Costumed Politics

A good friend texted me two days ago from Los Angeles with real urgency: You must Vote. This is really important. Please consider dropping off your ballot. He was of course referring to the California re-call election.

I’d told him days before that I was sitting this one out. “Don’t worry,” I texted him back, “It’s in the bag.” Democrats held the seat and wouldn’t hold the Governor accountable for his French Laundry lapse, and the Republicans were only offering a slightly more unappealing, albeit genuine, crackpot candidate. 

The California re-call (Newsom v. Elder) cost the State of California $400 million, far too many zeros for a battle between a celebrity politician and a celebrity radio talk-show host; had it been a pay-per-view event money might have been raised for public education, climate change study, public transportation, and informed civil debate on hot-button issues such as LGBT rights and immigration. 

That same day Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (D—14th District New York) showed up at the Met Gala* (price per ticket $35,000) in a floor length white gown designed by Aurora James on which the words “Tax the Rich” were sewn, words chosen, one is led to imagine, as some sort of a progressive political message in the guise of a costume. “When Aurora and I were first kind of partnered, we really started having a conversation about what it means to be a working-class woman of color at the Met, and we said, ‘We can’t just play along, we need to break the fourth wall and challenge some of the institutions,’ Ocasio-Cortez said during a red-carpet interview.

I’m old enough to remember Jesse ‘Big Daddy’ Unruh—‘money is the mother’s milk of politics’—and Willie Brown to whom cash was packaged in brown paper bags delivered directly to his office in Sacramento. I actually lived beneath the bridge so to speak of both of their regimes. I more or less know how the business of politics works. I more or less ‘know’ who Gavin Newsom is; a costumed French Laundry boy who seems to be at least half-heartedly dedicated to breaking out of his noblesse oblige and into the softly moderate lap of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. And as lamentable as Newsom is, I won’t lose sleep over his so-called re-election as I lost 3 days of sleep in 2016 when Trump ascended the throne as King of Mar-a-Lago. 

One does wonder though about how such ostentatious displays by politicians affect the people they purportedly serve, and that they might actually widen the perception among their constituencies that the gap between the rich and poor is real and growing more real every day. Is attending the Met Gala at $35k a pop** really any different from attending a royal ball at the court of Louis XIV? Or the magical Camelot Kingdom dreamed up by the myth makers of the glorious JFK era?

 btw: If I’d sewed the words on the backside of Ocasio-Cortez’s dress I’d have sewn, WHEN IS DONALD TRUMP GOING TO JAIL?

*The Met Gala is an annual fund-raising event used to support the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. In 2019 the gala raised $15 million, according to The New York Times.

 **AOC’s annual salary is $174,000. If she did pay the $35k for her ticket to the ball, that would constitute about 20% of her annual salary, an unwise proportion of her income to devote to such a politically frivolous pursuit; most likely AOC was ‘comped’ for promotional purposes or had her ticket underwritten by a business seeking a tax exemption.

A meme from the internet storm that erupted after The Met Gala, replacing AO-Cortez’ dress message with a different, perhaps a bit long-winded, but completely apropos political statement of its own, a riff perhaps on Flaubert’s, “The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of idiocy achieved by the bourgeoisie.”