s interest. They signed the agreements, and that’s what we’re going to live with.”
In American politics we do not go for the kill. We let people make arguments like “not allowing this woman to speak is in her interest,” politely retreat, and hope someone out there catches the lie.
“No,” Warren says, with perfect brutality. “The question is, Are the women bound by being muzzled by you.”
I felt this moment in the small of my back, and between my shoulder blades, and in one particular spot in my forearm that goes tingly when I’m nervous. A small child sucked milk from my chest and grew strong. Somewhere off in the distance, Chris Matthews rolled his eyes, unaware that the darkness was coming for him.
There’s a Joan Didion passage in Slouching Toward Bethlehem where some lightweight at a joke of a think tank instructs Joan, “Don’t make the mistake of taking a chair at the big table. … The talk there is pretty high powered.” Didion, the actual intellectual, absorbed this, allowed him his moment, and skewered him in an essay that would appear in one of the most enduring collections of all time. This is a mode of destruction with which women are accustomed, the devastating comment much afterward. Warren presented a dream of real-time vanquish. She took a man and forced him, before millions of people, into a binary choice he could not abide.
She did not have to be in battle. To watch Warren explain something was to watch someone with a particularly ordered mind, capable of seizing upon a narrow question, zooming out and carrying you concisely along a set of interlocking forces. Even when you didn’t agree, you could marvel at the fluidity with which she engaged the logic of the worldview. The system may be rigged, but she can untie the knot while you watch. It was so easy for her to see the steps of any sequential argument that she could abandon herself, really, to the mood. She could play. She could engage a dramatic pause, deliver a punchline and run jauntily offstage.
I have punctured the thin film of my bubble enough to know that most of the time, I live comfortably inside of one. I am a professor of creative writing from Connecticut. I am quoting Joan Fucking Didion in an essay about Elizabeth Warren. That we can see past the edges of our identities does not make us less susceptible to feeling represented. It is feelings all the way down, or at least most of the way down. The difference between what any of these candidates can achieve is vanishingly small; even in a world where Democrats gain full control of Congress, the diversity of the Democratic electorate will render any change incremental. Should you find yourself mocking Melissa from Iowa, an independent who told a reporter she’d caucused for Bernie Sanders in 2016, voted for Donald Trump, and would vote for Trump again if Pete Buttigieg didn’t win the Dem nomination, I only ask that you take a gander at the entire pundit class. Note how emotional they become at the slightest insult toward their preferred candidates, who will all operate in the same constrained space of feasible compromise.
The difference between the Iowan and the pundit is that the Iowan is likely to tell you she’s voting based on a feeling, whereas the pundit will give you a list of policy preferences he’s using to explain his feelings. You join the cult because you identify with the cult members. When someone asks why you joined, you point to scripture.
Political crushes are embarrassing, and we should be embarrassed by them. I do not expect, in my lifetime, to admire another politician, and I am not particularly surprised that this one has been vanquished by a senescent middling man who just wants to be friends and, probably, take a nap. The week after I had my daughter, I ordered steak, but even as I asked for it I knew: The flavor had been fleeting, and now it was gone.
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March 07, 2020 at 05:32AM
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Opinion | The Enthralling Brutality of Elizabeth Warren - POLITICO
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