“You’re not slumming, are you, Iz? With Charlene? She’s not exactly your usual careerist ice-maiden.”
Careerist ice-maiden? I do a mental inventory while I watch Imogen dice celery on the big kitchen island. It’s nice to be back in Woodside. Imogen’s making a Bolognese and the onions are already sizzling away on the stove top, the air thick with their lush, sulfur-tinged bouquet. I fail to come up with a convincing counter example.
“That’s pretty rich, coming from a woman who seems to be making it her mission in life to work her way through the Bay Area’s bartenders.”
“Ooh, snap!” She concedes the point, laughing. “All I’m trying to say is, don’t create unrealistic expectations, okay? Those folks’ lives will go on after we’re back here in the Bay Area for good.”
“Charlene’s not expecting a little blue ring box from Tiffany, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She tips the celery into the pot and gives it a quick stir, then fishes around in a kitchen drawer for a bit before coming up with a vegetable peeler for the carrots.
“Just out of curiosity, have you ever dated a woman who wasn’t Caucasian?”
She pauses in stripping thin orange ribbons off the carrots into the compost bin to meet my gaze.
“Why do you have to make everything about race? It’s like with Darryl and O-O-T voters generally. You can’t see anything but race driving their votes. The entirety of human history cannot be about race.”
“It’s not all about race!” Imogen looks surprised.
Is it possible this is a misunderstanding? That she’s just encouraging me not to ignore the shadows cast by the difficult history of race in America, or something wordy but benign like that?
“More of it is about gender!” she says.
Christ. So much for benign.
“Gender bias is a lot more intractable than racism! Don’t forget that African American men got the vote fifty years before women got the vote in America.”
If I’m not careful, this is going to turn into another one of Imogen’s salacious lectures that could go under the header Bad Things White Men Have Done in History.
“I don’t know why you find it so difficult to accept that Darryl could have had a lot of reasons not to be excited about Hillary Clinton, and a lot of reasons to vote for Donald Trump, besides racism and sexism, Imogen.”
“And I don’t know why you feel the need to defend this guy, Isaiah. Sure, Hillary Clinton wasn’t a perfect candidate. Who is? Was the lecherous Bill Clinton a perfect candidate? How about Joe Biden, with his brilliant performance crapping on Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings? It seems that the only candidate we require to be perfect is the first major party female candidate for the presidency. And letting that determine your vote? That’s sexism. I mean, look at you. You’re hardly the world’s biggest feminist, but you recognized she was the most qualified candidate—you pulled the lever for Hillary.”
In the nearly two years since the 2016 presidential election, my vote has never come up, not directly. I stare at her. I can’t let this moment pass, can’t let her assume I voted for Clinton any longer. Before this moment there was a gray area. After this moment, it will be a lie.
“I didn’t vote for Clinton. I voted for Stein.”
My voice sounds strange in my own ears. Maybe it sounds strange to her, too, because she doesn’t say anything. She stares at me, like she doesn’t recognize me. In the silence, I can hear the staccato chirps of a lone bird in the backyard.
“Jill Stein, the Green Candidate,” I say, inanely, because she’s still not saying anything.
“I know who Jill Stein is. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I didn’t expect Trump to win. When Trump won, well, it cast the whole protest vote in a different light.”
“I’ll say.”
She stares at me for a moment longer, her eyes ranging over my face, searching for something. Then she turns back to the chopping board. Brow furrowed, eyes a little red, teeth sunk into her upper lip, she starts dicing away.
I’ve been dreading this conversation for nearly two years, and all Imogen has to say is ‘I’ll say.’
Maybe it’s not surprising in a family with half a dozen racial contributions (that we know of) that there was a big focus on race. Our mom used to say, ‘White man is racist until proven innocent.’ That sounds an awful lot like an injunction to white profiling to me. Hank and Irene Whitman were white, and though they had their quirks and their blind spots, they spent every day trying to be decent and loving people. They were always very good to me. By the time I was in college, I had decided not to live a life defined by race. To all appearances, Imogen appeared to be moving in the other direction. She stopped getting her hair straightened, she joined the Asian and African American Students Unions, etc.
