Wednesday, 10 April 2019, was a school night, and one of the Boys wasn’t feeling well, so just his brother and I went out that evening to attend the Kamala Harris “town hall” being held on the university campus. I understand, I think, the idea behind the “town hall” name, and the image it is supposed to evoke. What I don’t quite understand is why this phrase is used. How many folks even have a “town hall”—a city hall, sure—and who would go there for anything except routine (one hopes) bureaucratic maintenance? Has anyone ever had a “town hall style” meeting in an actual town hall? The thought that this is nostalgia seems at least a bit off, as that feeling has as its object something in one’s own past. In any event, armed with some suitably linguistic m(is)usings, we set off.
The street in front of the university building was very busy and the parking ramp across from it overflowing when we arrived, so I let my Boy out as I sought parking elsewhere. It took a while, a sure sign of something significant in our Big Time College Sports town, where the auguries that matter are the parking of cars, not the flight of birds. Evidently this was An Event. Sure enough, when I returned the line for the Event stretched out from the entry doors, snaked down the stairwell in front of me, and uncoiled again on the floor below.
The hall was the largest ballroom in the building: a real Headliner always plays The Big Room. Entry required an exchange: you get a ticket, they get your name and, if you were feeling generous, you could also donate your address, email, and phone number. I was not in a giving vein. I got in about 15 minutes after the scheduled start, 45 after the doors had opened, and I wasn’t a bit late (Headliners will make you wait). The ballroom was fully carpeted, which suggested some limits on its use for its nominal purpose, and almost as populated.
Music was playing, and the tune when I entered was a Jackson Five. My recognizing it and some others (e.g., Prince) doesn’t make me the augor they need (my flock’s featherings are meager), but one cut should be the campaign theme song: “One nation under a groove”—now that suggests a Clinton administration worth supporting—If they only had the nerve. The music seemed to set a vibe-of-color, but given how strongly the Headliner emphasizes doing right by kids—“I feel this is so critically important: I believe you can judge a society based on how it treats its children”—Jackson tunes should maybe be . . . reconsidered?
The crowd was indeed large and cross (who knows, maybe inter) sectional. The Harris pols put the number at over 900, very good for Iowa City, and probably nearishly accurate. The set-up was theater-in-the-round, though the stage itself was square. There were bar stools with wireless microphones on the stage. Some folks maybe hoped for a drop-the-mic moment, but they would be disappointed. There were many press people, occupying a special section at the back of the room. Clearly, Sitting Senator Runs is News (even if s/he doesn’t bite dog).
The seats behind the stage, off to the side of the staging-area, were bleachers, all the others were on the ground. Most people seemed to have seats. As I moved among we-the-standees, the pre-talk mainly coursed politicsy, with a heavy topping of “where-when-is-she?” (Headliners will make you wait). On each side of the walkway leading from staging to stage there were two very large flag placards: two US flags and two Iowa state flags, perhaps so that the visitors were clear on who the natives were and the natives were clear on where the visitors were heading.
There were four opening acts. The first was a local amateur, an ed student. The second was a Harris pol, a state-wide something-or-other (resume no doubt available). They didn’t give off much that could be called a vibe. Then came the featured undercard: Iowa’s two leading female African American electoral politicians (yes, yes, we know). The first had won a surprising primary victory, then had lost a surprisingly close race in trying to become the first female African American to win a state-wide office (yes, we KNOW—but compare Beto maybe?). The second was more local: the first female African American to win a county-wide office (LOOK, WE KNOW WE LIVE IN IOWA), one with some actual local power. They had vibe, and amped up the anticipation for the Headliner (Headliners will make you wait—about an hour in this case).
The Headliner hand-shook her way from the staging area to the stage, took an embrace and a microphone from her opening act, and launched herself with a local reference (“Go Hawks!”). Not tall, she wore a dark, two-button suit, the pants of which covered highish-heeled boots. She indexed (lack of) height and its potential to prevent breaking (glass) ceilings early on, in an anecdote answering the “Why are you running?” question.
