So here is Bernie—masked, legs crossed, wearing mittens like the ones your mother said, as you went to second grade, “Don’t lose the mittens!”
Here is Bernie in the in front of the obelisk in 2001, hanging upside down on a branch with bats, in Trump’s garish gilt-drenched apartment, all over She-Who-Murdered-the-Rose-Garden-for-a-Photo-Op’s dress as she exits Air Force one the final time, cubed up in a Picasso painting, with The Joker in the subway, on the Schitt’s Creek billboard, at the Last Supper, onstage during Hamilton, in the dark of night with wolves, being yelled at by Ralph Kramden, at home in a stained glass window, in the oval office as Joe Biden signs a proclamation, as a crocheted doll, with Tony Soprano and his psychiatrist, with the queen, with sexy ladies, in the first car of a roller coaster….
He out-Zeligs Zelig; he out-Gumps Forrest Gump. Why? Why this plethora of Bernie memes? Why are the memes of Bernie?
When Trump left, it wasn’t like the departure or death of a loved person or dog or cat. It was a relief. It wasn’t an empty space in our imagination but rather the removal of a constant irritation: like a painful boil on a buttock that suddenly was no longer there. It isn’t missed; it’s absence is relief, lightness, the ability to sit without worrying about it.
Trump’s voice was gone, his face was gone, his tweets were gone. You could turn on a TV set or radio and see and hear something else. The rational world occupied the space he’d malignantly dominated for more than four years. The only time we hear about him now is in relation to criminal behaviors for which he may or may not be held accountable, just like any other crook who makes the news.
The past year—dealing with Trump and Covid—has been rough on everybody. Most of us know people who have died of Covid. Trump and his enablers, are responsible for the great majority of those deaths. Now it’s just Covid and, for the first time, the US government is addressing it as a public health issue rather than a PR nuisance.
The past four years have been four years of lies, of bad spelling, of an absurd hairdo, of comical orange makeup. Every single day.
All gone.
How do you represent that? There are no images for negatives. All artists know that. For lost or absent loved ones, we have memories and photos and stories. But there is no image of the space no longer occupied. But who wants to recall a memory, look at a photo, or hear or tell a story about Trump? How to represent the delight, the silence, the ascent of reason?
Bernie’s mittens. In that photo, surrounded by people in skin-tight black leather gloves, he wearsa that look as if they’d been made from wool salvaged from an old sweater. The fingers he was relentlessly jabbing at every camera lens or audience when he spoke are wrapped in those mittens. Those fingers, for the first time since we’ve known him, are quiet.
Bernie’s face mask: when addressing an audience, he never talked. He barked. A former Congressional colleague refers to him as “the scold.” You can’t scold from behind a mask. Behind the mask, the barking scold was silent.
All the things he said that we agreed with: they’re still on the table. All his behaviors that drove us nuts: they were contained by those mittens and that mask, punctuated by the crossed legs. As he sat there, Joe Biden spoke and our world veered toward what MSNBC commentator Nicolle Wallace called, “the radical normal.”
What better image of that than Bernie? In that single moment, he became what he’d barked, jabbed and scolded so long to be: Bernie Everyman, Bernie Everywhere. Bernie in every visual form and forum. Bernie as a meme everybody on our side can delight in. The evil of the world is still with us—the Plague, racism, economic and gender inequality, stupidity and ignorance. But the conversation is no longer dominated by the Prince of Lies.
Bernie as the perfect Man of the Moment. It wasn’t the role he wanted, but it was the one he fit better than anyone else. It only lasted a few days. New memes have tapered off. But they made their point: they got us from the swearing in and that evening’s astonishing concert and fireworks display to a place where real work is really going on. We’ve got our world back, at least for now. It’s not pretty, but it’s not pretty in a way we know. Bernie and his mittens marked, more than anything else, our transition.