We didn’t discuss Mom’s attitude towards whites explicitly until Obama became president. The conversation was lit with the afterglow of the election of the nation’s first mixed-race president. Imogen may have recalled Mom’s admonitions a little differently, but it was easy for both of us to interpret Mom’s attitude as the product of another, more difficult time and much more difficult circumstances. We found ourselves in luxurious agreement.
Donald Trump’s election has upset that agreement. Imogen views the fact that 63 percent of white men voted for Trump (and 73 percent of non–college educated white men) as vindication of Mom’s paranoia. But there were myriad other possible reasons people could have had for their votes, many of them expressed in exit polls. And if you look at the exit polls, what you see is security, the economy, jobs. What you do not see is voters saying, “He’s a racist? Sign me up!”
But once Imogen has jumped to a conclusion, there’s no bringing her back. Like the trouble with Mike, her boss at Kaplan and Stone. It started with his making some comment like ‘my wife’s away for the weekend.’ She said he was trying to bend her over, literally, sexually. But, obviously, those words could have had an innocent meaning. For example, that his wife would be away for the weekend. The guy could have been just making conversation. It’s true that other, non-ambiguous bad stuff happened later. But a guy saying ‘my wife’s away for the weekend’ is not cause for the death penalty.
Do I think Donald Trump is a racist? Hell yes! And to anyone who claims Trump’s not, I’d ask, what does racism look like to you? Do you think a man has to be wearing a white hood and out burning crosses to be a racist? Check the calendar; it is not 1963 and that dog won’t hunt. But voting for Trump is not the same as endorsing everything Trump says or does. A vote is never a blanket endorsement.
I know Darryl Gniewek. He’s a decent guy. He deserves to be taken at his word: he was concerned about jobs. He’s expressed a lot of concern about his dad’s Social Security, his health care. Perhaps Darryl’s a bit of a populist. None of this makes him a racist.
Like Darryl, I deserve to be taken at my word: my vote for Stein was motivated by my environmental concerns and my concerns about Hillary Clinton—not about her gender, but her character, as evidenced by her equivocations and flip-flops on a fair number of issues and her attacks on her husband’s accusers. And, again, none of this makes me a misogynist.
36
No Santa Claus
Wednesday, October 17th, 20 days until the midterms
“America’s middle has been outperforming the coasts for decades . . . [C]ounties in the Plains states and the resource-rich middle of the country have enjoyed some of the largest per capita income gains in the entire country . . . [F]rom 2000 to 2016 . . . white men left behind by a changing economy . . . still enjoy vast advantages over blue-collar black and female workers.”
Evan Horowitz, “Where Blue-Collar America Is Strongest,” FiveThirtyEight.com, April 12, 2018.33
“Have you figured out how you’re gonna spend your tax cut yet? The average American is getting an extra $780 back. That’s a whole $65 a month, an extra $33 in each and every paycheck.34 And you kno
w what? The majority claim they don’t see a difference in their paychecks.35 Fucking ingrates. But you, you must be getting tens of thousands back. How much has the Great DJT gifted you with his tax cut, Iz? Thirty thousand?”
I hate meetings with Corey.
“Corey—”
“More, huh? Fifty thousand?”
Corey is way off, but there is no way I’m going to tell him. Trump’s morally indefensible Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which will balloon the annual deficit to over a trillion by 2020,36 necessitating steep cuts in, you guessed it, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, went a long way towards funding the little scam I named RAPAC.
“Corey! Can you focus, please? We’re here to talk about jobs. Why did it work?”
I hate asking Corey for input. For anything, really.
“Why did what work?” asks Corey.
“Why did Trump’s job message work? I’m not talking about the Republican base. I’m asking, why did it swing the Obama voter into the Trump column? The economy has added jobs, but not any faster than it was already adding jobs. The mining jobs haven’t come back and won’t come back. The Carrier workers he made such a big deal about saving—which cost Indiana $7 million—mostly got laid off anyway. Why does it continue to work? Why do Trump voters continue to support him?”
