Oh Say, Can You AOC?

Lots of people professed to be shocked, shocked when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of all the democratic socialist celebs, so jarringly appeared amongst the bright stars and broads in stripes at this week's opulent Met Gala. 

But why shouldn't she be there? The theme of this year's exclusive charity fashion event was, after all, "American Independence." And nothing says independence like wearing a white designer gown with bloody red letters spelling "Tax the Rich" all over the back of it. It would have been so tacky and off-putting to guests who'd paid $35,000 a ticket if she'd plastered the slogan like a banner on the front of the dress where they'd actually have to look at it while schmoozing with her.

The font was eerily similar to the notorious "I Don't Care, Do U?" message worn on the back of Melania Trump's jacket during her trip to the border to visit immigrant prisons. 

 

 Maybe you would have preferred that AOC show her working class bona fides by wearing her old bartending duds, just to entrap the guests into ordering her to fetch them another drink. And worse, if she'd accessorized it with an Abolish ICE insignia, they'd only complain that their drinks were too warm, and demand a refund on their tickets.

Although AOC had a masked male lackey so gallantly holding up the streaming train of her gown as she made her grand entrance past people protesting neo-feudalism behind police ramparts, she had already pre-emptively lashed out at what she called her "haters" by tweeting that she and the gown's Black immigrant designer were about to "kick open the doors of the Met." She'd only meant to be figurative, of course, even strategically quoting Marshall McLuhan for the woefully non-savvy hordes of haters out there: "The medium is the message."

But the message-bomb that was meant to burst in the rarefied air at the Met Gala turned out to be kind of a dud, once word leaked out that designer Aurora James is actually a native of Toronto, Canada and is the girlfriend of wealthy Seagrams heir Benjamin Bronfman.

AOC aims to have her cake and eat it too. She is both the user and the used. She used Met Gala founder and storied Vogue editor Anna Wintour to help elevate her brand and her progressive platform.  Wintour is a major political power player and one of the Democratic  Party's most successful bundlers and fundraising event hostesses, having raised millions of dollars for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But she has also faced significant criticism from even her own staff for excluding black and brown people from her publishing and fashion empire.

As a New York Times critique published a year ago told it:

As Ms. Wintour ascended, Vogue’s publication of “hurtful or intolerant” content rarely resulted in lasting negative attention for her. But Black journalists who have worked with Ms. Wintour, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they had not gotten over their experiences at a magazine whose workplace mirrored its exclusive pages.

Under Ms. Wintour, 18 people said, Vogue welcomed a certain type of employee — someone who is thin and white, typically from a wealthy family and educated at elite schools. Of the 18, 11 people said that, in their view, Ms. Wintour should no longer be in charge of Vogue and should give up her post as Condé Nast’s editorial leader.

“Fashion is bitchy,” one former Black staff member said. “It’s hard. This is the way it’s supposed to be. But at Vogue, when we’d evaluate a shoot or a look, we’d say ‘That’s Vogue,’ or, ‘That’s not Vogue,’ and what that really meant was ‘thin, rich and white.’ How do you work in that environment?”

Fast forward to the Met Gala one year later, and AOC, who is Puerto Rican, was personally invited by Wintour herself, in an epic feat of woke-washing, to sit at the main table, helping to burnish her own neo-diversified brand. The splashy but rear-facing "Tax the Rich" message was, of course, safely hidden from the sensitive view of the very rich, very white, and very thin Anna Wintour. If AOC knows that she herself was used as a mere ass-covering accessory, as were the rest of the minority models, movie stars and designers at the event, then she didn't let on.

Meanwhile, if she doesn't challenge Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for his New York senate seat in a primary, she will be among the first in line to succeed him when he retires. And from there, she will no doubt make a run for the presidency. To achieve her goals, she is going to need Anna Wintour. AOC's attendance at the Met Gala was nothing if not one long drawn-out dog whistle to the ruling class that she is absolutely no threat to them.

We'll just have to wait and see whether she and her Squad entourage follow through on their threat to kill the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure bill currently in front of the House unless the already watered-down $3.5 trillion social welfare bill passes first with the unanimous Democratic support that it needs.

The latest offer on the negotiating table  to "centrists" is to delay Medicare dental coverage for the elderly until 2028. What, after all, are a few million more lost geriatric teeth, oral infections and associated morbidity and mortality in the grand scheme of things? It may be the American twilight's last gleaming, but at least if the rich get taxed the cajoling AOC way, we'll have some gleaming choppers or shiny dentures to look forward to - if we can only hang on for a few more years in fires, floods, heat waves and hurricanes.

 As sick as we are and as sickened as we might feel, let's be healthily skeptical of AOC and of course, of every other politician who claims to feel our pain. Despite her melodramatic kvetching about "I and my body (being) relentlessly policed from all corners,"  criticism of the powerful by the powerless is not hatred at all. It's an attempt both at self-preservation and the preservation of society as a whole. It's actually a form of love.

