 bluewaikiki.com [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr
Today: Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, writer, editor, co-founder of the new blog, Hearing Things, and author of the forthcoming book Vaquera.
Issue No. 197Like Common People
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Like Common PeopleI spent election night at a private watch party in Manhattan hosted by a literal billionaire. A friend who was working there invited me, saying he needed moral support. I had intended to observe the returns in my apartment with a blanket, my boyfriend, and my two cats, and even before agreeing to attend I knew this party would be the worst kind of party. But I also knew I would get free food and a good story out of it, and if there’s anything a writer loves, it’s free food and a good story (in that order). Besides that, I am never knowingly in the proximity of billionaires, and I thought it might be a worthwhile anthropological mission, to see how the other .0001 percent lives. Though this would be an even rarer space, because the billionaire is a progressive Democrat, and the party would be emceed by people of color on the liberal left. I know what you are thinking and yes, the free food was bananas. I have never consumed a fresher or more buttery slice of salmon sashimi. The water was mineral with a dainty slice of lime, and was just served without asking. (Tap? For plebes.) The bar was, perhaps obviously, open, though in my 28 years of voting I have learned that election night is best suffered through sober. There were little trays of Greek olives on each table, swimming in fine oil that glinted off the candlelight. “Isn’t this delicious?” my boyfriend gushed, while eating an exceptional potato chip. I felt like I was cosplaying Gatsby, only instead of pearls I was wearing a XXL t-shirt that read “I WILL AID AND ABET ABORTION.” An attractive middle aged white man tried to hit on me by complimenting it. The party felt like the Democratic establishment and its material failures. The air was thick with wealth and high-end personal fragrances, obvious even through all the Harris merch worn by the majority-white people in attendance—quiet luxury, I guess, a camo Harris-Walz trucker hat on the top, the Row loafers on the bottom. The hosts were funny in that they were comedians, but the crowd wasn’t really laughing until a 20-something white kid came out to tell moldy jokes about how the U.S. is sooo different from his home in the UK. I later learned he was the son of a different billionaire (not the host). The vibes were so bad that one comedian—the friend who invited me—basically said “fuck it” and started telling ACAB jokes. The crowd did not like that. The second comedian, a well-known Black woman from the South, interrupted her own objectively funny set to stick her head backstage and yell, “Am I done yet?” Confronted with realist humor about race and class, a majority of the party attendees were mostly dour, maybe short-circuiting. A lovely man running for mayor introduced himself to each person at my table, though it was quite obvious we had no real funds to channel campaign-wards and he quickly moved on. At one point I looked up and the multi-millionaire Democrat from my House district about whom, that morning, I’d made a big deal about not voting for, was literally standing above me, wearing an extremely well-tailored suit and his Congressional pin. (I knew he had a safe win; I wrote-in the working-class progressive he pushed out in the last election.) Hell hath the most banging hors d’oeuvres. Collectively, those in the room had no doubt donated millions to the Harris campaign. In my capacity as a journalist I have been in highly rarefied spaces before—hotel rooms at the Carlisle, the offices of some of the most powerful publications and television networks in the U.S., a weird secret wellness community where celebrities go to get away, Nicki Minaj’s dressing room—but as they say, if you grew up working class, you never stop feeling working class, and places like those magnify that feeling. To put it another way, I didn’t really feel uncomfortable eating their food. It was more like I felt uncomfortable because all these people with their good intentions and knowingness about their own good intentions were full of shit maybe? Like when was the last time they talked to a working-class person they didn’t employ? I could be interviewing for a job at the top of a glimmering glass building, but granted entry to those kinds of spaces I never feel more like the non-college-educated Wyoming Chicana that I am. Even with everything that striving has gotten me—even with the Mexican immigrant work ethic instilled by my mom, which has made my own position inside the barely existing middle-class exceptional in and of itself. People like my hosts join the corporate media, which is stumbling over itself just as they are to figure out what went wrong in the Harris campaign. They are erroneously blaming anti-genocide voters and Muslims and “Latinos.” But having grown up with poor and working class Mexican Americans and whites in the reddest state in the nation, where the last swing to Democrat was for LBJ in 1964, I have one answer for them: no matter how much we all love Beyoncé and Gracie Abrams and J.Lo, people are fucking struggling.  Image: tacobell.com The cost of a cheese quesadilla at Taco Bell has gone up to $4.89. I bring that up because, in the early 2000s when I had just started writing for glossy magazines, yet was at my brokest, the dollar-twenty-nine cheese quesadilla at the Union Square Taco Bell legit kept me going—a weekly treat to supplement the twenty-five-cent packets of peanut butter crackers I was living on from the bodega. (But hey bitch, I was skinny! 🫠) Twenty years later, the glossy magazine pay is the same. The tacos are not. Replicate that ratio with food and wages billions of times across the country, mix it up with fascist rhetoric, supercharge it with the country’s foundational racism and sexism and more recent demonization of its proportionally tiny population of trans people, and here we motherfucking are. The party seemed stunned when a kind-seeming white man wearing a VOTE! t-shirt took the stage and announced that it didn’t look good for Harris in North Carolina or Georgia, but that she still had a path. I looked over and saw a celebrity famous for her liberal politics and portrayal of a magical child-witch gazing up at him from the front row. She had a phenomenal dye job—like some of the shiniest, prettiest hair I’ve ever seen in person. My boyfriend and I decided then we had to get outta there, and made our way to the bus stop.
FLAMING FURIOUSHamilton Nolan has written a screed for the ages over at In These Times.
There are about a zillion more people on Bluesky all of a sudden. Follow the Flaming Hydra Starter Pack for a taste of the old internet, and the new one.
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