Elizabeth Warren, scrappy pit-bull for justice: a love story

(it’s all about electability, people)



I’M A CANADIAN WHO TAKES A KEEN interest in American politics, out of necessity (q.v. “in bed with an elephant,” the phrase coined by Pierre Trudeau, father of Justin, back in the day when Trudeaux — is that the plural? We’ll say it is — still had some clout and even left the house occasionally), and also out of the natural human fascination with fresh train wrecks.

I was in awe of Elizabeth Warren at first sight, as she vilified, to their faces and on live Internet feeds, the big little boys of Wall Street. It was a messy, unpleasant, but essential series of interventions, and as I watched I felt the same kind of sick thrill I felt when I discovered that the source of the nasty smell in my apartment was a pound of ground beef my roommate had hidden in his closet, then forgotten about.

(Sometimes the stench of evil is so pervasive, and the modus operandi so bizarre, you have to become habituated just to save the day and summon up the courage to carry on. “Doesn’t everyone keep a stash of ground beef in their closet? No — ?”)

But my heavenly mind-marriage with Liz was consummated on the day, sometime back in the Golden Era, the misty, nostalgia-glazed Arcadia that was pre-November 2016, when she declared Trump

 a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud...

In normal circumstances, whatever those look like and if there even is such a beast anymore, Warren would justifiably be accused of making an ad hominem attack. But these are tryin’ times, oh yeah, and in making this statement she’d laced up her boxing gloves and stepped into the ring, having simply revealed herself as a shrewd judge of character with a refreshing lack of inhibition.

With a presidential candidate who had exactly zero qualifications for the job, in fact, negative qualifications that actively screamed about how completely unsuited he was to be President — six times bankrupt, business fraudster, classic misogynist (and, it would be revealed, sexual predator), white nationalist, lack of any experience whatsoever in any government role and lack of understanding that he was not going to be running a business but making decisions in the public interest — with his qualifications hovering at around minus thirty-eight, what was there to work with except his character (assuming that having no character is, in itself, a kind of character)?

Warren has a passion for justice, the zeal of the convert (as a young woman she was, by her own description, fiercely conservative), a lawyer’s ability to summarize evidence and build a convincing argument, and a constructive, righteous anger that makes her speeches electrifying.

And she is focusing on an issue — the financial terrorism perpetrated by the cowboys of high finance on regular, middle-class Americans — that the 99% (that’s us) can understand, and that avoids the trigger topics of religion / sex / gender / race (not that those issues aren’t of primary importance, but we’re talking electability. Let’s save the polarizing arguments for when we’re all tucked up safely in bed).

If there’s one thing the Dems need, it’s focus. Oh, Minerva! Focus, and a compelling, unifying narrative. They’ve been stuck, for what seems an eternity but is probably just decades, in a reactive position, always limited by the intellectual boundaries imposed by an increasingly illiberal and intolerant right, or hampered by internal disagreements and the self-serving machinations of narcissistic old men (a.k.a. Bernie Sanders, The Great Spoiler).

(And what irony that, in his insistence that his way was the only way, all or nothing — offering the total Scandinavian Social Democratic smorgasbord with lingonberry sauce to a population that goes apoplectic at the mere thought of universal health care — Sanders showed himself to be just as intolerant and polarizing as the buffoon he more or less single-handedly put in office.)

Every time Warren explains, » as in this article on Medium, the blunt, ad hoc strategies of the financial sector, those make it up as you go along cash grabs they’ve tried to convince us are the arcane, untouchable workings-out of eternal laws, I find myself gobsmacked anew by how much Washington is in thrall to Wall Street, up to its withers in dirty money and daily, normalized corruption.

And I’m mystified by how much America, self-proclaimed land of prosperity and opportunity for all, regardless of origins, seems to have bought the neoliberal economic horse droppings of that other obnoxious bargain-basement Messiah, Milton Friedman, Mr. Trickle-Down.

The problem is one of heuristics, those mental short-cuts that enable us to make snap decisions without starting every dilemma with Adam and Eve and working forward. What is most available in our minds becomes our preferred solution and availability is determined by how often we have it pounded into our brains. That’s why marketing is a never ending competition to be the most salient brand, what advertisers call “top of mind.”

What do we have available? For years now we’ve heard the mantras of small government, de-regulation, austerity, and the dire warnings about socialism (forever associated in people’s minds with autocratic communist regimes such as Soviet Russia, in actuality a form of state capitalism). We’ve absorbed the sneering pejoratives “PC”, snowflake, libtard, social justice warrior, so thoroughly that many progressives themselves, suffering from insidious Stockholm syndrome, begin to babble about the terrible chilling effect on freedom of speech caused by the use of respectful language towards minorities.

The relentless focus of the right wing has caught progressives sleeping, and cast us as the villains of their narrative. What we’ve been missing is our own narrative and a voice as passionate for economic and social justice and inclusiveness as conservative voices have been for the status quo and status quo ante.

