The controversy she's catalyzed by assuming the role of President Pro Tempore in a denim vest and checking her phone from the dais spans left to right. I kind of think some of the ire from the left is intertwined with progressives' frustration about her opposition to their cherished aims, such as a $15 minimum wage, governmental intrusion into the setting of drug prices, and taking a grab-bag approach to infrastructure legislation.
It's clear she gets a kick out of being an unpredictable combination of traits. It may be that she has embellished some aspects of her upbringing, but it's pretty clear that it was weird at best, involving as she's claimed a time when the family lived in an abandoned gas station. The family was Mormon; she broke with the Latter-day Saints upon graduating from Brigham Young. She was quite the progressive herself in her social-worker days and the first years of her political career (Green Party member, PhD in "justice studies") and expressed her views colorfully ("These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they're choosing to live that life. That's bullshit. I mean, what the fuck are we really talking about here?") She's described herself as bisexual, a status that has always perplexed me. Doesn't one have to be pretty promiscuous to determine that one is bisexual? And doesn't one have to have lovers of either the opposite-sex or same-sex variety who are, shall we say, understanding of one's efforts to conclude that that is indeed one's status? (Oh, that's right, in a world where secularism and and emphasis on individuals' feelings have snuffed out conventions rooted in religion, we no longer devote any thought to how others conduct their sex lives.)
But since her election to the Senate, she's been the kind of Democrat that makes the majority of that party's members pull their hair out. She voted against the Green New Deal. She voted for confirming David Bernhardt (a former - gasp! - oil company executive!) as Interior Secretary. And, as noted above, she does not dig the idea of a $15-per-hour minimum wage.
The way she's positioned herself in the last couple of years had righties - of the sort who live for clicks on their daily sensationalizing - providing lots of oxygen to the restroom incident of a couple of weeks ago. And, I mean, who couldn't - unless one were an ate-up activist type - see the utter absence of basic decency in chasing a Senator into a restroom stall while haranguing her about how she was going to vote on massive spending bills?
Now, with regard to the stunt at hand, I weigh in on the side of tradition and decorum. It was wrong for her to wear the denim vest. Then again, ideologically, I'm part of a breed that quite possibly faces extinction - that is to say, an actual conservative.
I keep having occasion to come back to the opening paragraphs of Joseph Epstein's 2004 Weekly Standard essay, "The Perpetual Adolescent":
WHENEVER ANYONE under the age of 50 sees old newsreel film of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak of 1941, he is almost certain to be brought up by the fact that nearly everyone in the male-dominated crowds--in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland--seems to be wearing a suit and a fedora or other serious adult hat. The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. A major depression was ending, a world war was on. Even though they were watching an entertainment that took most of them back to their boyhoods, they thought of themselves as adults, no longer kids, but grown-ups, adults, men.
How different from today, when a good part of the crowd at any ballgame, no matter what the age, is wearing jeans and team caps and T-shirts; and let us not neglect those (one hopes) benign maniacs who paint their faces in home-team colors or spell out, on their bare chests, the letters of the names of star players: S-O-S-A.
Part of the explanation for the suits at the ballpark in DiMaggio's day is that in the 1940s and even '50s there weren't a lot of sport, or leisure, or casual clothes around. Unless one lived at what H.L. Mencken called "the country-club stage of culture"--unless, that is, one golfed, played tennis, or sailed--one was likely to own only the clothes one worked in or better. Far from casual Fridays, in those years there weren't even casual Sundays. Wearing one's "Sunday best," a cliché of the time, meant wearing the good clothes one reserved for church.
Dressing down may first have set in on the West Coast, where a certain informality was thought to be a new way of life. In the 1960s, in universities casual dress became absolutely de rigueur among younger faculty, who, in their ardor to destroy any evidence of their being implicated in evil hierarchy, wished not merely to seem in no wise different from their students but, more important, to seem always young; and the quickest path to youthfulness was teaching in jeans, T-shirts, and the rest of it.
Life in that different day was felt to observe the human equivalent of the Aristotelian unities: to have, like a good drama, a beginning, middle, and end. Each part, it was understood, had its own advantages and detractions, but the middle--adulthood--was the lengthiest and most earnest part, where everything serious happened and much was at stake. To violate the boundaries of any of the three divisions of life was to go against what was natural and thereby to appear unseemly, to put one's world somehow out of joint, to be, let us face it, a touch, and perhaps more than a touch, grotesque.
Today, of course, all this has been shattered. The ideal almost everywhere is to seem young for as long as possible. The health clubs and endemic workout clothes, the enormous increase in cosmetic surgery (for women and men), the special youth-oriented television programming and moviemaking, all these are merely the more obvious signs of the triumph of youth culture. When I say youth culture, I do not mean merely that the young today are transcendent, the group most admired among the various age groups in American society, but that youth is no longer viewed as a transitory state, through which one passes on the way from childhood to adulthood, but an aspiration, a vaunted condition in which, if one can only arrange it, to settle in perpetuity.
Am I vulnerable to a charge of hypocrisy here? After all, and this is a mindset I'd developed before the pandemic, but which was greatly reinforced by it, I tend to think in terms of how much of my day I can maneuver through in short and a tee shirt. But if that's the case, that's what I am, and I consider it a step up from never having known better. And when a situation absolutely calls for formality, I'm happy to rise to the occasion.
My conclusion is that, 2021 post-America being what it is, we're just going to be encountering a fairly constant parade of characters in our political and cultural life. Sinema's gonna Sinema, and sometimes it will please this bunch and some other times, the other bunch.
I suppose the argument can be made that having a greater number of characters in proportion to the number of button-down serious people makes us a more fun society. But then I survey the landscape, and it doesn't look like too many folks are having much fun at all.
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