Rules of Resistance

by I. M. Hunt-Logan

  “He did say that, to a blond reporter on CNN,” says Darryl.

  “Hmmm. Perhaps your memory’s not as good as you think. But even assuming he said that, why would you believe that? Why did you believe that you aren’t required to have tree-falling insurance, and the insurer has to cover you, even if you already have a fallen tree? Nobody would pay any premiums in advance of trees falling. Why would they? They can just pay when a tree actually falls. When the big storm happens, the single person wants the insurer to give them insurance and to cover the cost of the house repair. But what does the insurer have to charge the person to stay in this business? More than $10,000, that’s for sure. The cost of the house repairs, $10,000, plus the cost of doing business, plus their profit margin, so just for argument, let’s say, $15,000.”

  Corey raises a hand, palm out like a crossing guard. “‘But wait,’ you say. ‘Why would the person want to pay $15,000 for $10,000 in repairs?’”

  He drops his hand and pops another Dorito in his mouth, then continues talking with his mouth full.

  “Good question, Darryl. Honestly, I cannot imagine why. Maybe you were thinking the insurer should just charge the person the $50 premium. So here’s a question for you. Why would the insurer be willing to cover $10,000 in repairs for a $50 premium?”

  A hot, red flush creeps up Darryl’s neck. He doesn’t have an answer and the silence drags out.

  At his best, Corey’s riffs are a tad subversive, anarchic. They straddle liberating and uncomfortable. Corey’s humor, his entertainment value, lies in the space where funny cohabits with snarky. This is different. At least this unpleasant little lesson appears to have reached its conclusion.

  But Corey has other ideas. “Okay, so back to the original question: what do you have to believe, Darryl, to believe DJT can get rid of the requirement that everyone have coverage but keep the pre-existing condition protection? Darryl?”

  “Donald Trump is a successful businessman,” says Darryl.

  Corey ignores Darryl’s attempt to change the rules of engagement from arithmetic to expertise, from personal responsibility to trust. Corey continues as if Darryl hadn’t spoken. “Maybe . . . that global warming is a Chinese conspiracy? Is that what you believe, Darryl?”

  Darryl glares at Corey. “Trump is a billionaire.”

  Corey has left the intersection of funny and snarky far behind; he’s moved purposefully into pulling the wings off insects—deliberately unkind territory.

  “Actually, no,” says Corey. “Global warming being a Chinese conspiracy does not solve the insurance problem. The problem is one of arithmetic: the premiums need to add to a number larger than or equal to the cost of providing health care.”

  It’s past time to intervene. “Corey, I think you’ve made your point—”

  Corey raises a palm to me. “Just a sec, Isaiah, I’m just getting to the good part. So, Darryl, if global warming isn’t the answer, what do you think it is? Maybe . . . it’s arithmetic that is a Chinese conspiracy!”

  Darryl is silent. I wonder if on some level he knows his ‘trust expertise’ argument flies in the face of the working man’s creed of self-reliance and personal responsibility, knows that even with a rule change, he cannot win this argument. Corey is right and reveling sadistically in it.

  I try again. “Corey, c’mon, man.”

  “Stop interrupting this free exchange of ideas, Iz. I’m nearly at the punchline. Arithmetic being a conspiracy does sort of solve the problem. If arithmetic doesn’t work, then the premiums collected by the insurer don’t have to ‘add’”—here Corey provides exaggerated air quotes with his fingers—“to a number larger than or equal to the cost of providing health care.

  “So is that what you believe, Darryl? That arithmetic is a Chinese conspiracy? Darryl?”

  “No,” Darryl grinds out between gritted teeth.

  “Well, I guess there is another possibility. Maybe the problem is simply that you, Darryl Gniewek, can’t do simple arithmetic. Can you add and subtract, Darryl?”

  “Corey, cut it out. It’s not like Darryl’s a health economist.”

  “I didn’t ask Darryl if he was an economist, Isaiah. I asked if he could add and subtract. Are you concerned that Darryl can’t add and subtract?”

  “Corey—”

  “I’m asking Darryl, Isaiah. Stop interrupting. Darryl, how about it? Add, subtract? How about multiply and divide?”

