by Joshua Cohen
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BUT THE FUNDAMENTAL DIVIDE in this election has been nondemographic and off the map—it’s not the rift between races or ethnicities or genders, or the gap between the interior and the coasts, but the gulf that’s been opened up between Actions and Words. Trump, who’s been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault, attempted rape, and rape, has suffered more for what he’s said—for his hot-mic comments about grabbing women “by the pussy.” While both facts—the accusations and the comments—have astounded me as a man, the theoretical distinction, or the practical distinction in their consequences, has astounded me as a writer. My own words, during this election, have been pointless. Inconsequential. They’ve changed nothing. They’ve swayed no one.
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TRUMP SUPPORTERS BELIEVE THEY’VE elected a man of Action, so as to purge a man of Words: Obama. Of course, the utter reverse of that formula is true: Obama did things (including the wrong things), Obama made things (including mistakes), but Trump, in all his biblical attainment of seventy years, has merely bloviated. It occurs to me that nearly all of the beliefs most dear, or most publicly dear, to Trump supporters have been like their swastikas: true only in their opposite, their counterpole inversion. Rarely has a mass delusion been so complementary or symmetrizing. Trump is a friend of the working class? No: He’s an exploiter whose businesses have consistently cut employee benefits and pay, refused to employ union labor, and stiffed contractors. Trump is a self-made success? No: The bulk of his businesses have failed, and his net worth—which can only be estimated, because he never released his tax returns—would almost certainly have been higher had he never gone into real estate and casinos (and airlines and golf courses and universities and vodka) at all and just taken the money (about $40 million) he’d inherited from his father and invested it conservatively, Standard & Poorly, in mutual funds.
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THE MOST DANGEROUS RHETORICAL shift comes only now: It came earlier this morning, actually, when a man who’s spent the last year, if not the last few decades, bullying and lying stepped into the victory-speech spotlight, smirked into the cameras, and delivered a halting attempt at helium-pitched, hifalutinal prose-poetry—congratulating his rival (whom he’d threatened to jail as recently as yesterday), and avidly promising, as all successful candidates avidly promise, to be a president for “all Americans.” This magnanimity he displayed wasn’t sincere, or even pseudosincere—an actorly invocation of a stabilizing tradition. Instead, because it was so uncharacteristic, and yet so self-amused, it struck me as nothing more than gloating: Here was a man not only proud of his win, but also proud of what he thinks is his ability to conceal his pride, which he’s deluded enough to think he’s doing competently. Trump is a man who can be inclusive only in triumph, because inclusiveness can only increase that triumph—it can only increase him. After his remarks, the “normalization” commenced. Mainstream TV personalities (who in this election emerged as anything but mainstream: as fringe) piled on the praise, and speculated as to how the candidate might change once in office, or be changed by the office. Correction: not the candidate, the president-elect. Later in the day, with the markets holding steady, Clinton gave her concession speech, and Obama spoke too—just now. Everything is being done to restore some sense of national self-respect, some smidge of international dignity, in the face of a fascism of vanity, because a fascism without convictions.
FROM THE DIARIES
LECTURE REVIEW
“[…] no truer synthesis of anachronism and incongruity […]”
MEMOIR
The genre of an age that’s lost all hope of a biographer.
EXIT BERNIE
NEW YORK’S TOWN HALL IS a janky half-decrepit theater founded by suffragists in 1921, famous for hosting Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and, more recently, A Prairie Home Companion, coming to you live from the tourist-scrum of Midtown Manhattan. I was here in January 2016, to get talked at by Senator Bernie Sanders, democratic socialist, ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, former Vermont representative in the House, former mayor of Burlington, civil rights activist, husband, grandfather, Jew, and, at the time of this writing, contender for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
Settling into my seat, I was panicked. I’d received an email from the campaign’s communications staff indicating that today’s speech was going to be the senator’s yuge policy speech on the economy—a subject I’ve always found so abstract, so speculatively mad, determined by so many numbers and percentages and decimal points, bound by so many holding companies and corporate ties, that it seemed to hop, skip, and jump over the human and dwell instead amid the empyrean of the unmentionable, or at least undiscussable, alongside such topics as comparative eschatology and the relationship between free will and the godhead. To speak about the economy with any efficacy, or so as to provide any entertainment, the senator would have to take all the ugly, corrupt, almost animal malfeasance that lurks below the shiny machined surfaces of terminology like “mortgage-backed securities” and “predatory lending,” and breathe it into life, into lives, into real-seeming sagas of real people who’d been duped, indebted, and dispossessed—hardworking, American, etc., people who’d lost their savings, and lost their homes, in a tragic confrontation with a cipher.
