Veep, Cafe Du Monde
Welcome to the twenty-first installment of my newsletter about my two very favorite things in the world.
Remember mid-May? Back when Trump fired James Comey, but before Comey's Senate testimony? Gosh, those were the days, weren't they. I spent that week in New Orleans, allegedly working on a writing project, but really refreshing the Metafilter US politics thread, going on long, sweaty walks, and losing my mind.
It was hot in New Orleans, my first exposure to sun and high humidity since September '16 (September '16! Gosh, those were the days, weren't they). Every time I went outside I felt my bones unclench just a little bit, like they were expelling bad memories of hustling, hunched over and shivering, out to lunch or to and from the subway. I generally walk pretty fast but in New Orleans that's just impossible, the air is too thick and there's too much to look at. I would leave my Air BnB at 10, planning to shop for lunch or get a coffee or check out a museum/graveyard/Confederate monument removal and come back dazed and sweaty at 4:30, unsure as to what took so long. I got a tan line on my feet -- just my feet -- from my Birkenstocks. It's still there, nearly three months later.
UC-Berkeley tan? Woodstock tan? (Actually there is a name for this)
When I wasn't walking around in a stupor, I curled up in front of the window unit AC and rewatched nearly the entire run of Veep. You would think that this is like watching a zombie movie in your living room while real live zombies are chowing down just steps away in your kitchen, and you would be right, but I enjoyed it all the same.
Veep is fucking incredible; I could end this letter now and feel like I've said enough. But alright, here we go. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (national treasure, I hope when I die there's some sort of crazy mixup and I am buried next to her) plays Selina Meyer, Vice President of the United States and the only female anti-hero (anti-heroine? isn't it crazy "anti-heroine" doesn't even sound like a real word?) I can think of on television* . The show, which first aired in 2012 (gosh, those were the days, weren't they) tracks her "rise" to "power" and her eventual run for President, in the close company of her communications director Dan, press secretary Mike, chief of staff Amy, and personal aide Gary.
*(IDK, maybe Ellen Barkin in that TNT show I don't watch)
Veep has one core joke -- "LOL, isn't the US government dysfunctional" but it explores infinite variations and permutations of the same, and they're all Stephen Hawking-level genius. In the first episode, Selina, newly-inaugurated and excited to launch her signature filibuster reform legislation, goes to a Senate breakfast to start discussions but arrives to a room basically empty. Amy calls Mike: "Mike, talk to me. I am in a room with three people and a fuckload of quiche" - and learns someone in Selina's office has tweeted "76% of govt buildings now have cornstarch utensils - let's make plastic utensils extinct!", in reference to Selina's plan to introduce cornstarch utensils to federal buildings as part of her "Clean Jobs" portfolio.
"Oh, great. We've upset the plastics industry? This whole building is bankrolled by plastics," Selina sighs.
(also the cornstarch utensils don't work)
Barbara Hallowes, a Senator who Selina consults for advice, points out that by pissing off Plastics, Selina has also pissed off Oil --- "and you do not want to fuck with those guys, because they fuck in a very unpleasant fashion."
and everything goes downhill from there. The President forces Selina to give a fundraising speech in his stead because he doesn't want to be asked about a different piece of legislation, then sends his aide Jonah to tell Selina she has to delete all references to Clean Jobs three minutes before the speech -- Mike: Just a small change in the speech. Selina: What is that? Mike: Plastics apparently talked to the President. The White House doesn't want us mentioning oil or cornstarch or plastic. Just wing it. Selina: This has been pencil-fucked completely? Mike: Uh, yes, front and back. Very little romance. Selina: That's the entire speech, okay? What's left here? I've got "hello" and I have... prepositions.
During this speech Selina uses the word "retard"and has to apologize; meanwhile a Senator on life support
dies, and Amy accidentally signs her own name to the condolence card, instead of Selina's.
"AMY!" Selina screams when she discovers the error.
