Sometimes an accuser who makes the accusation of infamy against a wrongdoer may be seen to have less than pure motives, which eventually leads to the wrongdoer becoming martyred and forgiven, while the accuser is viewed as a graver danger to the larger community than the wrongdoer ever was. That, after all, was what was at play with Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." It seems as if this is playing out in a (hashtag)MeToo incarnation as one reads through this article from Politico.com about the challenges the junior senator from New York, Kristen Gillibrand, is facing from corporate donors as she considers jumping into the 2020 presidential sweepstakes.
My Mom is one who does not forgive Gillibrand, though I wonder how much of that is from her Italian-background as she never forgave Elia Kazan when I did (I learned Kazan named those who were already named and many dead, and did so at the end after holding out for years to the detriment of his career). Anyway, I have read the defense of Gillibrand over at the liberal-left blog, Lawyers, Guns & Money. I find it less than persuasive. They argue two things that they see as simple. First, they argue she was only part of a larger group of senators, so why single her out? Well, the Politico.com article shows that is not true. She led it, says Politico. And what I recall is she had had president-fever for awhile at that time, and had seen Franken as a competitor for 2020. And as Al Franken said about her in a very strong and positive testimonial years before his scandal arose, she is a competitor. So there's that, too.
Second, the LGM post argues she was correct. Franken, in other words, was a cad toward women. My Mom says to that, Phooey. Well, she says something different, but why turn this into an R-rated post? Substantively, Al liked to squeeze some women's bodies without prior consent back in the day, at least up through 2010. It was still terribly wrong even at the time, but apparently he had been fairly well behaved since then--and, unlike Trump and Kavanaugh, Franken was deeply contrite about the whole thing, and still is. The argument, better phrased at the time, is Democrats are hypocrites to give Franken a pass while attacking Trump, and now, as the nation has gone back to high school to go after us Baby Boomer guys, Kavanaugh. I wondered just how much hypocrisy there would be if Franken had done penance, and been censured, for his previous conduct rather than resigned, however. The "Franken precedent" did not work with Kavanaugh anyway, and Kavanaugh now sits in a job where he can only be impeached, not defeated in an election.
What I remember feeling at the time of the Franken imbroglio was many of these Democratic Party senators, including Schumer, were jealous of and had never liked Franken because Franken did not work his way up to senator, but ran as a celebrity--starting at the top, if one puts it in the language these senators would understand. The senate is a club, after all, and you ain't in it. And I recall several seemed to fear Franken's wit and intellect, as, if one ever met many of these senators, one would be disappointed in how shallow they are outside of rank political talk. It is not like they read much literature, have any musical knowledge, or the like. These are not learned people for the most part but people who are driven, focused, and smooth in a glib sort of a way. When the pile-on occurred, I felt they were saying to themselves in their little club, "Oh, you think you're so special, huh, Mr. Hollywood-Manhattan-Harvard educated celebrity? Well, welcome to the big leagues!" As I say, the senate is a club and Franken never belonged, in their eyes. If one reads the Wiki page bio of Gillibrand, one sees she is from an elite background and earnestly worked the system to which she had been literally born. It is impressive because she is impressive in that "to the manner/manor born" way. But one wonders, how much Elena Ferrante has she read since graduating from Dartmouth...
So, I guess, yeah, I find it amusing how corporate Democratic Party donors smelled something foul emanating from this junior senator from New York. It is not, as Scott Lemieux at LGM blog thinks, a "misogyny tax," and Scott, since when do we sound like a right winger in talking about something we don't like as a "tax?" And if I read the article from Politico, it is from those donors who bought into the whole "It's her turn" and "We need a woman candidate" line for Hillary Clinton, meaning typical corporate Democrats who claim the mantle of feminism against Bernie-Bros, and at least one quoted in the article is a woman.
For me at this point, since we are now so many news cycles away from the Franken scandal, is Gillibrand a progressive or a corporate Democrat? From this article, she may be a progressive, but I don't know if this is a costume or not. It seems, though, if the corporate donors are not very enamored with her, that should make me feel, "Oh yeah! I like her!" But one must not make such assumptions as too often these matters are driven by personalities, though maybe we should "forgive" Gillibrand. Come on, Ma! Gillibrand is pushing to make post offices banks for regular income earners and the poor. She is for Medicare for All. She is for massive infrastructure re-development. She's photogenic and speaks really, really well. She's got a better record than Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and hangs with Elizabeth Warren. Aw, come on, Ma! Insert Italian-American joke here: "What is Italian's Alzheimers? It's when you forget everything except the grudges."
But, of course, let's remember the wisdom of George Carlin, who reminded us, in his "club" routine, that we are not in the club and why so many people are so miseducated by cable news. Let's also think of Gore Vidal's thoughtful quip, "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so," by which he meant the person is bought and paid for. And Frank Zappa reminded us, "Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex."
Bernie Sanders (and the late Paul Wellstone, who Franken revered, by the way) has always represented the far edge of the practical exception to what every one of these other senators have done to get to where they are now. And don't think these other senators don't hate Sanders for being an interloper, though they admire how he paid his dues and did not start at the top. There's that, I suppose. I just wonder, too, whether this is all something Nat Hawthorne would find familiar, and maybe there is wisdom in turning another page after the ending in "The Scarlet Letter" and deciding the accuser is not so bad after all, either. I realize the person in the story is a true villain from nearly the start, but we should engage literature, find differences in its lessons, and seek wisdom and, yes, forgiveness all around. Gillibrand's motives were certainly not pure. But she spoke to an important moment of cultural change in our nation, and as I said in an earlier blog post, maybe our day as white male Baby Boomers is done--unless there is, again, forgiveness all around, with the issue being the genuineness of our contriteness for some of us, at least.