And frankly, I didn’t think the senator had that in him. Sanders, at least the Sanders I’d been tuned to, cannot tell a story. Though he’s always invoking regular folks, he never names them, and in fact the only folks he ever names are far from regular and are entered into the record strictly for the purposes of citation, or indictment: politicians, military personnel, academics, business executives, and bankers. Sanders has none of (Bill) Clinton’s charm, and regardless of his reluctance to be a deficit spender, less than none of (Hillary) Clinton’s faux charm—that ability, or willingness, shared by Obama and even George W., to give a State of the Union in which the tale is told of a Mr. X who’d worked for X number of years at X type of job, only to get laid off when his employer moved to Mexico or China. And then suddenly, as if by magic, the camera pans to the balcony…and there’s Mr. X, beaming along with Mrs. X, and the X children, who have all miraculously benefited from Y and Z policies.
I hate that cornpone crap—but not like Sanders hates it. And his inability, or unwillingness, to crassify like that seems to derive from some deep inner trust in the logical, some sense that if a policy is honest and intelligent enough, it doesn’t need to be justified by a name or face—it doesn’t need to be sold to you. And while this might never be a feasible way to publicize a movie or TV show, let alone a novel or even a work of election journalism, just such an approach might be the only way to get a socialist elected to the presidency.
WHITE BALANCE
A lot of things have to happen to ensure the successful filming and broadcast of a major address: Electricity has to be adequate; coverage angles and obstructions must be negotiated. There are sound checks. And finally, once all that’s been put to bed, the last thing that has to be attended to goes by the wonderfully polysemic term “white balance.” Now, it’s important to remember not to trust everything we see, or hear, or read. Perception is relative, as the Sophists and Roger Ailes have always told us; observation skews. Color temperatures, or intensities, are never absolute, but depend on the device sensing them: the rods and cones of eyes, and cameras. This means that they have to be transformed, or, in film terms, “corrected,” into new intensities appropriate to the display medium—say, the sRGB computer monitor standard, or the HD of cable news. The color white, that reflector of light, is the simultaneous combination of all colors. This makes white the standard by which all other colors are judged. To “white balance” an image is to ensure that its white looks white. If that’s the case, then all the other colors will look like themselves too. This, at least in film, generally is reg
arded as positive.
A man mounted the stage, stood between five American flags and a podium, and held a slab of white card stock aloft. He yelled, “White balance.” The camera people, up on risers behind me, adjusted accordingly. Most of the camera people were white. The man holding the card stock was black. Most of the journalists and the volunteers stalking the aisles issuing hashtag instructions were white. The 1,500-member capacity audience included many people holding their own “white balance”-type signs, card stock scrawled with Sharpie proclaiming their debt, their dispossessions. They were a gender-balanced mix of white, black, Hispanic, South Asian, and Arab. They were waiting for a Jew.
DOING JEWISH
He just comes out, no-nonsense. His suit rumpled, his tie stupid. He barely acknowledges the applause. His hands are up and waving hello but in that don’t-make-a-fuss, don’t-get-up-on-my-account gesture. Sit down already, will you?! The clapping exists in another universe, inaccessible to him, like the laugh track on Seinfeld. Apropos of that Show About Nothing, it makes sense that the great Sanders impersonator has turned out to be Larry David: Sanders’s fellow Brooklynite, who, before he played the senator on Saturday Night Live, was a writer on the show who got only one skit produced and a stand-up comic who so notoriously feared and loathed audiences that he used to bail on club dates that were going poorly. Like David, Sanders is a man who came to the front of the camera reluctantly and who always somewhat resents it, or seems to. The front of the camera is where the idiocy lies.