This will be a theme throughout the series:
Other recurring themes: Constant, creative profanity, as befits the successor of The Thick Of It...
Dan: I was trying to use Jonah for intelligence...
extra points here for Selina's Alex Trebek-perfect French pronunciation of "croissant", which gives this scene that special je ne sais quois
Selina: "It doesn't do the job, and it makes a fucking mess!"
When I said "Fuck my face!" in response to some standard issue office bad news, I realized I might need to cut back on my Veep consumption. But I won't.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus has won five consecutive Emmys for her performance in Veep (long may she reign), but the other stellar thing about the show is the ensemble of Mike/Dan/Amy/Gary (and later, others). You can watch Veep the first time through for all of Selina's lines, and then rewatch and direct your attention to, for example, Amy. Here, Dan is sucking up to Selina after meeting her for the first time, but Amy, having briefly dated Dan, already knows he is "a shit." Dan opines, unasked, on the two mistakes Selina made in her primary campaign, and this moment
captures, for barely a second, Amy's reaction to Dan's general Dan-ness and to this advice in particular.
You can rewatch any episode of Veep only watching Amy and enjoy an excellent spin-off show that is still better than 95% of what's on TV. And, you can substitute in any other value for Amy - Gary, Mike, Dan, Jonah, later Kent, Ben, and Bill - and get another slightly different spin-off that is nuanced, responsive, hilarious, and 100% in character.
Some people don't like the first season of Veep; they can't quite tell if Selina/her staff are supposed to be sympathetic. The 2016 election also threw the show a huge huge loop -- the writers had to rewrite parts of it, so many things that had been raised in jest in past seasons were now in fact reality -- and season six starts off a little shaky.
But I'm going to opine the following. With the sixth season, Veep redeems any tonal inconsistencies in its first season and transforms itself from a (merely) great comedy to an actually devastating piece of political commentary/satire. Here's why.
Selina comes to office with the goal of passing the Clean Jobs legislation, which the President first claimed to support, then drops, mid-season, in favor of the Fiscal Responsibilty Act.
"I'm just not going to accept this," Selina says. "I'd have more power in my hands if I joined one of those moronic Sedgway tours of DC. Do you have any idea what I've lost here today?" Do you? Really?"
Dan, through his devious robot ways, is able to get most of the Clean Jobs reform drafted into an amendment to the Fiscal Responsibilities Act, which the President is eager to pass. The Amendment ties in the Senate, which means Selina has to cast the tiebreaking vote - either vote for the Amendment and for her own reform, against the President's explicit wishes (Dan, who hates the bill, advises this option -- "you support your own policy"), or vote against it, supporting the President but vetoing her own legislation (Amy, who loves the bill, advises her to vote against).
"This is some weird-ass, through-the-looking-glass shit right now," Selina says.
She votes against, and, in her own words, "destroy(s) the policy that you and I have been working on for months, if you think about it, years, Amy...Is this what I came into politics to do?"
Over the following seasons we see Selina grow more petty, narcissistic, self-serving, disingenuous, and power hungry -- there are moments in 5 and 6 she is so manic, I was like, "Are we supposed to think she's on drugs....??" She attempts to manipulate Jonah into giving the opposing party the presidency, just so she can ensure a run again in four years. She starts a sham charity foundation and "accidentally" accepts bribes from (cough) Russia-adjacent countries (cough) to fund her Presidential Library. It's all hilarious -- "isn't the US government dysfunctional" -- and then the season 6 finale aired a few weeks ago, which, BoJack Horseman style, goes deep into the past, into Selina's pre-White House political career throws everything in a strange light. We learn that Selina had all but lost her first Senate race when she caught her husband in flagrante with a rich donor, from whom Selina extracts a crucial donation, just in time to re-up her television buy. We learn that on her first day as Veep, she arrived at the White House prepared to settle in to the office near the President as promised, but the President reneged his promise and sticks her across the street.
"You and I both know that the President would never do this if I was a male VP," Selina says to Ben, the President's chief of staff.