“It wasn’t about jobs,” says Corey. “It was never about jobs.”
Christ, it’s like pulling teeth. It’s like he’s trying not to tell me.
“I’m not talking about Klansmen or David Duke followers. I’m talking Obama to Trump voters, like Darryl. For them, it was about jobs. In exit polls, they said it was about jobs.”
Corey wriggles his bulk around in the office chair and gets a little nail clipper out.
“You know what the unemployment rate was when Trump got elected? Nationwide, it was under 5 percent. The lowest it’s been since before the 2008 crash. If you look at counties that swung from Obama to Trump—say look at Howard County, Iowa, a county that swung from 20 points for Obama to 20 points for Trump, a 40-point swing—what did it look like there?”
Corey is actually clipping his nails. In my office. Letting the clippings drop on my carpet.
“The county is 98 percent white, and only 13 percent of residents over twenty-five have college degrees. The month before the election, the county had 2.9 percent unemployment.37 Two point nine percent. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t have jobs.”
I grit my teeth. “So it was about good jobs, about middle-class jobs? People had jobs but they weren’t making enough?”
“People can never make too much,” Corey allows. Then he smiles at the irritation I can’t hide as he slides the clipper back into a pocket. “But Trump voters were making more than the national average, and more than Hillary voters. The median household income for Trump voters was $72,000—for Clinton voters it was $61,000. Only 12 percent of Trump voters had incomes below $30,000, compared with 20 percent of Clinton voters and 27 percent of American households overall.”
“Darryl said it was about jobs,” I say, enunciating clearly. Maybe I should fire Corey here and now and get some other sleazy political consultant for the last couple weeks of the campaign.
“It was never about jobs. It’s time to grow up, Iz. There is no Santa Claus, and people don’t always tell the truth. Mostly, people just give the answer they think they’re supposed to give. They don’t even think about it. The crux of the jobs message is to give them a cover story, a reason they can say without embarrassment in polite company, all the while speaking to their real reasons without them knowing.”
Does this add up? Unemployment is low. Trump voters are doing better than Clinton voters and the nation on average. Not even West Virginians think mining jobs are coming back. Christ, can it really all be about race?
“So what about entitlements?” I ask. “Darryl says he believed Trump when he said he’d fix Social Security and Medicare. Are you saying Darryl doesn’t care about entitlements? That he’s lying about that too?”
“Oh, Darryl definitely cares about entitlements. Most Republicans do.”
The brown-chicken-brown-cow song emanates from Corey’s pocket.
“I gotta take this,” he says, getting up.
“Then why did he say jobs?” I ask as he reaches the door.
“Because you asked him, ‘Is it jobs?’ And so he thought the ‘correct’ answer was jobs.”
Corey heads to the far side of the bullpen as he answers the phone. “Cheryl?” He’s hunched over, with his back to me, hissing into the phone. But since Corey only has an outside voice, I can still make out the words.
“You think you can squeeze me? Fuckin’ whore! I should have left your druggie mountain stripper ass at Rosalita’s.”
Corey pronounces whore with two syllables: ‘who-are.’
This clears up the little mystery of who would date Corey. Rosalita’s is a punchline in off-color Modesto jokes. It’s a sorry little establishment in Jamestown, the only strip joint (barely) within fifty miles of Modesto. Evidently a ‘mountain stripper’ was willing to date Corey, however briefly.
“No, Cheryl, no. You better watch your back.”
I get up and shut my office door. Depressing and distracting as Corey’s ‘love life’ is, it has no bearing on my problem.
I was wrong. It wasn’t jobs. It was never jobs. Darryl voted for Trump because of entitlements. Trump said he’d fix health care and Social Security. But as Corey so savagely demonstrated when Darryl’s dad lost access to drug treatment, you’d have to not be able to add to believe Trump’s assertion that he could get rid of the individual mandate and keep pre-existing conditions protection. Why did Darryl believe Trump’s weird brand of magical thinking on Social Security and health care?
