Collective Effervescence

 

Margaret Mead Green in Theodore Roosevelt Park, Manhattan, with the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation looming in the background. Photo by Alvaro Keding for American Museum of Natural History.

Sunday morning, after the spectacular finish of the NBA final, I was in the greenmarket outside the American Museum of Natural History, being an out-there citizen for once and helping to pass out fliers for one of the candidates in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district, Micah Lasher, who I regard as the natural successor of the departing Jerry Nadler, if you need to know—the museum entrance on that block of Columbus Avenue is the way to an early voting location, so the point wasn't so much to give them another flier (incredible amounts of money are being spent in this campaign, and we've been getting five or ten of them every day in our mailboxes) as just to remind them of our candidate's name, in case they were there to vote. 

Lasher and Nadler were there, a block or so away from my station, and I went down there to be introduced and shake their hands. When I got back, there was a Black lady sitting on one of the park benches outside the museum, taking advantage as I was of a bit of shade from the trees in the Margaret Mead Green, a little meadow park where we used to wander freely before it got fenced in some years ago, making room for the bright white shotcrete wildness of the  Gilder Center, and talking with great animation on her cell phone about what a great day it was and how she just had to get outdoors and into the atmosphere of the city, and I thought how wild it was that I knew exactly what she was talking about—the Knicks—and felt similar. Then a little old white lady in a respirator mask came and sat down beside her and they began to engage in more Knicks conversation, which got into still more metaphysical territory with the discussion of civic unity and the sense of some kind of redemption. And lastly she went off to finish her shopping and the original lady was greeted by a couple of friends talking about plans for the day; one of them, a big bald Black man with a gray beard and extraordinary resonant voice, was recognizably the wonderful writer Jelani Cobb. I, standing there with my fliers, in a green shirt in the sea of orange and blue, on a different errand, was shy enough already, and this made me shyer, so I kept quiet and focused on the customers, who were hardly making eye contact, though every once in a while one of them would give me a thumb up or whisper, "Already voted for him," but I certainly did all the same feel myself to be a full participant in the Jalen Brunson communion that was bringing us all together, what Émile Durkheim called the "opposite of grief", a "collective effervescence" that can help to restore social solidarity following a collapse. 

(Not my own idea—got it from grief specialist Barri Leiner Grant on the radio, and found it a compelling companion to my ideas about unresolved collective trauma, such as New York's experience with COVID-19, which she refers to as a "grief pandemic".)

And after my shift was over, I went and voted myself, at my own early voting location at Frank McCourt High School on 85th Street, and there ran into another older white lady who was also passing out Lasher fliers. I'd taken off my Lasher button and stuck it in my pocket so as not to be campaigning too close to a polling place, so I lifted it out to show her, and she said, "Oh, I'm his mom!" and thanked me very graciously for my support, which put a really nice cap on the whole experience.

The Democratic Party dominates so much in the city at the current moment that the primary is in effect the election, more ratified than fought in November, and I thought I should put out a report on some of the stuff I'm following.

Our primary in the 12th district isn't the most exciting one going on in the city; I think a lot of people would say that is the 10th, straddling Lower Manhattan and some of the trendiest parts of northern Brooklyn, where incumbent Dan Goldman, who became TV-famous after House Democrat hired him as their attorney to lead the 2019 impeachment of Trump (and I'll say in any company he did a terrific job) is facing off against former New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who became TV-famous as the New York mayoral candidate who was unexpectedly almost as brilliant a social media candidate as the winner, Zohran Mamdani, and who understood how to use the ranked-choice voting system to prevent the most undesirable outcome, a victory for the unacceptably cynical and corrupt Andrew Cuomo, and engineered the cross-endorsement between Lander and Mamdani that ensured Mamdani's victory in that race. 