Meanwhile, I say let AOC pursue her transactional career in political performance art. Don't let the shallow spectacle get you down. 

How (a few of) the Mighty Have Fallen

Irony reached new heights Monday night, when New York's attorney general was forced to resign his office for slapping and choking women even before the last opulent bondage and torture-themed costume had exited the annual Met Gala. The poor New York Times was even forced to temporarily replace its best and worst-dressed slideshows of the decadent event with the shocking news of Eric Schneiderman's downfall.

And talk about role reversal --  he will now be investigated by Cyrus Vance, the same Manhattan district attorney whom Schneiderman had been ostensibly investigating for the alleged deep-sixing of a New York City police investigation of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein.

I say "ostensibly," because Schneiderman has always been something of a poseur. You might vaguely remember him as the "tough on Wall Street" prosecutor who was conveniently co-opted by President Barack Obama in 2014 to head up a special federal task force on financial crime. Needless to say, not one banker ever went to jail as a result. This could possibly have been because Obama somehow not only forgot to provide Schneiderman with an office staff, he'd even neglected to give him an office. Or one single phone.

But Schneiderman got the next best thing to a real function, official Oval Office cuff-links, or a trip to Disneyland. He got an honored seat next to Michelle Obama at that year's State of the Union address.  He got the biggest political prize of all: saturated, nationwide corporate media coverage.

More recently, he'd bathed himself in glowing saturated coverage by posing as righteously as the legal face of the anti-Trump #Resistance as he'd once posed as the new anti-bankster sheriff in town. He pretended to be Lancelot defending legions of Guineveres at the same time he was abusing them in the castle keeps of his West Side bachelor pad, the Hamptons, and wherever the rich and famous congregate. So it should come as no surprise that Schneiderman would defend his assaults as "consensual role-playing" exercises.

  I signed up for Eric's mailing list way back in the good old days when I still thought he was sincere about fighting Wall Street in the vein of one of his predecessors, the also-fallen Eliot Spitzer. I first became smitten with the dapper Schneiderman persona in 2011, when the Obama administration began putting a lot of pressure on him to back off the banksters. My AG-crush reached its crescendo when Kathryn Wylde, a New York Fed official, actually confronted Eric on the sacred steps of the Catholic church where the funeral for Governor Hugh Carey had just been held, and demanded that he lay off Bank of America. When he was kicked off a federal panel by an Obama factotum for refusing to make a sweetheart deal with foreclosure fraudsters, I was in his email fan club for life. Or so I thought at the time.

Despite my gradual awakening to Eric's true posing nature, the revelations of his sadistic violence still have the capacity to shock. And here I thought that Timothy Cardinal Dolan, partying at the decadent Catholic-themed Met Gala on Monday night, right alongside Rihanna dressed as a Borgia pope, was the shock of the day. This event was the total obverse of Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities, as Dolan profusely thanked private equity robber baron Stephen Schwartzmann for financing the "Heavenly Bodies" museum exhibit, which includes a leather bondage mask draped in rosary beads and a near-topless scarlet dress fashioned from cardinals' robes.   

If even the righteous professional virtue-signalers of Dark Ages America can't beat them, the pragmatic philosophy goes, they might as well join them. How else would the Church remain the wealthiest institution on the face of planet?

As for Schneiderman, his mortal sin was that while he was pretending to beat up the bankers, he was beating up on women, both physically and emotionally. He compensated for his craven wrist-slap of Wall Street by slapping women's faces so severely that he literally left his hand-print on one victim's skin, while he rendered another woman chronically hearing-impaired.

One thing I always found weird about his frequent fund-raising emails was that he rarely signed them himself. A female campaign underling usually wrote them on his behalf, probably to distance him from money and the incessant grubbing of it. Like many a top cop before him, he invested a lot of time and energy into the maintenance of his squeaky-clean, virtue-signalling image. (see Comey, James.)

It of course came as no surprise when current Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a stalwart friend of Wall Street despite some recent progressive role-playing exercises, was the first VIP to demand Schneidermann's resignation on Monday. For his part, Cuomo may or may not also be under official investigation for bribery and other corrupt things which have nothing to do with the #MeToo movement. So he's probably safe, despite experiencing some ostensible discomfort from his primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon.

As a matter of fact, Schneiderman probably could have gotten away with his violence and alleged drug abuse were it not for the "wokeness" of his victims, engendered by the #MeToo movement. 

Only a precious few of the Mighty ever fall, and it's usually for the crime of not having kowtowed to other Mighty Righties obsequiously enough - or as Cardinal Dolan put it at Monday night's Met Gala, not adhering smarmily enough to "truth, goodness and beauty".

Why else would the wealthy celebrities dress up in their Torquemadan S&M attire at their annual Bacchanalia if not, as Dolan gushed, to show that "we love to serve the poor to do good.  And that's why we're into things such as art, poetry, music, liturgy and, yes, even fashion, to thank God for the gift of beauty."