The Vaporous Campaign Of Kamala Harris - Saying Nothing And Meaning It

'Who knows what's in that cunt's head', said Aitch in Jonathan Glazer's movie Sexy Beast, referring to the crazed and sadistic Don Logan who terrorizes him and the happy group of ex-cons and their wives vacationing in Spain; and so it was said in the corridors of Washington about the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, Kamala Harris.

Week after week Harris said nothing of substance, spinning webs of the most spidery, insubstantial notions about time, history, and womanhood, all floating in the breeze, all those squares and hectogons, changing shape with the wind.  Nostrums of marvelous fantasy, visions of some imagined future based on an imagined past, an airy, flighty handbasket of posies meaning nothing at all. 

 

Her crowds loved her - her proud, defiant stance as a black woman appealing for the right to serve the American people.  She would not only advocate tirelessly for the rights of women and black people, nor simply channel them, she would incorporate, assume, absorb them into her very being.  Whenever she stood before this chorus of young women, enamored with the very idea of one of their own sitting in the Oval Office, chills ran up and down their spines. 

The treacle, the tinsel, the soft lights of compassion, unity, and inclusivity were part of her aura. Energy, immigration, and foreign wars were unwelcome nettles, burrs under the saddle, nasty bits of irrelevance given the historic nature of a Black Woman President. 

Working this complicity to its roots, Harris went from state to state claiming the innate, final privilege of women - the highest office in the land.  'I will be the President for all the people', she said in Baton Rouge, overlooking a crowd of comers - black women, mulattoes like her, mixed race Cajun Cherokee women, swamp rats, and shrimp peelers, 'but especially for you!' and waiting until the cheering subsided, she went on, 'No American will be left behind, and all Americans will prosper.  

You....', she said, pointing and waving her hand over the motley, multi-colored, raft of the outlier Louisianans who had come to see her.  'I am yours, and you are mine'. 

She didn't actually avoid the press as her critics claimed.  There was simply no need to get mired in pettiness, having to answer the carping questions about debt service and interest rates.  All that would take care of itself once she was elected.  No one ever questioned Jesus' agenda, or tried to pin him down on his ideas of compassion, tolerance, and charity.  He was good.  That was all that mattered, and the same went for her. 

Everything she said was woven into the web. 'Energy', she said, 'is the lifeblood of America, a magic potion of prosperity and well-being, a gift from the earth, the sun, and the wind, all to be used to power this great country of ours.  We are caretakers of the world, ministers to its health, ambassadors to its bounty.' 

Again, the crowd of enthusiastic supporters cheered every phrase, every pregnant pause, every salient innuendo,  They knew exactly what she meant and hugged each other with love and profound emotion,  Tears were in the eyes of these young women as they left the parade grounds and waved to the Harris motorcade. 'Isn't she wonderful?, a feeling endorsed by every last one of them who had turned out to hear her. 

She was accused by the conservative press of changing her accent depending on the crowd - black when talking to blacks, white to white; and so she did as the videos showed, but she did so unapologetically. 'Diversity within, diversity without', she proudly said, implying that no person was anything but a polyglot, all that DNA tangled up and reconfigured in the most intriguing ways.

Of course the hectors on the Right never let up.  How could she talk white when there was no white in her at all.  No matter how much Indians might claim they were Caucasians, they were nothing of the sort, so the white thing was an ascribed thing, an assimilated thing, so for her to talk white was cultural appropriation writ large, the shoe on the other foot. 

 

They recalled her infamous trip to Anacostia, an inner city black ghetto of Washington, the Capital's worst, most pestilential, hopeless slum, where she went to deliver her message of inclusion and blackness and was roundly shooed out of town by hecklers. 'Whatchoo doin' down here, you white bitch?', shouted one woman from the window of the projects. 'Get yo' fat ass up outta here'. 

Kamala knew then that there was limit to her black thang, her identity politics, and the whole shebang of race, gender, and ethnicity. 'Gotta be more careful', she told herself.  So she avoided deep ghetto blacks - they didn't know to vote in the first place, and wouldn't even if they could - and turned to the more politically attuned; but it was to white liberals she addressed most of her remarks. White women would vote for her ipso facto, automatically, and absolutely; but some of them went to college and veered unhealthily into policy issues, so she had to throw a few statistics in the sweet pudding served to them. 

Every liberal redoubt of America loved her passionate embrace of diversity and inclusivity.  Finally America's wealth would be distributed fairly, taken from the greedy capitalist barons and given to the poor, the disenfranchised, and the forgotten.  Finally the black man would be placed on the pinnacle of the human pyramid where he belonged; and finally heterosexuality would disappear as a discredited notion.  'We love her', her supporters said. 

And so it went. Kamala was indefatigable, and never lost her way.  Yes, occasionally when she went off script she got mixed up in her famous word salads, but her supporters knew how to parse these meanderings and extract the kernels of brilliance within them.  On and on she went, saying absolutely nothing, revealing nothing but the complete vacuity within her head, but confident that what she said was enough; and apparently it was for millions of voters were on her side. 

As the campaign went into its final days, she only ramped up her familiar, airy, transparent, patent medicine prescriptions.  Why change a good thing?  Why open oneself to the partisan, bellowing nonsense of her opponent?  None whatsoever.  None at all. 

As of this writing the election is barely a month away, so only time will tell if this arriviste makes it up the ladder and will sit on the Jefferson chair in the Lincoln bedroom.