Height is introduced through the mother who raised the Headliner and her sister: “all of five feet tall” while seeming “seven feet tall” to those who met her. Putting her hand on her hip, turning to her right, and then taking a couple of steps, the Headliner—pointing now at an invisible . . . herself?—explains that if you came home complaining about something, her mother would immediately respond—the voice changes now—“Whatta you goin’ do ‘bout it?” The answer, back in her own voice: “So I decided to run for President of the United States!” and she breaks up, all laughter and smiles.
It’s a good, effective, and affecting, moment—one feels, but resists, the impulse to say “bit”—and worth thinking about. Many people will acknowledge having a fear of heights, but it’s fair to say that even more people won’t acknowledge having a disrespect for ‘shorts’, and the Headliner addressed this by slyly suggesting she inherited not just her mother’s height but also her stature. She provided an image of (embattled?) sisterhood: a small mother and two (small) daughters facing down the world. A lesson from Duke Ellington’s childhood comes to mind: “Command, don’t demand, respect.” Her answer to the “Why run?” question was surprisingly satisfying for us due to the irrepressible pleasure it gave her. Witnessing her inhabiting and presenting of her mother, the shifts in gesture, movement, and, most of all, voice and speech pattern, we feel like we’ve been let in, that we’ve been afforded a glimpse into the Headliner’s inner life, of what matters so much to her that she carries it around with her all the time.
Yes, but . . . what about that voice and speech pattern? I never saw or heard Shyamala Gopalan Harris (she died in 2009), so I have no direct knowledge here. I do know—it’s no kind of secret—that her first language was Tamil and that she came to the US when she was in her early 20s, to earn a PhD at UC Berkeley. Without going far down a potential blind alley that it’d be hard for me to gracefully back out of, I do wonder: is that the voice and speech pattern of a native speaker of a Dravidian language, daughter of a diplomat, winner of a national medal for singing classical Indian music? It seemed much more familiar to US hearers than what we might have imagined (with little or no grounds) a native Tamil speaker would sound like.
But so what? Well, there’s this: in the first five minutes, the Headliner framed her remarks with a question she said everyone in the US has to answer right now: “Who are we?” And her overall organizing rhetorical move was “Let’s speak some truth”, and each item that followed was styled an instance of “speaking truth”. Now I don’t think (she thought) she was giving us some not truth when she spoke in her mother(‘s) tongue. However, as Oscar Wilde told us: “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.”
Let’s be clear: complexity is a Good Thing, everyone else has more of it than we tend to credit them with, and, perhaps despite the Harris Pols best efforts, some of it seemed to leak out when the Headliner did her thing. That said, before trying to look out far and in deep, let’s get a sense of what could be visible even to the people along the sand.
She said “access to health care . . . should [be] a right” and that it’s “immoral . . . [when] people are denied access to healthcare” due to ability to pay, so she supports “the goal of Medicare for all.” Why not simply “health care” (“access to”?) and “Medicare for all” (“the goal of”?)—if you don’t think there’s a difference, use the stronger, cleaner wording; if you do, what is it?
When we met up afterwards, I asked my Boy what sort of vibe he thought the Event had. He said a negative one, that a picture of today as nasty and brutish (but not short!) was conjured. I was pretty shocked. I hadn’t registered that; I had been lulled by her “our fight is born out of optimism”. But he hadn’t been, and he was right, of course. Part of the task just is enumerating the current problems. The other part is exhibiting the correct solution (you). While I had chewed over the second, he had choked on the first. Maybe together we could clean the plate, but the Headliner can’t count on everyone consuming her words family-style.
When the Headliner speaks, she makes a point. That is, she extends her index finger. Sometimes she points at something/one specific, like when she turned her mother channel on; other times it’s a vague or general point out there; but often, her index finger just points straight up, not out and at. All these literal, physical points are, of course, made along with rhetorical, verbal points.
Many—not nearly all, probably not most, but more than a few—of those points were about a need to enforce existing laws that are being ignored (for example in labor and discrimination law). Not things at which to turn up one’s nose, nor to be sneezed at, but perhaps a sniffle is in order. The Headliner is, famously or notoriously, a lawyer, specifically a prosecutor (in 2013 then POTUS Obama called her “by far the best-looking attorney general in the country”—these were the years before Jeff Sessions and William Barr, of course). Law has biases toward limits and the past, so being very good at the law, or legal thinking, can lead to thinking within limits (limited thinking?) and looking backwards. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a good legal mind or a lawyer need be (whatever might be meant by) “conservative”. “Radical lawyers” exist. But they rarely become prosecutors, and if one does, it’ll be an established white male without any other political ambitions (that is, Lawrence Krasner). Not a surprise, then, if the Headliner does lawyer-think, but worth noting, as is also that a surprise can be a Good Thing.
