Brief Encounters With Hideous Liberal Men #2, by Adam Lehrer

Adam Lehrer encounters a trust fund baby with delusions of oppression.

I’m at Clandestino, the notorious bar at the center of Dimes Square in Chinatown, Manhattan. It is about 5 PM. It’s hot and the sun still blazes in the sky. It’s August, and the liquor only dries my throat and leaves a sharp sting on the back of my tongue. I’m dehydrated. It’s unpleasant and sticky, and sweat has seeped through my short sleeve button down shirt.

I’m with two friends. A man and a woman. Both of them are artists. The scene at Clandestino is, as ever, faux-fashionable and prickly. Everyone looks like they could be very poor despite the fact that they are indeed very rich. The waiter, a gigantic light-skinned black man of about 6 ft 5 and wide-shouldered and rotund, is ignoring me as per usual. I used to think that he must be busy, which is fair enough, but I’m realizing that perhaps he’s acting deliberately avoidant and obstinate. Maybe he knows who I am. Maybe he despises what I represent (freedom). I always tip him well out of anxiety that he hates me, which if it’s a salesman tactic it’s an ingenious one and I salute him.

Finally, three Moscow Mules arrive at our table. We clink our glasses together and engage in a half-hearted and noncommittal manner. The conversation is light and forced. There’s not much to say really.

Without asking permission, a young couple no older than 22 grabs two seats and pushes them up to our table. The man is shlubby with bad clothes that make him look like an elementary school student performing poorly in physical education class, and the young woman looks dirty and unkempt, with oily hair replete of split ends (youth is wasted on the young). I find everything about the couple unseemly and distasteful. They fail to introduce themselves and largely pretend that my male friend and I don’t exist, but apparently know the young woman who is sharing drinks with me. They start conversing with her. I try and tune them out, but the brazen disrespect stings. A zoomer trait I’m noticing is the foregoing of traditional manners and the niceties of greeting. Decency is, sadly, becoming old fashioned.

Somehow, the rude, shlubby young man brings up Joe Biden. He proclaims that Joe Biden is a white supremacist, trying to sound edgy in that faux, dirtbag leftist manner that I feel nothing but contempt and distaste for. I grit my teeth and persist in ignoring the discourse. But now he’s on one, talking about Joe Biden’s racism incessantly as if it’s a provocative and novel observation. For the first time, I address the paunchy young man.

“But did you vote for him?” I ask.

“Huh?”

“Joe Biden, did you vote for him?”

“Well, yeah.”

“So why the fuck do you think that anyone cares about Joe Biden? You clearly can’t be that concerned about white supremacism nor think that it’s a disqualifying trait in a president. After all, you voted for a white supremacist?”

The slippery, holier than thou beta male is flushed with anxiety. His girlfriend, seemingly subservient or at least suffering in silence, is looking downwards at the table.

“Well who did you vote for?” asks the young man.

“I don’t vote. But I honestly don’t believe that Joe Biden is a white supremacist. He’s probably vaguely bigoted in the way that men of a certain age often are, but I don’t think he hates with that kind of intensity. There are, however, a million more valid reasons to despise his politics and not vote for him, which you did anyways.”

“Well, when you get offered two white supremacists to vote for, it’s probably better to vote for the less white supremacist one,” says the dullard, saying so many words with such little meaning, a “Marbled Swarm” without the aristocratic affectation and nobility of syntax. I find that a Lautréamont line is circling through my head: “For how long will you maintain the decrepit cult of this god who is impervious to your prayers and generous offerings.” The sickly young liberal man’s insistence on his racialist viewpoints rings of a religious fervor absent cathartic spirituality.

“This insistence on white supremacism in each direction seems to me nothing more than grappling with the harsh reality of the contradictions of a capitalist state, no?” I say. “I believe the reality of the situation is much harsher and perhaps more frightening for you to reckon with: that we could have an avowedly anti-racist president or an arch white supremacist president and there wouldn’t be a bit of a difference. The bare economic reality of exploitation and its attendant militarism and imperialism would persist. Your insistence on the white supremacism of individual political figures is nothing more than an expression of of narrow idealism that holds onto the hope that it's indeed morals or the absence of them that are eroding society as we know it. But the racialized frame is one that will prevent you from reconciling with the truth."

Finally, the off-putting girlfriend looks up, angered. “How can he divorce himself from a racial frame or whatever when he has to live in a racialized body everyday?” she shrieks.

For the first time, I realize that this young man, who I had assumed to be either Persian or even Sicilian or some such, was a very (very) light skinned black man (or maybe mixed race, I think asking questions about someone’s exact ethnicity is rude and bizarre so I don’t). I realize now that this is a futile conversation and that this young, rude, exasperating young leftist man is going to play the oppression card despite obviously being unemployed, living in New York, and surely enjoying his status as the off-spring of very rich parents.

”I don’t have the choice to not think in racialized terms, because I’m a racialized being and I’ve experienced racism everyday of my life.”

I am doubtful about the sincerity of this statement since everything about this whiny adult boy’s manipulative argumentative tactics reads as the product of an extreme petty bourgeois narcissism and, not to mention, the fact that I didn’t even realize he was black until moments earlier. With that, I avert my eyes from the shrill couple. This isn’t worth my time. This column isn’t worth my time. Perhaps even debate is no longer worth my time. Conversation is a dead art form. I feel the malevolent gaze of the narcissistic young liberal in my periphery. For now, I’m anesthetized from its sting. 

Illustration by Kai Althoff