"We'd be out there shotgunning beers, sucking each other off like Carter and Mondale."
"Ma'am, you need to understand....the President doesn't actually want you to do anything, other than continue to be a woman, which.... you're doing a pretty okay job at! He'll call you if he needs you. I'll let you walk the rest of the way, I'm trying to cut down on exercise."
It breaks my heart a little to watch Selina spin this to her staff -- "I actually have good news!" -- as they, in Amy's words, offer to "shut this down." I can't wait, should god be good and let us live another fifteen-thirty years, to read the cultural studies Ph.D theses that will be written about Veep in the age of Hilary Rodham Clinton. But for the benefit of future researchers, I read this episode, paired with the arc of season 1 -- "Sue, did the President call?" -- as a confirmation of something else Selina said -- that "politics has a sickness, and it's sick." That participating in politics, as a woman, has actually made her crazy, or that power makes you crazy, or inevitably corrupts (not a point the show has glanced even near before). Either. Both.
Is this what I came into politics to do?
Do you have any idea what I lost here today?
The second or third day of my trip, I walked to the streetcar and rode it down to the French Quarter. Bourbon Street was closed -- some sewer problem, Con Ed was on it -- and smelled worse than I had anticipated, and I had already anticipated a lot of vomit and urine. It was so humid I had stopped sweating, it seemed, though my clothes were almost soaked. I saw a clothing store that didn't look too touristy and bought a sleeveless, very short blue-and-white striped seersucker dress, which I wore out of the store. I had planned to get the famous cafe au lait and beignets at Cafe Du Monde but even wearing more seasonally appropriate attire, hot coffee just did not sound appealing. Cafe Du Monde has a lot of patio seating and a tiny indoor care; inside the A/C was like an additional force of nature, but there were no tables. I steeled myself for some cutthroat maneuvering, looking to see who had maps, who had empty cups and the bill, who was looking for their umbrellas and rifling through their bags.
"Would you like to sit with me?" another woman asked.
"Sure, um, okay," I said.
"I am also alone; I think we will be seated quicker if we are together," she said.
This didn't seem wrong. Also it would do me good to interact with another person instead of having all my human contact mediated via HBO Go/computer screen.
My new friend was visiting from Hong Kong. She asked me a lot of questions as we ordered and enjoyed our beignets and cafe au lait. I liked the beignets more than the coffee. They reminded me of the funnel cakes you can get at the Illinois State Fair and other similar regional celebrations. I love that across cultures, we've reached a consensus that fried dough dusted in sugar is a universal Good. She asked where I was staying, and I told her. She had been to the famous restaurant nearby the night before. "I'm jealous!" I said (I was on a budget). "How was the food?"
Good, rich, soo much of it, she said. This matched my experience of eating out in New Orleans.
She asked me what I thought of New Orleans.
"I love it," I said. "I've never really been to the South before. Well, I've visited Atlanta a bunch of times...that's not the same though. New Orleans isn't really the South, I guess. I mean, it is. It just has a kind of different cultural background then, like, Georgia, or the other parts of Louisiana even. " I really did not know what I was talking about. This is what happens, when you spend all day by yourself, you talk to someone and suddenly have no control over where the conversation goes, it's just your brain takes the opportunity to offgas all its detritus into the atmosphere via the direct route of your mouth.
"What do you mean by the South?" she asked.
"Ummm, good question! I guess, there's New England, and there's the South, as far as the original colonies go. You can kind of tell what is New England because the states are called "New Whatever", New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York... I live in New York -- well, New York City -- which actually isn't New England, really, either." Great. "New York is a very international city. Hong Kong too, right? Here, New Orleans, it feels like more of its own place."
I tried to think about how the South was different from New England, and I really couldn't come up with answer that wasn't food or weather or Confederacy-related. I just read books about this stuff. I'm not from either place. I don't really know.
Until next time,
Ruth
Other:
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This profile of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tony Hale (Gary) is excellent reading