The Headliner’s being down by law with the law reminded me of a class Charles V. Hamilton (best known for writing Black Power with Stokely Carmichael) taught in the early 70s. A family friend sat in and described it as “How to become a Black mayor (when your city isn’t majority Black)”; the official title was something like “Problems in US urban politics”. There was a single strategy: “you need to ‘reassure’ enough white voters that you are ‘responsible’.” The class then consisted of analyzing tactics in contexts, real and imagined, for candidates, actual and possible. The 40+ years since have widened the electoral net and increased the catch, as even a little reflection reveals.
It isn’t just her legal past that catches the Headliner. She decried “having a commander-in-chief” who doesn’t trust “the American intelligence community” because “we cannot afford that kind of approach to our security and our standing in the world.” And she often likes to list what there is that should be extended rather than describe what there isn’t that needs to be created. But it’s not so simple. Her signature proposal is for increasing school teacher pay with the “first in our nation ever federal investment in [it]” (in Iowa, the increase, she said, would be $12,200 per year). Complexity returns.
So we get back to how the Headliner talks. She obviously enjoys doing voices. Besides her mother, she calls up the pinched voice of the nay-sayer: “Well, how you gonna pay for it?” about her plan for a middle-and-below cash payment tax credit, followed by, again, uncontainable laughs and smiles, these shared with the still-onstage opening act, and a roused and rousing response, “I’ll tell you how we gonna pay for it! On day one we gonna repeal that tax cut that benefitted the top 1% and richest corporations,” index finger straight up, hand circling in the air. Or, hand on hip, she gives us in clipped tones the self-satisfied smugness of conventional wisdom: “The economy is great. The economy is great. The economy is doing great.” Or when, with a small head nod, she slips a soft “y’now what I’m talkin’ ‘bout” midword into a set piece on “speaking truth”. While these are conscious, sometimes infectious, play, they also slide into and merge with something else: the varieties of speech-register experience in her talk.
Sometimes her diction and syntax can get hyper-formal, even technical: “inflection moment”, “consent decrees”, “the relationship of trust is by its very nature a reciprocal relation”, “my analysis is that the metric of our success”; sometimes puzzling “work on the importance of restoring the importance of truth and justice”; and occasionally just a bit disheartening, like when she ran together facts of feeling with a stimulus program “one of the greatest expressions a society can make of love for its children is to invest in their education, and by extension to invest in their teachers”. But she’ll also get conversational, telling us “they’re playin’ politics”, “people are workin’—they’re workin’ two an’ three jobs”, “I don’ know anyone who can get by [on minimum wage]”, and “look, this moment’ll pass”. Everyone moves around in their speech, of course, but I’m not sure everyone moves quite so much, quite so openly, and quite so casually. What seems odd is that it doesn’t seem odd coming from her. If you just listen to the Headliner, you might not even hear it.
Maybe, then, for her Du Bois’s “double-consciousness” isn’t enough. While biography isn’t destiny (because nothing is), it can be suggestive. Her parents were immigrants to the US, a Tamil and a Jamaican. Born in Oakland, her childhood was in Berkeley. She went to both a Hindu temple and a Black Baptist church, where she sang in the choir. Her adolescence was spent in Montreal; her high school, my native informant tells me, is in the fancy Anglo part of city, but would have required French pretty much daily until graduation. Then (presumably) her first self-made life-choice: college at Howard in DC; that followed by a second, to return to the family school, Berkeley, for her law degree. All those voices and registers lining her head, the Headliner comes by them naturally.
Which leads to a final thought, about the hometown she shares with another female Headliner. Maybe she’s telling us, and herself, that in her Oakland (and all our Oaklands) it’s not that there’s no there there, it’s that there’s lots to hear here.