Somewhere in NYC a pretty young, white, disabled lawyer who rolls around in her automated wheel chair sitting Indian-style is hurting. It’s not Ariella Barker’s chronic pain from a rare facial nerve condition that is the source of her pain. No, it’s Bernie Sanders’ impatient, petulant treatment of the disabled, for which she tried, and tried, and tried to be a voice within the campaign.
Caught up in the reverie of Sanders rhetorical sway sometime last year, and feeling the intensity that can only come when one falls deeply in love with a candidate, her fall to the ranks of the imperfect Hillary Clinton has been hard. She’s cataloged her journey on a blog that she started some 6 years ago in order to frontpage her deep disappointment in her father in the wake of his death. It’s hard to tell if her propensity for falling for flawed people is a result of or in spite of her rocky relationship with her father.
Nevertheless, her post, titled Berned by Bernie, approximately her 33rd since starting the blog six years ago, has gone viral and ended up at the top of Memeorandum Friday. It has Bernouts berning with outrage, and Hillbots grasping the hilt of her sword to use it to fight the ruthlessness of Team Bernie. One thing you should know: TeamHillary has hired Ms. Barker to write about her story. No word yet on if the pay is enough to count against her disability income.
This, after a week of Roberta Lange making the rounds of all the major 24 hour news networks and playing the violent voicemails she’s received in the wake of her shit show at the Nevada State Convention. After attempting to wait out the Bernouts for some 13 hours—and failing–she’s since been the victim of aggressive Bernie Bros. In painstaking detail on show after show, she’s told the story of how her phone now rings every single minute. The single mothers at the restaurant where she is Operations Manager can no longer buy diapers for their babies due to the fallout from her harassment, the poor dears.
The Bernouts are also quickly discovering the power of female pain-sharing. Exhibit A is author/ teacher/ activist Gayle Brandeis, who is so dedicated to Bernie that she went to the NV convention even though she was just a cloud after her father died. She went with her 6 year old son in tow. Awwwwww. Now, not only is she disillusioned by the machinations of intra-party politics at a caucusing convention, her 6 year old son now carries the pain of all her losses. Read it and weep, Hillbots. She was on your side until you jerked her dreams out from under her.
Do I seem sarcastic? I am. I can see from here that this will be the summer show. The style of these poor little victims, who write about their personal stories in waves of emotion and euphoria, will be de rigueur by the end of June. These well-educated women with their matrices of physical, emotional, and/or social problems, will flood the Internets in the same way their buddies have been flooding college campuses with protests for the last 18 months. They will be squalling about safe spaces, or opportunity, or being bullied, and all manner of expensive solutions for what ails them.
These women cast themselves in the same frustrating mold that intellectual women have always cast themselves in: accomplished, but crazy, and deeply, deeply flawed. They are never normal, yet empowered, women. Think of it as the Virginia Woolf prototype of feminist. The craziness is what allows them to feel so deeply; the intellect helps to capture it all so searingly on the page. Their identities are caught up in what is now the traditional iconography of young, white feminism. They are privileged, well-read, and suicidal, like Woolf and Sylvia Plath, or sexually liberated like Anne Sexton (the irony!). They are comfortable being sacrificial, like the Lady of Shalott, handing off the sword to the truly powerful, to the one who was promised.
Virginia’s daughters all have rooms of their own, and they will spend the summer producing page after page of this claptrap in service to the Democrats. Most of it will be fiction, of course.
This is the new-old campaign model, folks. The narrative is ascendant once again. It’s time for some warm fuzzies and shoving personal pain down your gullet and calling yourselves satisfied. The sad, sad ladies of the left are ready to pour out their pain. They are triggered and drowning, an army of virtual Ophelias who believe that their beautiful visages alone will move their male cohorts to the malleable melancholy of Hamlet. Will it work? Time will tell. I have my doubts. One thing I know is this: history has shown that Americans are not sympathetic to the emotional displays of women, especially white women.
The Crawdad Hole 