Sanders is not a fluent speaker, and his formulations grate. His speech is barely paragraph-worthy, barely sentence-worthy; its closest model would be the text of a PowerPoint, delivered with a Yiddish krechts. It’s the speech of a Bernie or Bern, never a Bernard. This unrelenting seriousness is embodied by his hair, which is the same white, hot mess it always is and always will be. It’s not merely that Sanders is unconcerned with appearance, it’s that he’s consistently unconcerned, and that consistency reinforces the consistent emphases of his voice, which, in turn, reinforce the consistent phrases he voices. This is a man who doesn’t just stay “regular,” but stays “identical”; whose superficial shambles belie a formidable resolve. He has the fastidiousness of most post–New Deal alter kockers who lay out copies of the Daily News beneath them on the subway, to preserve their pants; he has the rhetorical range of a CPA who spends his lunch break counting heart pills or jelly beans. How many jelly beans, Bernie? Sixty jelly beans! And by the way, the six largest banks in this country, which “issue two-thirds of all credit cards and more than 35 percent of all mortgages,” also control “more than 95 percent of all financial derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits.” And if that’s not enough, try this: “Their assets are equivalent to nearly 60 percent of our GDP,” Bernie says. “Enough is enough,” and the crowd howls.
That last line is classic, in affect: the way he pronounces it with equal parts rage (“Enough”) and resignation (“is enough”). This is a man resigned to his rage, a put-upon, artless, gray-flannelized man whose single-minded fixation on domestic income inequality and financial reform is every bit as enervating and drudgey as it is practical and admirable.
This dichotomy is what makes Sanders fascinating, though it’s not why millions of people, not just Larry David, but millions of Larry Davids in kitchens throughout America, take pleasure in doing impressions of him, or in doing what I’m going to call ostensible, or displaced, impressions. Because despite any exactitude of gesture and phonation—the open-hanging mouth, the tongue thrust, the accent’s glides, the nonrhotics, the shrugging and grimacing, the peeved shaken fist and wag of the finger—the true thing being impersonated goes unsaid. Larry David does not “do” Bernie Sanders; Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers do not “do” Bernie Sanders; neither do they “do” “pregentrification Brooklyn,” nor do they “do” “old man.” Instead, what they “do,” and what they’re relishing “doing,” is “Jew,” and it’s been surprising to me that no one has had the Trumpian schlong to admit this, or to call anyone out on it. Jews know it, and none of them are offended, because Jews embrace Bernie for the same reason that everyone else does; they’re magnetized by one of the only things that America today seems to lack: genuine political conviction, founded in an authentic ethnic identity that can be read as white, but that isn’t racist.
THE RACIAL POLITICS OF YUGE
It’s become fairly clear, and I hope not just to me, that white people in this country have gone crazy. Granted, an apocalyptic belief in the final, definitive loss of four hundred or so years of economic and cultural supremacy will do that to you—the fall has been long in coming; masters of the universe should’ve been better prepared. Instead, they act stunned. And to cope with that loss, as well as to cope with the fearmongering of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, which promises them Muslim terrorists in every closet and under every bed, they—or an insanely significant cohort—seem to have given themselves over to the worst sort of race-baiting and antiimmigrant nativism, under the guise of making or keeping America “great,” which is to say, making or keeping America “white.”
What this requires, besides bigotry, is the valorization of a white identity that seems strong enough to counteract the deracinating and emasculating forces of capitalism and what bigots take to be the outrageous sense of entitlement, propensity for violence and crime, and the outsized sexual appetites, of Mexicans (by which they mean all Latinos) and blacks. What I’m talking about, of course, is Trumpism: a cult led by a racist, or a man who plays a racist on TV, who also revels in emphasizing his outtaborough tough-guy cred, though the truth is he’s neither a Belfast brawler nor a Neapolitan mafioso, but the rich-kid scion of a millionaire family of German descent from so far out and leafy in Queens that it’s basically Nassau County, Lawn Guyland. Still, he talks trash like a corner guy. A hood.