Elizabeth Warren has spun a personal and political narrative that reeks of common sense, and in a voice that means business; it’s your mother about to scrub your face really, really hard with a rough, damp face cloth. It’s a voice even grown men can’t discount. The only comparable voice I can think of is that of Maxine Waters. Hail to the Giga Moms!

Ms. Warren, you are the scrappy pit-bull of justice and may your bite be as sharp as your bark; you are the middle class’s fierce Emmeline Pankhurst, hurling rocks at the tinted privacy glass of the elite’s limos; you are the liberal pundit’s unlikely seventy-year-old pin-up girl. You are sublime.

If you don’t get the nomination, I think I will lose hope — not for Americans, never for Americans, but for America.


THE YouTube-IVERSE IS ALREADY BEATIFYING Sanders, Mr. Me-or-Nothing, and excoriating Warren as being in the pockets of “the Establishment.”

Now, I ask you. Why would Liz be courted and artificially pumped up and promoted by the very establishment she is hell-bent on taming and regulating? Does this make sense to you? Of course it doesn’t!

“Why is Joe Biden in first place?” asks one confused lady.

Umm, because he’s an old, white male. Next question? Old white males gotta run, gotta sing, gotta dance. Old white males are the flavor of the past, and the past — when men were men, women were seen, whistled at, slapped, pinched, tickled, assaulted and condescended to but not heard, people of color knew their place, and The Gays were thankfully invisible — is Shangri-La, the lost Promised Land.

Joe’s a Regular Guy, having already played the warm-hearted doofus to Obama’s patrician straight man, in an uncomfortable role-reversal: Now Obama was the plantation owner and Joe, in white face, the comic field hand and simple light relief. Joe was suitably butch enough to counterbalance Obama’s ever-so-slightly-gay reserve, intellectualism and faint yet unmistakable ever-present air of fastidious distaste at having descended to the earthly plane.

Joe’s still at it: Fondling women, making inappropriate remarks about women, and wondering where the good old days have gone where a man wasn’t called on the carpet for every little off-color joke or well-meant love pat, however undesired.

Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of history much of the time: he was for the Defense of Marriage Act, for banning LGBTQ in the military; subsequent reversals notwithstanding; for capital punishment and increasing capital offenses; for abortion partial bans and the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funds going to providing abortion.

Is this really the antidote to Trump?

And Sanders! Sweet mother of Liza! Sanders single-handedly handed the U.S. four years of Trump because his ego kept him hanging on, incensed that Hillary was touted as the more attractive option. Too late he told his followers to back Hillary, in a passive-aggressive, thinly veiled plea for loyalty to him and him alone, voiced as a plea for party unity — but with oh so much patent insincerity. It’s like his mom told him to stop being so mean to the mentally-challenged girl who wrote him mash notes and kept trying to hold his hand after class.

Guess what? Misogyny rears its tired old, white, male head. And it’s feeling uncomfortably like the beginnings of déjà vu all over again.

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5 thoughts on “Elizabeth Warren, scrappy pit-bull for justice: a love story

  1. This is a tightly written piece and I see nary a blemish in it. I am going to openly share with another friend on Facebook and real life who, when he is not divining astrological charts, is a sharp commentator on the politics of his native Yankee soil. His name is Richard Geer (not the actor who spells his name Gere but apparently they may be related nonetheless).

    1. Share away! And I eat my words about Biden: He’s risen to the job, grown into the role and turns out to have been a closet progressive all along. So, I was wrong. You have to forgive the knots people tied themselves into in the past when they had to compromise, and judge them by what they do now (politicians, I mean. I’ll never forgive a guy who dumped me for someone with money, even if he turned the United States into a permanent branch of IKEA – pass the health care with lingonberry preserves, will ya?!).

  2. Re Warren, I can think of no one more qualified but sadly I do not think she will appeal to the voting public. She should align with one of the candidates likely to win (Biden?) and would make a terrific Secretary of the Interior

    1. Biden, UGH. Biden is more like a centre-right Republican than a Democrat, especially in view of his stance on the various issues above. I hate to think the States would settle for such a backwards-looking move.

      I’m not so sure about Warren’s lack of appeal. I think her MESSAGE is appealing, which is what is important. Isn’t it? And it’s largely a story of little man vs. evil giant (corporations, financial sector, corruption), which always plays well. I think if she doesn’t get the nomination or win, it’s because she’s a woman.

  3. Brilliant analysis!

    Oh, and I had a bulimic and alcoholic roommate who would horde food in his room, including a package of opened wieners that were rotting in a drawer. Yuck!

    F

    On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 9:16 AM A Slow, Painful Death Would Be Too Good For You (and other observations) wrote:

    > David Roddis posted: ” it’s all about electability I’m a Canadian who > takes a keen interest in American politics, out of necessity (q.v. “in bed > with an elephant”), and out of the natural human fascination with fresh > train wrecks. I was in awe of Warren at first sigh” >

Tell us what you think. Keep it civil, yet interesting.