In 1999, John Rocker, a beefy young relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, explained to Sports Illustrated why he would never want to play baseball in New York. “Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you're [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids,” he said. “It's depressing.” The tabloids raged, local politicians condemned the remarks, and Major League Baseball suspended him for the first few months of the coming season. Rocker's comments spurred New Yorkers to do a rare thing: praise the subway—in this case, the 7 train, with its especially diverse ridership, holding it up as an emblem of city pride.
This week, the New York subway featured in a similar skirmish in the culture wars, when a Twitter user reposted a photograph of a drag queen sitting on the train next to a woman in a niqab, with the caption, “This is the future that liberals want.” As with Rocker's comments, the framing of a subway tableau as some kind of debased and terrifying dystopia was met with widespread derision. Part of the response was urgent and earnest—another assertion of cosmopolitan values during a time of ascendant reactionary politics. Twitter users pointed out that the sight of two very different-looking people riding the train was neither remarkable nor futuristic—such things happen every day, right now. BuzzFeed tracked down Gilda Wabbit, the drag queen in the photo, who said, “I won’t speak for all liberals, but my goal is for everyone . . . to be able to exist as they choose without judgment or fear.”
Mostly, though, liberals just laughed, and, for a rare moment in the era of President Trump, they laughed at themselves—appropriating the offending tweet as a self-reflexive meme that mocked the original poster and liberal culture in equal measure. Users posted an array of photos—Power Rangers, Care Bears, the animated eco-warriors of “Captain Planet,” the Young Pope, all manner of cute animals, Justin Trudeau—as other visions of the long dreamed-of progressive future. As the meme spread, it devolved into near meaningless: people are now posting photos of just about anything with the phrase attached. It has become the first “Thanks, Obama” or “Benghazi” joke of the Trump era—an ironic repurposing of conservative outrage that is defused and made ridiculous.
The threats posed by Trumpism, of course, are serious—and one of Trumpism’s central themes is an ever-narrowing conception of what it means to be an American, what it means to belong, who gets to be counted as “us” and who as “other.” To this end, the original tweet is exactly the kind of thing that deserves serious refutation. But one of the offshoots of the rise of Trump has been to rob many liberals of their sense of humor. To pay close attention to the news is to trap oneself in a daily cycle of outrage, self-righteousness, a pained recognition of the inelegance of that self-righteousness, and, finally, a feeling of futility. Part of what made the Women's March so powerful was its scenes of comedy, not simply the signs that mocked the President but those that recognized the joyousness in the very of act of protest.
A classic strategy of the school bully is to make his enemies look, in comparison, like uptight weenies. Every time that Trump rages about “fake news,” people are compelled to respond with some form of, “No, actually, reporting is real, and facts are important and essential to the functioning of democracy.” It's a necessary response, but, on style points, the class clown always beats the teacher's pet.
Sometimes, the nonsense campaign of Trump and his most fervent supporters must be recognized as such and ignored, or else, as in this case, mocked and hijacked in a new and better direction. “This is the future that liberals want” was a stupid thing to say, and the meme it spawned is stupid, too—but it's a gleeful, exuberant kind of stupidity, and, in a small way, it has provided a moment of release. Constant vigilant outrage is not only exhausting, and eventually deflating, but it's ill suited to liberal culture, which is suffused with a healthy dose of self-awareness, self-mockery, and even self-loathing. There's a reason conservatives control talk radio, with all its grim certitude, and liberals run comedy, which is characterized by, among others things, ambivalence. As Woody Allen, in “Annie Hall,” said, “Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here.” Donald Trump, meanwhile, is said to find nothing about himself funny at all. That, as much as anything else, is worth resisting.