  “Yes,” hisses Darryl.

  “Then I guess there’s only one other possibility, Darryl. Maybe you didn’t really believe that we could get rid of the individual mandate and keep pre-existing conditions, like your dad’s dependence on drugs. Now why would you do that to your dad, Darryl?”

  “Jesus, Corey! The man’s father is in a bad way. Do you have to be such a shit?”

  Corey balls up the empty Doritos bag, tosses it in a wastebasket. “Christ, where’s the personal responsibility? Stop blaming DJT for your own shortcomings.”

  I grab Darryl by the arm and shove him in front of me into my office. “C’mon, Darryl, let’s see if we can find another treatment program for your dad.”

  It takes a couple hours for us to research treatment facilities in the greater Toledo area and to send inquiries to half a dozen of them. Luckily, by the time we’re done, Corey has departed for the day. I ask Darryl if he wants to go for a beer and am relieved when he turns me down. The last thing I want to do is rehash the ugly arithmetic conversation.

  Listening to Corey’s riffs and lectures on the Republican base, I assumed the snark was posturing, for humor and to show how un-PC, how transgressive, he could be. Basically, I thought it was an act.

  But watching him savage Darryl, it appeared that he holds Darryl and the base in utter contempt. A lot of op-ed space has been devoted to how lefty elites talk down to Trump voters. That is nothing compared to the way this Republican strategist treated this Trump voter. As if his pain was not cause for compassion, but for derision.

  Where does this come from? It’s hard not to see it filtered through the prism of the Upper East Side/Choate revelation. Corey is a guy who grew up wealthy, modeled himself after a high school working-class hero, but now expresses contempt for the working class. Maybe pretending to be working-class was a way not to cop to his privilege, and maybe he got tired of getting shit about his privilege? Maybe the working-class hero had feet of clay, or was a bully? Whatever the story is, the whole thing reeks of self-loathing.

  25

  Manliness Makes the Man Job

  Friday, October 5th, 32 days until the midterms

  Corey’s nasty little performance last week is making me rethink how long I want to work with this guy. I need to step up my effort to understand Trump’s jobs message. It’s not clear I could craft an effective RAPAC jobs message, but I’m sure Imogen and the rest of the Delgado crew would find a way to use my opposition research.

  Armed with Corey’s list of jobs, I look for data on which sectors are driving employment in Modesto. I don’t find any of Corey’s preferred jobs. According to the bureau of labor statistics, the top four employment categories are farm (22 percent); trade, transport, and utilities (17 percent); education and health (14 percent); and government (13 percent). Everything else is a single digit percentage.

  I think ‘farm’ might be promising. Farming means working the land, right? Think of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. You know the one: old bald guy with glasses in a black jacket, collarless shirt, and overalls, holding a pitchfork. His dowdy wife with her pale hair pulled back in a bun. Those people were white.

  Corey says, “No, no, no. ‘Farm’ means Hispanic farm workers. If they vote at all, seven out of ten will vote Democratic. Let me see your stats.”

  Corey peruses the list while picking at his teeth with a toothpick. Who does that in public?

  “Well, obviously, government is bad, so that’s a no go. Education and health? That’s grade school teachers and home health aides. Can you say pink-collar?”

>   As if growing the economy and creating jobs isn’t hard enough, Corey has just ruled out two-thirds of the employment opportunities in the county for reasons that amount to ‘too pink’ or ‘too brown.’ Is this inanity the sum total of his thinking on jobs? Am I really paying this guy $300 an hour?

  “But health care is one of the only categories of employment that’s growing. We might actually be able to deliver health care jobs.”

  I want to bite my own tongue off for using the word ‘but,’ like I’m pleading with this asshole.

  Corey looks at me as if I’m remedial, a little salt for my wound.

  “Iz, working-class white men do not want health care jobs. Well, at least not the jobs that are available to them. If they could be brain surgeons, sure. But they don’t want to be physician’s assistants.”

  “Why not? Entry-level physician’s assistants jobs pay around $45K. That’s three times the minimum wage.”