It stands to reason, then, that liberals become yugely pleased when they encounter a white liberal in whom they can deduce an equivalent or, honestly, more genuine and utterly sane version of that same authenticity. Sanders knows this, or at least his advisers do, and in the address produced for Town Hall they have advantaged this asset by interlarding slogans from the Occupy Wall Street Slogan Generator, verbal barrages in a style I can only call Aaron Sorkin joins the IRS, with myriad opportunities for Sanders to use, abuse, and redefine Trump’s favorite pet verbiage:
Wall Street executives still receive yuge compensation packages….Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments, making yuge profits….A handful of yuge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country….Unlike big banks, credit unions did not receive a yuge bailout….Wall Street makes yuge campaign contributions….
The substance of Sanders’s remarks is lost in these moments. All anyone hears is a yawp truer to the idealized New York street than Trump’s. Instead, what they hear is that word used negatively: With Sanders, huge is bad. Enormous bank, bad. Huge deficit, bad. The word has become so big that it must fail. A person in front of me—a black person—leans over to another black person and whispers the word in her ear. They turn to face each other and grin. This is nachas.
JEWISH POWER
Everything I’ve written so far is predicated on two assumptions I’m not sure I want to defend: One is that Jews in the American context both are and aren’t white people; the other is that I have some understanding of what Jewishness means, or is signified by, in the mind of Bernie Sanders, who was born on September 8, 1941—aka the day that Hitler began the disastrous encirclement of Leningrad—and who grew up in a three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled tenement apartment off Kings Highway, in Brooklyn, the second and youngest son of a Yiddish-speaking traveling paint-salesman father, who’d emigrated from Poland and lost most of his family to the Nazis, and of a first-generation American Jewish homemaker mother, who’d spen
t her childhood afflicted with rheumatic fever and who died during a heart operation at the age of forty-six.
To be sure, the senator himself, whose formal involvement with Judaism began with Hebrew school and a bar mitzvah in the ’50s and appears to have faded after a ’60s stint in Israel picking apples on a kibbutz, hardly wants to talk about that heritage. Neither in speeches, nor in interviews. When I ask about this reticence—not to Bernie directly, but his support staff—I get nothing, except the sense that about half the staff I’ve met is Jewish. Sanders’s 1997 memoir, Outsider in the House, mentions his Judaism only twice, once to characterize the ethnicity of his childhood neighborhood and once to characterize the ethnicity of his parents.
When Sanders was confronted with the evangelical Zionophiles of Liberty University, whom he addressed on Rosh Hashanah last year, he gave brief bland quotes pertaining to spiritual beliefs and to the social-welfare-and-justice philosophies of Judaism. However, more frequently, when pressed about his faith—or what he would do to combat Islamophobia, as he was at George Mason University a month later—he brings up the Holocaust, and the importance of elections, noting that Hitler was elected, after all. Neither of those approaches holds much meaning for American Jews, who, like most Americans, are more concerned with this country’s ghettos, and the concentration camps it’s running in Guantanamo Bay and on the Mexican border, than with rehashing any foreign martyrdom. To date, Sanders’s most public, but also most parlous, statements on his own Semitism occurred in the first two of his two-person debates with Hillary. In early February, in Durham, New Hampshire, he delivered what was received as an atypically personal closing statement that referred to his father as a Polish (i.e., not a Jewish) immigrant, a descriptor that the Nazis, to say nothing of coeval Poles, would have disputed. A couple of weeks later, at another debate in Milwaukee, Sanders was asked whether he was worried about becoming “the instrument of thwarting history” (Hillary’s ponderous, self-thwarting, self-fulfilling prophecy-phrase), by postponing the election of America’s first female president. Sanders responded: “From a historical point of view, somebody with my background, somebody with my views, somebody who has spent his entire life taking on the big money interests, I think a Sanders victory would be of some historical accomplishment as well.”