White Noise
Marjorie Taylor Greene is Joe Biden’s — and Democracy’s — greatest asset
President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union was quite unlike anything Americans have seen or heard since Woodrow Wilson revived the executive tradition of delivering an annual message to Congress in-person.
And the main reason was Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Dressed for the occasion in accidental homage to Narnia’s Jadis, MTG was, in a word, perfect as the obnoxious — and obnoxiously loud — embodiment of a rowdy, radicalized right that brands any bipartisan effort to govern effectively “anti-American.”
All that was missing was a tiara made of icicles atop her head.
The wildly memorable event began with an exchange that was unthinkable until it happened: President Joe Biden congratulated Kevin McCarthy on his elevation to speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and shook the man’s hand.
After this simple yet profound flourish of civility, he charged into a litany of accomplishments: 12.1 million jobs created. Take-home pay increased. Deficit slashed by $1.7 trillion. The easy-like-Sunday-morning manner of his delivery made the victories — more than 300 hundred of them signed into law due to bipartisan efforts — sound and feel all the more impressive.
They weren’t boasts. They were — and are — the facts.
Next, President Biden boldly went where no president has dared to go before, speaking candidly about The Talk that whites in America have never, ever had to give their children; The Talk that most white Americans don’t even know exists: The Talk that Black American parents give to their children about how to behave if they are pulled over by cops in any town.
Almost as if he were leading a national intervention, the president calmly and firmly foisted the hard conversation on us all before welcoming the parents of Tyre Nichols to the chamber. Then Biden quoted Tyre’s mother who, he said, is finding solace in the belief that “something good” will come from the murder of her son by a gang of Memphis Police officers.
The applause that followed from both sides of the house was the first manifestation of that “good,” and for a few seconds it felt as if the sound of Republicans and Democrats clapping together had within it the power “to bind up the nation’s wounds,” as Abraham Lincoln intoned during his Second Inaugural address.
Throughout his annual report, President Biden uttered repeatedly the phrase “let’s finish the job,” calling to mind another line from Lincoln’s 1865 address: “let us strive on to finish the work.”
It’s hard to believe that it was purely coincidental.
These and many other equally powerful moments, designed and delivered by the president with few hiccups, a lot of gusto, and at times downright grit with his jaw firmly set, made it without a doubt the most impressive, the most inspiring State of the Union I’ve ever witnessed.
Had I watched it at the corner pub with the volume off and took a swig of beer every time Kevin McCarthy stood up to applaud President Joe Biden (shoulder to shoulder with Vice President Kamala Harris), I would have eventually pushed my pint aside, rubbed my eyes in pickled disbelief, and attempted to pull focus on the flatscreens with a suspicion, rarely felt nowadays, that we’re back on the path to being one nation, indivisible, under God.
But when MTG went to work in her peanut gallery of exactly one, we had crossed over from the historic into the sublime.
As she did during the president’s first State of the Union — with her erstwhile sidekick Lauren Boebert back when they were still knocking around together as the radical right’s version of Mean Girls — she violated almost every known social norm of the chamber during this address, capping off an evening of comically bad behavior by screaming “liar!” while the gentleman president paused to allow the woman from Georgia’s 14th District to vent what remained in — and of — her spleen.
It felt as if I were watching a reboot of The Exorcist, with President Biden as Fr. Lankester Merrin, and MTG as the very possessed 12-year-old Regan, who writhes and convulses with Satanic dyspepsia after every declaration of something genuinely good, something genuinely promising for all Americans, although our mega-billionaires, still loathe to pay their fair share of taxes, would take issue with the phrase “all Americans.”
I waited, eagerly, for her to throw herself into the aisle, spin her head around once or twice, and vomit green (or red) all over her blazing white Raisa Gorbachev-inspired parka as the president delivered his peroration. By that time, though, she was pooped out, and doubtless busy planning her next attention-seeking stunt, something that would top a walkabout on Capitol Hill with a large white balloon — wink, wink — in an attempt to annoy the president and the Democrats, and rack up Twitter likes.
If I didn’t know any better, I would right now be suspecting that she is a plant — not by the Russians, not by the Chinese, not by any hostile nation or terrorist group, but by the Democrats.
Why?
Because MTG and her ilk are showing the world in ways that even the most obtuse among us can grasp that in Biden’s America, disagreement, even idiotically childish and uninformed disagreement, is not tantamount to treason, contrary to what his predecessor (and not a few Red State governors) believe.
Without free and open dissent of any kind, we would not be a representative democracy, which is perhaps why the president seemed to relish the lunacy: “It’s OK, folks,” his smile telegraphed, “we can take it.”
The more MTG camps it up, making cartoonishly defiant statements that are magical fodder for Tik Tok and Instagram as a poster child for division and polarity in this country, which 72% of Americans who reacted positively to the State of the Union are putting lie to at present, the more she underscores the point that President Biden has been making in different ways since he was elected: American democracy may be rocked ferociously by waves of strife and inner conflict, but it does not sink.
One can go as “MTG” as one wishes: Pitch a tantrum. Gnash one’s teeth. And do it all on live television in front of millions of viewers during a State of the Union address— in 2023, you’re still at liberty to express your opinion as outrageously, as rudely, as stupidly as possible, so long as you don’t attempt to undermine or destroy the very document that guarantees such rights for you and others.
The Constitution, and the will of the people, remain off limits as the Jan. 6 goons are discovering, one by one.
The idea of America is too strong, the president declared, to be torn asunder by name calling, by jeers, by threats, by senior pranks, by hateful dissent, by election-denying, by armed insurrection.
MTG is living, vivid proof.
Contrary to what she must be thinking these days, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the best, most effective spokesperson for everything that is still possible in a country blessedly free of fascism.
And her incessant and increasingly outlandish demonstrations of it, executed with impunity, are turning another of Lincoln’s lines on its head: A house divided can stand.
