The Mittens as Warningīut it was more than that. ![]() Those crossed arms were the mittens saying, “Let’s see what you actually do and then we can talk about unity.” 2. But it expressed an unequivocal reservation of judgment about what was coming. It wasn’t a boycott of the occasion itself nobody wanted Trump out more than Bernie. The effect is not of a person left out at a party but rather, let’s be honest, of a person who has no interest in joining.Īt an event that was, above all, a show of cross-partisan unity, Bernie’s mittens stood in for everyone who has never been included in that elite-manufactured consensus. Just as important, however, is the posture of the mitten-wearer: the slouch, the crossed arms, the physical isolation from the crowd. Their haphazardness and the fact that Bernie clearly didn’t spare a single brain cell deciding to wear them beyond “It’s cold. Their handmade-ness in a world of mass manufacturing. Much of the media focus has been on the mittens themselves: their 1970s cross-country ski anti-style. What is the meaning, the mittenology of it all?Īs with so much else related to this new administration, it’s too soon to tell. ![]() What should we make of this? Why did so many millions connect to whatever language the mittens were speaking? Was it pandemic delirium - all of us projecting our social isolation onto the most isolated person in the crowd? Was it sexism and racism, the Bernie Bros once again failing to acknowledge the subversive messages expressed in the fashion choices of glass-ceiling shattering women? Was it, as a friend just texted as I typed these words, “the world’s secret wish that Bernie was our president”? Because in a sea of exquisitely matching face masks, Bernie Sanders’s ratty old mittens upstaged them all, instantly becoming the most discussed, delighted-in, and deranged visual message of the historic occasion.
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