Rebecca Solnit on Elizabeth Warren:
My dream candidate would’ve been a woman of color with all these qualities, and my dreamiest dream candidate would be a woman of color with Medusa hair who could turn the entire Republican Senate to stone with a glance, but Warren is who’s left in the race, and she is magnificent, and superheroes from Megan Rapinoe to Roxane Gay agree.
A Montenegrin friend was recently incensed by a misogynist ad in Podgorica, and while the image was already suggestive I had to use an on-line translation tool to understand the text, as I don’t read Serbo-Croatian (or Montenegrin, in the 21st Century, but I think I’ll just keep saying Serbo-Croatian).
At the gym yesterday I got to talking with a couple Polish men about the rap music that often plays in the gym. We were all amused that the language regularly piped in at a loud volume, „bitch, ho, nigga“ used to relate heroic tales of „sellin‘ crack, fuckin‘ bitches, killin‘ niggas“ would not be used in polite company in Polish in Poland, or in American English in the US, but here it was exotic, and appeals to young Germans as a voice from a cool land beyond staid Germany.
In reading Solnit this evening it occurred to me that I can quickly recognize drivel in English and to a lesser extent in German, yet not at all in Polish or Serbian. I hit that „dreamiest dream“ phrase and got to thinking: „What would my dreamiest dream be?“ Being able to discern that something written by a Montenegrin or Pole in their native language is garbage, and to be able to realize this quickly is I think a dream worth having.
I can’t imagine Elizabeth Warren covering a Nena song. Sahra Wagenknecht, I can picture — that could conceivably be hot. I can imagine Warren at one time having sung back-up for a high school classmate lip-synching Karen Carpenter, and in Warren’s retelling she has the lead.
