Susan on Medium

For months we had been bombarded on television with horrendous, uncensored images of the war in Vietnam. In March, American soldiers massacred 347 at My Lai. Two weeks later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the target of anti-war rage, said he would not seek re-election. In April, Martin Luther King had been assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis Hotel, and the inner cities exploded. Just days later SDS students at Columbia barricaded themselves in the president’s office while black students occupied a separate building. In May, Parisian students went on strike, tearing up the cobblestones of Paris. A few weeks later, moments after victory in the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of a Los Angeles Hotel. A few days before, a marginal member of Andy Warhol’s circle, Valerie Solanas, also founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, shot him in the stomach. Prior to the shooting, she had written a manifesto calling for “systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”

Remember that charisma can be just as dangerous as it is compelling. Charisma is subjective. It’s also the appeal of cultists and authoritarians, as well as our greatest leaders. Jim Jones and Hitler, to their followers, were seen as charismatic. And Incredible as it may seem, Trump supporters see him as charismatic.

Gabby Giffords said that sometimes it’s a fight for her to find the words. That’s how I feel this morning. How to describe what I feel? It’s a struggle, and that’s unusual for me. But I can say some of what we were given last night.

It really was just a debate. Ever since the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the debates have held an absurd amount of power in electoral politics. What happened then is legendary: Kennedy had been well-prepared with a set of talking points, and was instructed to turn the questions around (nowadays, we call this a “pivot”) in order to get them out no matter what the question was.

So I finished Mary Trump’s book late last night, and here’s what I think is so important about it.

It took the pandemic to show me “a room of one’s own” is much more than a spatial allocation

The following is excerpted from my latest collection of essays, Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman and other Writings on Politics and the Media 2016–2019. Despite the title, the collection is not primarily about Bernie Sanders. However, the following excerpt, which describes some of my experiences with the media after publishing a book supportive of Hillary Clinton, does contain material that Sanders supporters may find provocative and perhaps offensive.

My editor advised that I relegate only a brief discussion of Hillary’s comments about a “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” to a footnote in my last book, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. I accepted her advice, but I no longer think a footnote is sufficient. What follows contains some material from that footnote, but is greatly expanded and detailed. It appears in Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman and Other Writings on Politics and the Media 2016–2019.

Sanders said Sunday that he worked as hard as humanly possible once Clinton was the Democratic nominee. Let’s do a little fact-check on that claim…