Three Days — or Ten Thousand
Wednesday I donated to Antonio Delgado. Tuesday he won a 7-way democratic primary in New York’s 19th congressional district. He was *not* the protagonist of a this American Life episode about the primary race in a district currently represented by a republican. Here’s why.
I was a kid when the first Mad Max movie came out. Also the movie Heavy Metal. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the first Mad Max all the way through, but it was culturally influential in my circle of friends. I did see the Heavy Metal movie at some point and I’ve read some issues of Heavy Metal magazine. I’ve regretted those choices.
As a young adult, read a number of comics and graphic novels: Watchmen, and Swampthing, and various others. There’s a few that carved ruts in my memory, one in particular that featured the travails of a young woman in some nameless police state who throws a rock at a tank, ends up imprisoned and gang raped, and the last image is of her body, being eaten by vultures. I eventually learned to avoid many graphic novels.
For years I’ve wondered what people are thinking when they write these stories. Graphic novels in particular. Someone is drawing out, inking, and coloring images of devastating pain and loss, with artistic precision and accuracy. How do these carefully crafted stories and images of nihilistic violence come out of people’s heads and get purchased for leisure reading? For me, it’s like slow acting poison: doesn’t take you out or cause acute immediate reaction, but it sits there in your body and the creepy images mark your brain and leave a scared, sticky feeling that lingers for days.
There’s a number of cultural, psychological, and artist things happening. Certainly some people just get their jollies from sadistic, pornographic images and narratives. Some people find the unredeemed sadness and loss part of the literary intensity. But this week I started to really wonder about a practical question.
Most of the stories come from the minds of men (mostly white ones). Some, but probably not most, don’t put themselves in the position of the passive, live victims of balletic violence in fictional narratives. Men may die in grotesque, flamboyant ways in art, but based on life experience they can consume the stories with an understanding that they will be active participants in their own fate. They will be the shooters, mercenaries, the zombie hunters, the motorcycle gang. In stories without any good guys, they will still have a role, even if they are damaged and corrupted.
If I ever had that illusion, it vanished when I was very young. Again, there are a lot of reasons for it, but here’s the one that matters now. I’m not just a woman, I’m a mom. In the most recent Mad Max movie (which I saw three times in the theater, probably more than I’ve seen a movie in the theater since about 1994), there’s the line where Furiosa reunites with her clan. She says two things: she was captive for 10,000 days, not including days she doesn’t remember. That’s the poignant line delivered with all the pain of surviving, incredibly damaged in body and spirit. That’s the protagonist speaking. But the other, the throw away line, is when she says her mother died in the first few days after she was captured. It’s not difficult to speculate how, but I prefer not to.
I have daughters. When the end of the world comes, I know what happens. It happened in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, it’s been happening in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last twenty years. the stories of Yezidi women and the girls of kidnapped by Boko Haram aren’t “fresh” any more, but they’re still happening.
I don’t bank on being the tough crone on the motorcycle, fighting to the last. I’m as likely to be the nameless mother who dies in the first three days and leaves my daughters to unimaginable pain. There is no romanticizing that terror. Nothing in the world makes me want to chance it.
What does Mad Max have to do with Delgado? Let’s go back to how he wasn’t the protagonist on the sincere, dry, intellectual-yet-emotive radio show that talked about Jeff Beals, a white high school teacher who came in third behind Delgado yesterday. Beals ran an uncompromising, anti-corporate, universal healthcare driven campaign. He explicitly premised his candidacy on grass roots organizing, volunteer power, refusal to accept endorsements if it meant diluting his message, and a combative relationship with the mainstream democratic machine. Delgado was a bit player in the Beals narrative (as presented by NPR), characterized as a sellout because he wouldn’t endorse “Medicare for all”, and because he had access to corporate endorsements. (I note the parts of the story I heard didn’t feel the need to comment that Beals is white and Delgado is not).
At the same time I’ve still got men (white men) in my FB feed who are saying proudly, “okay, democrats — woo me, but don’t guilt me. show me a candidate who isn’t corrupt and i’ll play”. The Beals story said, “all the democrats are doing is saying ‘Oooh Trump BogeyMan!!”, but really we need a progressive platform and actual investment in the issues affecting working people.” And one of the Beals supporters (a woman, possibly white, I don’t know), was saying, “if Beals doesn’t win, i’m done with the democrats”. And I got a sinking sense of nausea.
These people are in a district represented by a republican. You know, the people who party line vote behind Wisconsin WeaselTool. The house of representatives are the ones who vote on impeachment and no R member of the house has the nads to do it now, which means when Mueller comes back with his findings that we’ve got a Putin puppet regime with Vlad’s hands aallll.The.Way.up the executive branches bum and twitching the tiny puppet hands, the House won’t do shit, which will completely blow the last remnants of constitutional government.
I like a zealot. Really I do. And I haven’t been a registered Dem in years (a luxury I have because I live in a solid Dem district). I think Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the rest of them are collaborationist corporate a-holes. But dismissing the Trump threat strategy is like saying “Oh boohoo, you’re telling me if I shoot this gun in this space ship, the air will blow out and we’ll all die.” Um… yeah. Do you disagree that we’re in a spaceship? Are you not clear about how vacuum works? I get that you don’t like the captain. The captain is an asshole, but can we get back to the ground first? Where there’s atmosphere? then you can go find another ship, or shoot this captain, or whatever.
People who dismiss the Trump/McConnell/Ryan threat, in the face of this week’s SCOTUS decisions, the concentration camps for migrants, the defunding of every social safety net we have, are saying: “fuck you. I’ll take the apocalypse before I’ll compromise. I’ll take my chances with filthy, choatic, violent, diseased post-apocalypse. My chances in that world are acceptable.” Well, mine aren’t.
For all the warboys who lived in Immortan Joe’s tower, or vicious biker gangs from Bullettown, there were more legless, boil-cvoered people living and dying at the foot of the mountain. For everyone wandering around covered with blood spatter, there’s someone whose blood it was. For all the dead-eyed, rugged mercenaries with steam punk weapons and bad teeth, there are the nameless women who died three days after they were captured.
NY-19 could be one less Republican. It’s not dramatic. It’s not romantic. It’s not a promise of medicare for all and reversing Citizen’s United. But we will sure as hell never get there if we take our toys home and sulk, while we wait for the mushroom cloud.
https://www.delgadoforcongress.com/
