Staunchly, vol. 117: Tear Down the Ivy

10/14/19

This weekend, a black woman was murdered in her home by a white police officer responding to a “wellness check.” 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson was “playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew when she went to investigate a ‘prowler’ outside the window, which was the officer that shot her.” Her lawyer has created a GoFundMe, which you can donate to here, to support her family and cover funeral costs.

Everytime I hear one of these stories, I remember the worst night of my life, when I knew I was going to kill myself. I was high, erratic, dangerous, at least to my own being. As a desperate, final hail mary, I called the cops on myself. They brought an ambulance, which took me to the UCLA hospital, where doctors treated me in the emergency psych ward. Everyone was mostly kind and average, at worst ill-equipped to handle the frantic, inexplicable pain of a girl who felt an itch to die and wanted to scratch.

I know there is a strong chance I only survived that night because I am white. Because the cops picked me up in Bel-Air; because they didn’t see me as a threat. Nice, crazy girl in a rich neighborhood. I kept apologizing.

I hate that I think of my own worst night when I read about a tragedy like Jefferson’s, a woman murdered in her own fucking home by a man whose literal entire job is the protection of her “wellness.” I hate the self-centering impulse I have, still untrained out of me, to relate something that has absolutely nothing to do with me to my own experiences.

Generously, I can see this impulse as an act of reckoning, a way of activating empathy through confrontation with my own racial privilege. I am, to bastardize Didion, on more than nodding terms with my own trauma. It is the way I enter into communion with the pain I see in the world. For me personally, that communion is essential to anything meaningful.

As I said, that is a generous reading. It is also, in its way, a cop-out. My instinct to relate springs from a genuine desire to access the horror of a moment in the service of honoring it. It also arises from a package of racial, socio-economic privilege that has taught me from birth that my pain is always relevant.

Paradoxically, I share the story of my own worst night to both highlight the stunning privilege that undergirds my own survival and to undermine the significance of the story of my own worst night. We shouldn’t have to commune, to empathize, to relate to feel the urgency of this tragedy. In this moment, there is no truth but Atatiana Jefferson’s truth. There is no other night but the night a little boy saw his aunt murdered in cold blood by the state.

I will keep trying to be better, starting by donating here.

I dream of one day owning a house wrapped in magical, overgrown ivy. My mom says of such a set-up: “Ivy is a hotel for rats.” Another friend’s mom calls it a “ladder for rats.” Yet another friend’s mom (have I tapped into some secret West LA mom code?) stood and watched with my friend, her daughter, as their gardeners removed a giant swath of ivy from their trellis, revealing an entire colony of vermin, shaken out like the final, doomed passengers on deck when the Titanic reached its final angle.

We are two years into Me Too and we have shaken out a lot of rats. Yet, as Ronan Farrow’s new book, and all the reporting around it, shows: there remains a wild, shielding, conspiracy of ivy.

This week Matt Lauer responded to Brooke Nevils, a woman who told Farrow that Lauer anally raped her during the Sochi Olympics, causing her to bleed for days. Lauer’s response is so (we now know) characteristically disgusting, sexist, and predatory, it seems shocking that it took us until 2017 to realize what scummy violent stuff this man is made of. We didn’t realize, of course, because there is a web of powerful, gross men still in charge whose entire careers consist of protecting other powerful, gross men—keeping the scummy violent stuff out of view so they and their friends can stay scummy and violent.

Men like Noah Oppenheim, Andy Lack, and Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC who allegedly waved a paparazzi picture of Maria Menounos’ exposed genitals (resulting from a swimsuit mishap) at a staff meeting, sighing heavily and saying, “Not bad. Not bad.”

Not bad. Words that cannot describe Griffin, or Oppenheim, who once wrote for the Harvard Crimson that women “enjoy being confined, pumped full of alcohol and preyed upon,” or Lack, who allegedly harassed young female employees for years and years.

These men are still in charge! They run a news network! They are tasked with shaping the “objective” political narrative during this, the scariest most unhinged era in modern politics!

Rebecca Traister puts it all much more eloquently here, but I guess my point is: we can’t just focus on the rats. We need to tear down the ivy.

Two months after the horrifying ICE raids in Mississippi, when hundreds of children came home from the first day of school to find their parents inexplicably missing, the immigrant community there is still reeling. I know keeping tabs on all the atrocities of the Trump presidency feels fully Sisyphean, but it’s our job to keep pushing.
Warren vs. Zuckerberg is legitimately the most unfair fight in recent memory. I am enjoying watching her make such beautiful art out of trolling.
These be cursed times.
“Season liberally” !!! We stan a principled, anti-Trump, outspoken, independent, Midwestern spice distributor, bbs!!! Penzey Spice Family, you got a son? Think it might be my destiny to marry into a zesty woke Wisconsin peppercorn empire.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is one of my favorite books of all time, and John le Carré might be the only white guy I genuinely care to listen to right now.
Brexit, WHOMST? The WAG drama is the true story of the British autumn. I need a statement from parliament and I need it yesterday.
In The New Republic, my friend Rachel reviews a book I mentioned loving in last week’s issue, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by (recent Nobel winner!) Olga Tokarczuk. She writes of Tokarczuk’s vegetarianism and animal activism, a protest in itself against the hard-right politics of modern Poland, and the power of fiction to rejigger our sense of the “radical”: “‘We live in the midst of a slaughterhouse and manage to ignore that,’ Tokarczuk said. ‘Our great-grandchildren will tell shocked stories about the barbarism with which their ancestors murdered animals.’ The novel incorporates these principles in its story, harnessing the propulsive power of the crime genre to get the reader to think with a different logic. Fiction is a good place to consider this kind of radical paradigm shift—a reader of a novel is already imagining other possible realities. Conjuring an enchanted forest and imagining a world without livestock slaughter are not such different mental projects.”
Speaking of witches, I liked this interview with a witch! Also a good reminder in today’s political climate that the people who scream “witch hunt” are 100% the same people who would have hunted witches.
I’m a snob who lived in DC for four years and wouldn’t let anyone touch my hair, so I’m actually shocked that AOC found a salon she trusted not to give her some tragic beltway puff n’ fluff (I feel like DC is the East Berlin of hair trends, like, they just got the Lob there). I think the true takeaway of the $80 AOC haircut, besides rampant GOP hypocrisy and sexism (which is not so much a takeaway anymore as it is the basic mirepoix of every Republican function down to exhalation), is that men have no fucking clue what it takes to be a woman in public.
Scorpio Saison is 9 days away. Let this headline from The Cut, about an unneutered Russian Blue tomcat at a Chinese pet hotel, get you in the mood: Horny Cat Needs Glucose Drip After All-Night Bone-a-Thon.

Um, realizing that minus horny cat, this is kind of a dark issue of Staunchly. Here’s one of my favorite lipsticks for fall