  “Christ, Iz, you’re such a fucking metrosexual. And you know why? Because you can afford to be. Nobody’s asking you to take a pink-collar job. To working class men, those jobs are women’s work. They’re support positions, without the possibility of promotion to the top position. They’d require a man to be nurturing, to communicate.” Corey sneers when he says the words ‘nurturing’ and ‘communicate,’ like they’re distasteful. “Asking them to take health care jobs, it’s condescending and, worse, emasculating.”

  Corey calling me ‘Iz’ is working my nerves. Of course, everyone calls me ‘Iz,’ and Corey’s been calling me Iz for a couple months. So I guess it’s simply that Corey is working my nerves.

  “You’re saying a guy would rather take a job making half as much in a hardware store just because tools are manly? That’s ridiculous. You think voters don’t get that $45,000 is more money than $20,000?”

  Did Corey never take an economics class? I would say that it’s like we speak different languages, but it’s not that innocent. I’m starting to see that every conversation with Corey is a competition or contest. He scores each one, and each conversation is an opportunity for him to win. And winning in Corey’s world only means something if someone else loses. Corey’s manipulation of language, his straw men, his red herrings—they are all ways he changes the rules to ensure that Corey wins and you lose.

  Now Corey says, “Money’s not everything.”

  He gets up, goes to the door, opens it, and yells into the bullpen, “Darryl!”

  Wary, Darryl comes to the door. “Yeah?”

  “How much do you make as a welder? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Corey’s tone is casual, conversational. Like last week’s arithmetic conversation never happened, like we’re all buddies. It’s giving me a bit of emotional whiplash; I can’t imagine what it’s doing for Darryl.

  Darryl stares at him for a second, then says, “About 80K.”

  “And Kathy, how much does Kathy make?”

  Darryl pauses again, says, “About the same.”

  “If Kathy made twice as much as you, would you become a physician’s assistant?”

  Darryl inhales, holds it, then answers, “Yeah, I don’t think so. It’s not really my kind of job, I’d have to go back to school . . .” His voice trails off.

  “Thanks, Darryl,” says Corey, by which he means ‘Leave now.’

  Darryl barely manages to step back before Corey shuts the door in his face. Corey turns back to me with a smug look on his face.

  “Darryl’s just one person—he’s essentially a case study,” I say. “It’s not as if he speaks for all Trump voters.”

  (Believe me, I recognize this is hypocritical. I know I’ve been treating Darryl as if he is the key to understanding all O-O-T voters. But I’m not giving Corey any easy wins.)

  “You’re not a natural at politics, Iz,” Corey says. “If you weren’t paying me, I’d say it’s time for you to fuck off. But you are paying me. So this is what I want you to do, I want you to picture yourself at a bar, sidling up to a hot, leggy blond. She asks what you do for a living. Do you really want to say, ‘physician’s assistant’?”

  Shit.

  I really, really hate to say this, but based on my not-trivial experience, Corey may have a point here. When picking up women at bars, if they don’t shut you down outright, they inevitably ask what you do for a living. I generally have a lot of success with start-up finance. (Entrepreneur sounds too much like I’m stroking myself.) I wonder how that would change if I said physician’s assistant instead. I can’t imagine it would improve my stats.

  I try to come up with an objection or counter argument that won’t be the equivalent of “No, you’re the baby!” I try and I fail. Because Economics 101’s claim that money is fungible, that one dollar is the same as any other dollar, just shows that Economics 101 knows squat about the sexual marketplace. Start-up finance dollars, or welder dollars, are worth more than physician’s assistant dollars to the straight male in the sexual marketplace, period.

  Corey is so confident he’s made his case that he doesn’t wait for my response. He returns to my jobs data. “Pretty slim pickings. Hate to tell ya, but you’re gonna end up with the Village People.”

  “The Village People?”

  “The Village People, as in ‘YMCA.’ It’s shorthand. Soldier, construction worker, cowboy, cop. Obviously, you skip the Indian and the biker.”

  He ticks off the members of the band on his right hand as he says them. Jesus. Where is he headed now?

