Brouhaha Roundup, Election Edition
Plus Sydney Sweeney
In the weeks before and after the New York mayoral election, there has been altogether too much catastrophizing about Zohran Mamdani. Some Jewish New Yorkers believe they will be in danger when he becomes mayor.1 A centrist commentator hints at a possible personality disorder when he alleges that Mamdani has “charm but not authenticity.” (How does he know? Has he met him?)
Other critics worry that Mamdani’s “socialist” ideas will bring about economic disaster. These critics are evincing the learned helplessness many Americans feel whenever public benefits that are totally normal in the rest of the developed world (like universal healthcare and gun control) are proposed in the US.
For the record, I agree that some of Mamdani’s proposals are unlikely to work. A rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments will cause higher rents everywhere else, because landlords will need to offset their losses. As for government-run grocery stores, my husband, Matt, lived in the Soviet Union, and his experience with government stores2 makes me skeptical that Mamdani’s proposal would be an improvement over what we have now.
But at least Mamdani has ideas for making New York more affordable. He intends for the government grocery stores to be a pilot program to test whether the idea is feasible. His proposed five stores—one in each borough—would hardly be the socialist takeover of private enterprise people fear. And many of his other ideas actually work quite well in other developed countries.
Take those free buses. I like this idea, because for nearly twelve years Matt and I have been the beneficiaries of cheap, safe, and reliable public transportation throughout Europe. It works great! Frequent riders usually buy an annual pass, which brings the cost per ride down to almost nothing. Most public transportation is ticketless: The passes are stored on our phones, so there is no need to deal with ticket machines. Best of all, when the bus or tram pulls up, everyone quickly gets on through all available doors, instead of lining up at the front and slowly processing on as the driver sells or checks tickets. The driver has one job, driving, and transit police handle fare enforcement.
This system minimizes conflicts and delays, thus reducing the stress of public transportation. As a result, taking public transportation is the norm for people of all income levels here. Matt and I often go to classical music concerts downtown, and afterwards, even late at night, crowds of affluent older folks head to the tram stop to ride home. It’s a virtuous cycle: The safer and more appealing public transportation is, the more people will ride it, which makes it still safer and more appealing to still more people.
And even though I think low-cost annual passes are preferable to free buses (riders ought to have some skin in the game), free buses do have their advantages. As we discovered to our delight during our visit to Annecy, France, many French cities make all buses free for everyone on summer weekends and holidays. For tourists, who might otherwise be confused about how to buy tickets, or who might be reluctant to dredge up their high-school French at the bus station, the free buses encourage more exploring—and more spending. And for French citizens, the buses ease traffic, boost the economy, and encourage families to participate in fun and enriching activities together.
What do you think, readers? Have I persuaded you that ticketless buses are a good idea?
Speaking of catastrophizing, readers are probably familiar with Helen Andrews’s preposterous (dare I say hysterical?) article “The Great Feminization,” which argues that our country is being destroyed because women are in the workplace. Andrews goes so far as to claim that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” This is not only nonsense, but, to quote Jeremy Bentham, “nonsense on stilts.” Or perhaps a better response is Barney Frank’s: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” Or we could paraphrase Lenny Bruce: “Yup, we did it. We destroyed the rule of law in the US. It was a party. Things got out of hand.”3
Even Andrews’s less overwrought claims—say, that female employees are bad for businesses because “Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation”—can easily be falsified by pointing to Japan, which has the fourth-largest economy in the world even though its male-dominated work culture is consensus-based, cooperative, risk-averse, and collectivist. In other words, consensus and cooperation are neither bad for business nor intrinsically feminine.
But actually, the best rejoinder of all to Andrews is “The Exploding Whale,” a hilarious article by Dave Barry. A bunch of guys have to deal with a large whale carcass that has washed up on an Oregon beach. They decide to blow up the carcass with a tremendous amount of dynamite, with disastrous results—flying chunks of rotting whale blubber smash a car and injure several onlookers. And after all that they haven’t even managed to get rid of the whale carcass, which continues to stink up the beach after the explosion. I think we can all agree that if there had been any women on this work team, they would not have dynamited the carcass but instead would have sensibly just buried it right away, no fuss no muss.
Well, readers? Are working women harming America? Or only Helen Andrews?
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Sydney Sweeney!
No sooner had the ridiculous controversy over Sweeney’s American Eagle ad died down (obviously Sydney Sweeney has great genes! just look at her! no need to impute racist motives to the ad!) than it flared up again because she refused to apologize for the ad in that now-notorious GQ interview.
You may be surprised to hear this from a left-leaning feminist like me, but I really like Sweeney. She’s smart and funny, and she was terrific in The White Lotus and the underrated Anyone But You, a modern retelling of Much Ado about Nothing, in which she holds her own with Glen Powell.
I have a theory about why Sweeney has been embroiled in controversy over her jeans/genes: To those of us who lack “huuuuuuge . . . tracts of land,” it can feel unfair that she garners so much attention and is so beloved by millions of men simply because she is pretty and blonde and has (in the words of Straight Bowen Yang) “heavy naturals.”
