Back when I lived in New York, grassroots political people would often speculate on whether Andrew Cuomo was hiding a sexual harassment scandal. Some thought he probably was: he was so arrogant and bullying, he had to have done what men like him tend to do. Some thought, no, he’s probably too careful, too calculating to take such a risk. Some accepted the mystery. I didn’t really have any idea. One thing was generally agreed upon: if he had harassed someone, there’s no way way we’d hear about it. Cuomo kept a tight lid on anything that happened in his closest circles. But though the details were fuzzy, the basics were clear. We knew he was a bully, a self-dealer, a ruthless petty and retaliatory person who would sabotage his own party if it increased his individual power. These weren’t even accusations, these were just facts about the world, like that the wind blew more or less horizontal to the ground and gravity pulled down. Nobody anywhere on the political spectrum who was engaging in any remotely serious discussion of politics would deny that was how he operated. That would be like talking about cooking and denying that heat changed the texture of food. Nothing you said afterwards would be anything but nonsense
For a crash course on some of this here’s a compilation of just a few of the things about Cuomo’s nature from one reporter, Sarah Jaffe, with whom I share basic political views, but if you’re a centrist or even right-winger, just browse old articles from City & State or even Politico, which has some trashy shit and planted spin but has to acknowledge at least some basic reality to get away with its schtick.
Yet it was very hard to find these views – or I don’t know if they’re even subjective enough to be “views” – expressed in public to broad audiences, or absorbed by those audiences, even as they were written about like basic truths in publications focused on anyone with an engagement beyond the unserious mass media circuit. Most people outside New York, and even in New York, thought he was a good, progressive governor. He kept getting elected with broad margins. Unless you were trying to do something in politics, make some thing happen on the state level, there just wasn’t any reason to pay that close attention. Because these things aren’t interesting to most people, there was no room in national or even prestige New York media for a frank acknowledgement of how Andrew Cuomo operated. And many of the people who cared about New York politics were incentivized to bullshit or turn their heads, because kissing Cuomo’s ass got you reporting access and political power, and keeping quiet at least got you out of his sights. If you were running for office or a lead press job, you basically made some kind of blathering noise about some good thing you did, or you chose other things to talk about.
Of late, many of Cuomo’s chickens look like they’re on their way home to roost. People have reported out stories of how he lied about people who died in nursing homes, let people die in jails and prisons, threatened and cajoled politicians who tried to hold him accountable, and harassed one, two, three, now four women working in his office. AG Tish James is not bucking on either investigation. The leader of the State Senate, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, has called direct for his resignation. And yet… I’m not sure said chickens will find their way to the roost, amidst the familiar storm that may cover him. Some things are new; some things are repeating, in new form. There’s noise, especially by low-information on social media, that all these credible and throughly reported activities are part of some plot by Trump-aligned forces to get the former president pardoned. And there’s silence, still, from many who could speak. Tish James and Andrea-Stewart Cousins are two of the biggest non-Cuomo forces in New York, but they don’t have national profile, and many in the state don’t know even know their names. Maybe, through attrition and neglect, each one of the blocks of ice that threatens to sink Cuomo’s ship will be broken up, and he will sail on by, with no acknowledgement that these things are just small chips off a deep and vast iceberg.
I can’t stop searching him and Tweeting about him. I’m obsessed. I’m angry. I feel like I’m going crazy. I feel like the things I know, have seen, have used to navigate a piece of the world, will just never register in most people’s conscious. It feels very bad, obviously. And yet, I can tune out of Andrew Cuomo. He has nothing directly to do with me. And this experience – being neglected, denied your base reality – is something that doesn’t happen to me all the time, or all that often. I sometimes think about what would happen if it were - if just one of the factors that causes most of the people in the world to be treated this way - were my reality, how sad and angry and depressed I would be, how bad it might get. I don’t know. It wouldn’t be good. I’d likely survive as most do, but I wouldn’t like it. I do know that, I very much want something happen to Andrew Cuomo for the way he treats people, if not even on a vengeance level, just on a level of not getting to do it anymore. Just being out of power. Just out of the particular extraordinary power he has, from which he is always snuffing out other people’s lights. And I also know that I do not really expect that something will. And that this is, on some level, what happens in the world all the time. I hope they get Cuomo. But if they don’t, yes, it will be infuriating, but he is just one little specimen of something larger and deeper, and that deeper thing – the abuse and denial of reality that keeps happening – is something that will keep welling up and sometimes those of us who have no power over Cuomo will in fact have power to affect that flow a little bit, push back on power or at least create some pockets where people’s reality in the shadow of power has room to exist, maybe even be active.. Maybe that’s the thing to do.
There’s much more I want to say about the horrible Mr. Cuomo but for now this will have to do.
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