On the 85 minutes of Kamala Harris
It would be patronizing of me to overstate that the 85 minutes Kamala Harris was President of the United States represent a great moment in history for women — particularly since the word “patronizing” has the same etymological root as the word “patriarch.” For me, the most conspicuous part of Madame Vice President’s brief premiership is sad: it serves as an agonizing reminder that we should instead be some 300 days into the second term of office of President Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. Were that true then any such short interlude would be just another hour and twenty five minutes of a long, happy and well-established status quo.
Even so, these days we must take victory where we can. Yes, for the 85 minutes President Biden was being given a colonoscopy under a general anaesthetic, Kamala Harris was President of the United States. Not only was that the first time in history that a woman was President, the woman in question was also a woman of color. So I say brava Madame Veep. It’s a start.
It’s also a reminder of the Little Man we want to forget. We have it on some authority that, under a cloak of paranoid secrecy, the Former Cretin undertook the same procedure, eschewing a general for a local so he could be awake the whole time. Not for one single solitary minute would he suffer to relinquish his grubby and precious (in the Golem sense of the word) hold on the presidency. His brittle and perpetually famished ego couldn’t tolerate the idea that Mike Pence might, however briefly and creepily in his own right, commit so flagrant a lese majeste as to occupy the same shoes as Himself.
It is also a tribute to the advanced state of enlightenment of our current President (who turns 79 today as I write this) that he unabashedly relinquished the reins of power with pride and confidence to his able Vice President, out in the open and in the unafraid light of day. The information, that the Moron Who Preceded underwent the same procedure, was smuggled out of the formerly benighted Oval Office and hinted at darkly by his third press secretary. We aren’t even certain it was a colonoscopy he was given. Presumably that’s a closely guarded, neurotic secret that was kept from us for “our own good.”
I hope we never get too jaded to note and rejoice about the contrasts between this administration and the last one. I hope the day never comes that normality is restored to the point it becomes perfunctory, unexceptional and run-of-the-mill, and we forget how lucky we are and how dreadful and dangerous things could have gotten had we lost in 2020. Because as bad as things were back then, they will be even worse should we lose again. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.