This one has to some extent turned into a drama of what's happening in the US and especially NYC Jewish communities, especially since the 2022 redistricting mess, which put two densely Jewish areas together, a big chunk of Ultra-Orthodox, elderly Borough Park with the largely secular and youthful white-collar professionals spreading around both ends of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges, and their differing responses to the traumas in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories since October 7, 2023 and the scary rising incidence of antisemitism in the US, breaking down along familiar left-right lines. Both candidates are Jewish: Goldman (who was actually in Tel Aviv with his family on October 7) relatively secular (he doesn't seem to belong to a particular synagogue), Lander more committed, to the Reform Jewish tradition of social activism, a devotee of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; Goldman taking the "centrist" position in support of keeping the Israel Defense Forces armed, though he's happy to criticize Netanyahu, Lander supporting the Block the Bombs bill and openly denouncing genocide in Gaza; Goldman endorsed by Hochul, Jeffries, Pelosi, the United Federation of Teachers, and AIPAC, Lander by the UAW,  Professional Staff Congress at CUNY, Mayor Mamdani and Senators Warren and Sanders. Goldman being an effective advocate  on behalf of comprehensive immigration reform and against ICE abuse, which I think is great, Lander putting his body on the line and getting arrested for disturbing ICE activities at 26 Federal Plaza. Goldman isn't in any way terrible other than being an actual Very Rich Guy (tens and possibly hundreds of millions inherited from the Levi Strauss denim empire family) and an AIPAC beneficiary, but I liked him better from the start as a lawyer (beautifully dressed and possessor of a gorgeous baritone speaking voice) than as a legislator, and I am wowed by the somewhat schlubby Lander who stands so fiercely for so many of the things I've been standing for in this space.

Mamdani has also been inserting himself with unexpected aggression into some controversial contests where I'm not even clear how to feel, though I've lived in both of the relevant districts myself. In Brooklyn's 7th district, where we engendered two kids in Sunset Park, and where the great Puerto Rican representative Nydia Velázquez is retiring this year, he is pushing a Democratic Socialists of America candidate, Claire Valdez, against Velázquez's own preferred candidate, Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso; and in Harlem, where Adriano Espaillat (my state senator from 2011 to 2016) is being challenged by another DSA member, Darializa Avila Chevalier. It's possible Mamdani is trying to exercise some Bernie Sanders theory here, setting up an opposition between identity politics and affordability politics: Reynoso and Espaillat are both New Yorkers with Dominican backgrounds, that's the largest Latino population in New York City (Espaillat is the first member of Congress to have arrived in New York as an undocumented immigrant as well as the first Dominican to serve in the House); Avila Chevalier is Dominican too, but born and raised in Florida, and Valdez is from Lubbock, Texas and a citizen of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Nation as well as the United States. Espaillat is not reliably progressive; he endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary last year, though switching to Mamdani for the election proper, and gets heavy backing from AIPAC and other pro-Israel donors. I'll be more interested in how the voters decide than telling them how to vote.

In the 12th, created in the last redistricting to eliminate a Democratic seat by smushing together Manhattan's East Side (Carolyn Maloney) and West Side (Jerry Nadler), the main candidates symbolize that: Micah Lasher is a West Sider and Alex Bores an East Sider. Both are members of the State Assembly, both are Jewish and very cautious on the Israel question, rejecting a bill to block arms sales to the nation (except as dictated by the Leahy law, which both favor at least in theory), but support Palestinian rights in one way and another (Lasher is a lot more explicit, deploring the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and expressing "heartbreak" over Palestinian casualties in the Gaza conflict). Lasher is hugely experienced in government at all levels, having worked in policy for Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Attorney General Letitia James, and of course Nadler; Bores is a tech guy by training and career, who spent five years as a data scientist with the evil Palantir corporation (he claims that when he quit, in 2019, it was in disgust at the company's relationship with ICE, but some doubt has been cast on that). He also makes a big thing of his experience with artificial intelligence, which has equipped him to cope as a member of Congress with what he claims is the most important issue of our time, and I'm not so sure of that or what he means by it. Extraordinary amount of money are being spent by the industry to defeat him (OpenAI), but also to elect him (Anthropic)—as if he's a pawn on one side of an internecine war which sometimes looks like the good side but leaves me rooting more for injuries (my position is basically the Ed Zitron one, that none of the companies have any idea for making a profit that will justify the incredible amounts they have to invest, and it's a dangerous bubble). He's responsible for a law offering some regulation of AI for New Yorkers, and Lasher voted for it. 

There are the two celebrities in the race, the grandson of the late President John Kennedy and the ex-husband of presidential press secretary Kellyanne Conway, and a bunch of other candidates of whom I think the only one worth mentioning is a public health expert called Nina Schwalbe who seems to be both extraordinarily well informed and pretty radical, but I don't think any of them are likely to win.

And everybody's very pleased with the Knicks!