The injustice rankles, and these feelings are deep and primal. Sydney Sweeney transports many of us [sheepishly raises hand] back to our younger days, and not in a good way. She rubs salt in the psychic wounds inflicted back when boys called us “flat”4 or ignored us altogether. Or maybe you, like me, had the deflating experience of talking with your high school crush, only to have him trail off midsentence to trail after a buxom babe. Maybe this happened to you more than once [again sheepishly raises hand]. Maybe you can relate to Sophia Loren as she gives Jayne Mansfield’s bazoombas the side-eye:
We’re only human. Of course we feel envy when bosomy blondes get all the love, sympathy, and plum roles,5 and we’re left wondering, What am I? Chopped liver? When we have less-than-admirable feelings, we sometimes find ways to justify them to ourselves, for example by insisting that no, actually we dislike Sweeney for legitimate political reasons.
This point is generalizable. When we find ourselves getting inordinately upset about online controversies, or when we feel an outsized fear of or animus against a public figure (or, if you’re Helen Andrews apparently, against all working women), it can help to get curious about why we are so het up. If our reasons turn out to be personal rather than political, we can remind ourselves that not every fear is rational, that the time to make up our minds about people is never, and that comparison is the thief of joy. And then we can follow Sweeney’s example and, in her words, “kind of just put [our] phone away.”
What say you, readers? Sydney Sweeney: Yay or nay?
How about you, readers? Any other online controversies, election-related or otherwise, you’d like to discuss? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Regardless of whether we (or a loved one) are endowed with “shock and awe” like Dolly Parton, or with “champagne glasses” like Marie Antoinette, we will enjoy this lovely sonnet, by Michael Chabon:
On Keats’s Seeking a Rhyme for “Breast” in Each of His Three Last Sonnets
I love that in the final fevered surge,
Hectic and heartsick and hemorrhaging time,
He had the art, the nerve, the need, the urge
To cup one last fair couplet with a rhyme.
Not “zest,” so much. It hints of spice and tart.
The dash of z does nothing to conceal
A young man’s penchant to neglect the heart—
The convoluted kernel—for the peel.
“Unrest” suggests the sleeplessness that turns
A burning saint upon a brazier bed—
Where bright with brazen martyrdom he yearns
For hotter fires, not pillow to his head.
But “waist,” now—that’s a handhold when she tips
An overbrimming cupful to my lips.
True, Mamdani is a strong critic of Israel. But several Republican staffers and politicians have joked about gassing Jews and have said they love Hitler, and the Vice President has defended them. In addition, a disturbingly large number of people who hold power on the Right are cozying up to the vicious antisemite Nick Fuentes. These New Yorkers are afraid of the wrong thing.
Matt was living in Leningrad during Chernobyl, and, after a difficult bureaucratic process, he managed to get a phone call through to his parents to assure them that he was ok. They warned him to avoid fresh dairy products. He laughed and said, “I don’t know why fresh dairy products would suddenly show up, but if I ever see any, I will avoid them.”
Bruce was responding to the bigoted accusation that “the Jews” killed Jesus. I tried to find a source online but was unsuccessful, so let’s just say that the source is Matt’s memory.
In my defense, I was 5’10” and weighed 120 pounds soaking wet. All my body fat was required to keep my central nervous system functioning! There was nothing left over to plump up my chestal area!
Another personal story: When the book The Bonfire of the Vanities was made into a movie, I groused to a male friend that they had cast Melanie Griffith to play the wife. The wife in the book is a willowy brunette, and I thought it was ridiculous that she was being played by a busty blonde. He started laughing and said, “Well of course you would feel that way!” Fair enough.
It takes all kinds! I *don’t* find Mamdani interesting (I look forward to autocorrect finding him interesting though) nor Sydney Sweeney, but I do Helen Andrews. She is so perfect a representative of a type that would’ve once been scorned as a “bluestocking” and yet, her politics do not owe much to the exemplars of that label. I’m pretty sure she’ll never be other than a working woman, unless she has to be suppressed. I was introduced to her via a piece she wrote when younger, on the misbehavior of JS Mill. Very entertaining.
I did read a little tidbit about Mamdani in a rather fun and acid WSJ review (my parents still get the paper!) of his father’s new book, which is a hagiography of Idi Amin, with the curious zest obviously of being written by a member of a group that was especially persecuted by him.
Here was the mention:
“There’s only one paragraph about the younger Mamdani in the entire book. The author writes of a sabbatical from Columbia in 2004, spent in Kampala. His wife and Zohran, then only 12, joined him. The boy was yanked out of school in New York and taken to Africa. What fun, you might think, how thrilling for a young lad! And then Mr. Mamdani tells us that, in Kampala, “Zohran settled down with the study of issues such as ‘zero grazing,’” a type of farming in which cattle are fed with cut grass.
As your heart sinks for the 12-year-old, you may also feel you understand Zohran better. It can’t be that easy, can it, to be the son of someone like that?”
As far as mamdani goes, your POV is interesting. But I would be careful — after 2 years of seething Jew hate — of dismissing New Yorker’s fears: “The poor dears are just having a fit of the vapors. Calmer heads will prevail.” I’m not saying YOU are saying that, but some people certainly are. And people have been accusing the Jews of blowing things out of proportion for the last couple decades. It’s an indirect mode of trivializing us and our concerns, of talking over.
Anyway I’ll be interested in your take on a contrary perspective:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/zohran-mamdani-sides-with-the-anti?r=dszqz&utm_medium=ios