  I say, flatly, “The Village People were a disco band, a gay disco band. The characters were gay fantasies.”

  “I know who the Village People were, Iz. I’m the one who brought them up. They’re icons of manliness.”

  “You’re saying struggling working-class white men want to be the objects of gay fantasies?”

  “Are you being a willfully ignorant little shit, Isaiah? The Village People were just imitating the country as a whole. America, through movies and ads and novels and comic books, anointed these jobs as the icons, the personifications of American Masculinity. Elites like you may be trying to move the goalposts on masculinity, with your skinny jeans and tailored shirts. But the Village People are about as sophisticated as our target voter’s thinking gets when he thinks about what it means to be a man.”

  “Oh, that’s not condescending.”

  “You want tax cuts for the one percent, Isaiah? You want less regulation on your hotshot start-ups in Silicon Valley? This is how the sausage gets made. Rural and suburban whites without college degrees want man-talk and white-talk and a Christian God ordaining white-man-on-top. Centrality in the narrative. But don’t worry. Be happy, Iz. Because you know what a narrative is? It’s just talk, and that’s cheap.”

  That’s more than enough Corey for me.

  I clear out and head home for a run to clear my head. My thought exercise is not going well. As much as I hate it when Corey is right about anything, I can’t find a flaw in his argument about why working-class men don’t find health care jobs attractive. If Corey is right, the jobs message has to be more than white; it has to be a caricature of masculinity as well. It does not have to promise jobs that are actually deliverable. In fact, it can be so far divorced from economic realities that it is simply a fantasy.

  Why did that work for Republicans? What would it mean if Democrats did it?

  26

  Endangered Species 2

  Monday, October 8th, 29 days until the midterms

  The billboard has been updated. Still all black and white, the SWM logo has been demoted to the lower right-hand corner. Now the bulk of the billboard is filled with pictures of hats. A camouflaged army helmet, the classic policeman’s hat, a fireman’s helmet, etc. And beneath the hats, this text: “White men put themselves on the line for us each and every day. But who will Save the White Man?”

  What is the point of these billboards? If these folks are trying to recruit for their white supremacist group or anything remotely political, then I think it�
�s time SWM got themselves their own sleazy consultant.

  The billboard feels like a bit of a rip-off of RAPAC’s Dangerous World spot. I don’t see how sounding derivative helps SWM. Also, this ad actually comes out and says ‘white.’ No symbolism, just serving race up on a tray. Given that Dangerous World triggered the libs without actually saying ‘white,’ this seems a little reckless.

  And what’s with having to ‘save’ the white man? ‘Save’ doesn’t feel like a good word choice; it makes white men sound in need of saving—i.e., weak. Also, does the ‘who’ suggest somebody besides white men will save white men? This sounds tone deaf to me, a violation of Corey’s white man’s centrality in the narrative.

  I can’t tell whether this helps or hurts Mike Reed. Echoing the Dangerous World message will reinforce the message. Then there’s the association with white supremacists, which further reinforces the message. But probably it doesn’t matter. It’s just one billboard, after all, in a district that encompasses all of Stanislaus County and some of San Joaquin County.

  27

  War on Women

  Thursday, October 11th, 26 days until the midterms

  Latest poll: Reed (R) 48%, Delgado (D) 38%, Undecided 14%

  LA Times/USC poll, conducted Oct 7–9, 2018

  The RAPAC coffee is not optimal. Staring at the pot, smelling its thin, acrid smell, I am not at all tempted to have a cup. But I am really jonesing for some caffeine. Maybe I should steal the espresso machine from the apartment and bring it to the office. There are three of us at the office who would use it. All day long. As opposed to just one Imogen, first thing in the morning.

  “Iz, you gotta see this!”

  Now that we’re about a month from the election, Darryl has started coming into the office in the evenings if I’m around. The urgency in Darryl’s voice is unmistakable. I hustle from the break room into the bullpen. As I approach, Darryl turns back to his computer and starts the YouTube video he has queued up, titled “Congressman Reed Schooled in Sex Ed.” The time stamp, 8:36 p.m., suggests this is hot off the presses.