37
Endangered Species 4
Wednesday, October 17th, 20 days until the midterms
Now the billboard features images of a prescription bottle and a syringe. “Drugs kill tens of thousands of white men a year.38, 39 You need to Save the White Man!” Again, there is a helpful note in large type: “Men are more likely than women to die of opioid overdose, and overdose rates are higher for non-Hispanic whites than any other racial/ethnic group but Native Americans.”
So Save the White Man is about white men dying of drug overdoses and firearm suicides? Essentially self-inflicted wounds? What the fuck is the point of this messaging? It’s like a hyperbolic progressive got ahold of Corey’s playbook and decided to stand centrality in the narrative on its head. Like somebody decided to find out how Mike Reed would feel being on the receiving end of the feminist equivalent of toxic chivalry or benevolent sexism.
Oh.
Back at the apartment, I’m in my bedroom throwing on running clothes when I hear a key in the apartment door. I go to meet her in the living room.
“Save the White Man?!”
Imogen is standing in the doorway, juggling the groceries while struggling to get her key out of the lock.
“You thought the answer to toxic chivalry was—I don’t know what you call it, emasculating benevolence? Take that, Mike Reed?! You couldn’t choose some place in the miles and miles that separate Democratic milquetoast messaging from this kind of scorched earth? How the hell do you think struggling working-class white men are going to respond to this?!”
She wriggles the key free and heads into the kitchen. Not even bothering to look at me, she sets the groceries on top of the little kitchen island and starts putting them away in the cupboards and the fridge.
“Seriously, Imogen. How do you think struggling working-class whites are going to respond to you making fun of their tribulations?”
She pauses in front of the open fridge, a half-gallon of milk in her hand, and says, “Funny how you assume the target audience of SWM is white men. Or maybe, not so funny. Not funny how, even though you know I came to Modesto to energize the Democratic base, you still can’t imagine any audience for my messaging except white men.”
S
he turns from the fridge and looks at me, resting the milk on the island.
“Honestly, Iz, I haven’t wasted a lot of time worrying about what white men think of my messaging. But now that you bring them up, I guess the appropriate response would be shame. Gut-wrenching shame that they put this country and themselves in peril because the prospect of the first female president made them gag.”
Imogen’s chutzpah leaves me open-mouthed.
“Facts not in evidence, Imogen: you haven’t proved that’s why working-class whites voted for Trump. Jesus H. Christ.”
38
Dick, Dick, Dick
Thursday, October 18th, 19 days until the midterms
“Be honest,” says Corey. “When you heard about Mexican rapists, about the Access Hollywood tape, part of you was excited. Jazzed. Like, a guy who brags about grabbing pussy can run for president? Really!? Talk about fuck political correctness. Am I right?”
Darryl and I exchange the what’s-with-this-guy look. You know what I’m talking about: eyebrows knitted, lips pursed, like maybe you’re picking up an unpleasant odor.
“Uh, no,” says Darryl.
Corey overheard Darryl and me making plans to hit the Branding Iron. He invited himself along, and now he’s being unpleasant in that special way only Corey can be unpleasant.
“We’re among friends here, Darryl. For once in your life, you can be honest. It was the pussy-grabbing bragging that let you know the Great DJT was gonna bring back testicular fortitude, that he was gonna restore the greatness of the Almighty American Male!”
Corey’s voice is loud enough to draw glances from the Branding Iron’s other patrons at the far end of the bar. I reposition myself on my barstool and prop my head up with an elbow on the bar so I can get a clear look at Darryl’s face. Strangely enough, Corey has echoed Imogen’s question. In a dramatically more vulgar fashion, he’s asking the central question about Obama-Obama-Trump voters. Did they vote for Trump because of his out-and-proud racism and sexism, or did they vote for Trump despite them? It’s the question I’ve danced around but have never asked Darryl directly.
Rules of Resistance Page 14
