In praise of cringe

Cory Booker, Taylor Swift, and those who don't apologize for caring

Senator Cory Booker is coming up on 24 hours of speaking on the Senate floor. At this point, he’s regularly stumbling over his words, and when one of his colleagues mercifully breaks in to ask as meandering and lengthy a question as they can concoct, you can hear the relief in his voice as he says, “I yield for the question.”

He has railed against federal workers being fired, retirees unable to get through to Social Security, damage to scientific research, international students being “disappeared,” the demonization of trans people, and the general chaos and disregard with which Trump and his minions are conducting their supposed work of “government efficiency.”

"When is it enough for people to stop falling in line?" he asked.

And he’s cried. He’s yelled. He’s laughed a little. He’s lamented.

Adorably cringe

Obviously I’ve not watched the entire thing, I’ve only dipped in and out. But witnessing someone in leadership take anything approaching dramatic action is like a glass of cool water in the desert. Booker is essentially issuing a primal scream up there, a scream many of us choke back on a daily basis to avoid scaring small children.

Whether it be from politicians, pundits, or just people at dinner parties or online, I tire of just the handwringing, but especially the antiseptic analysis of what should be done, what works, what doesn’t work, what’s useless. If I hear one more person say, “No one cares about democracy,” I’m going to lose my ever loving mind. Everyone seems to have an opinion about what needs to be done, how people are screwing it all up, how we get out of this. I’ve seen a lot of urbane sophisticates out there rolling their eyes at Booker today—“As if this is going to work," “He’s wasting his time,” “Performative nonsense”—just like I’ve seen and heard many people talk about how futile and feckless the protests organized and attended by ordinary people are.

With respect, F*ck those people. They need to shut all the way up.

I agree that strategy is needed. I figure someone way above my pay grade will come up with something. But right now we also need energy. We need encouragement. We need community. We need emotion. We need authenticity and vulnerability. We need people to f*cking CARE. We need people to stop being cool-kid-detached, above-it-all objective. We need to people to stop it with the I-know-best analysis. Honestly, if those people were so smart and if the answers were that handy, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

We need people to say out loud and cry out loud and admit out loud that they are terrified and don’t know what to do. We need spitting-mad-outrage and weeping, can’t-get-out-of-bed despair. We people to act like the world is ending. We need freaking drama queens.

We need cringe.

Now, there’s a spectrum of cringe, which is basically involves some form of self-humiliation. It can be self-aware and purposeful, or it can be oblivious and pathetic. Or just kind of disgusting. There is often a dollop of showy narcissism to it, if the cringe among us are honest. Cringe can be performative virtue signaling, and it can be manipulative.

This is bad cringe.

But the best cringe, the cringe we need now, is sincere, uninhibited expression of emotion, the refusal to save face or apologize for our humanity, the willingness to make people uncomfortable with it. And the stubborn, earnest belief that there are things that MATTER, and we dare to care deeply about them.

Cory Booker has always been more than a little bit cringe. He literally ran for president on a platform of love. He basically preached a sermon at Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s confirmation hearing, telling her through tears how much joy he felt watching her and how “God has got you.” He posts sappy videos in which he jogs and enthuses about things like butterflies. As mayor of Newark, he chose to live in a poor neighborhood and even rescued someone from a burning building. He’s a vegan, obviously. Probably the only reason he can get away with this level of cringe is because he is a former college football player. I’m sure he regularly induced vomiting in his teammates by doling out overdoses of sentiment.

You could call his persona schtick and what he’s doing today a stunt. And you know what, it is to a degree. Even Cory Booker has a cynical, calculating side, as we all do. But I also don’t think it’s crazy to think that Cory Booker really does care. That he is grieving for his country, just like so many of us are, and he doesn’t know what else to do but to talk about it, all night, until he can’t go on.

I’m here for it. We need people to tell us that it’s not OK, it might not be OK, and it’s OK to be devastated, to not be able to get out of bed sometimes, to break down in public, to worry about things that seem completely implausible, to be deeply freaked out.

If it’s a stunt, it’s a good one.

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Art is always a stunt. That is kind of the whole point. Unlike politics, art doesn’t try to deny that. Artists loudly proclaim, “Look at me and how talented I am! Look at how brilliant I am! Pay attention to what I am thinking and feeling! It’s important!”

Art is cringe even when it’s cool. But especially when it tries to be too cool. Too much music—maybe most of it—is cringe masquerading as cool. Which is very bad cringe.

The best musical cringe is a fearless refusal to be cool. It’s copping to raw emotion. It’s yearning out loud. It’s even laughing at how pathetic that is.

And there’s no one better at it than Taylor Swift.

And Bono, but let’s stick to Taylor for today.

Taylor Swift is not the biggest artist in the world because she has the best voice and the coolest dance moves and the most electric sound. Taylor is the biggest artist in the world because she puts the truth of her emotions on display, which gives her fans, mostly women, full ownership of theirs. She tells them it’s OK to have their heart shattered by a fling. To be needy. To be “high maintenance,” that misogynistic trope that instructs women to sit down and shut up and be no trouble at all.

She is a new kind of feminist, a woman completely liberated and successful, but unapologetically female. She sings that things would be easier if she were a man, but she never ever tries to be one. She knows it won’t work anyway.

The sexual revolution told women that they should be able to behave just like men without it costing them a thing. That if they couldn’t get away with that, they weren’t truly liberated. And I’m sure some women can breeze through bedsheets without a care in the world. But in my experience as a woman and in a society of women is that most of us can’t get away with that. So the sexual revolution gave men exactly what they wanted—sex with no strings attached with women told by their own female leaders that trying to attach them was “uncool”—while women, most of whom actually wanted committed love, got left holding the emotional bag. And worse, they had to stuff down that pain lest they be labeled obsessive or demanding or crazy.

Taylor isn’t leading some return to puritanical sexual mores, but she’s honest about what she really wants and what she really feels. She sings repeatedly about wanting to get married and have children. She sings with outrage about being betrayed and brays for revenge like a psycho-bitch. She becomes openly, absurdly, self-deprecatingly attached. “I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like the plague,” she says in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” I mean, cringe.

This lyric DEVASTATES me every time.

Like Booker, Taylor can get away with her cringe because she is extraordinary, in her case, talented and gorgeous. But her fans are ordinary. Her music gives them permission to be cringe, too. Her music helps them feel connection and community through their cringe.

I was late to Swiftie-dom. She was young and country (I mean, CRINGE) at the beginning, and I wrote her off as just another pretty girl with mediocre talent that some record producers packaged up just so. But my daughter got me to actually listen to her, and she blew me away with her ability to make pathetic, embarrassing, inconvenient emotions powerful, playful, funny, friendly, and, well, OK.

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I just got back from my first Tesla Takedown protest. As you know, I’ve been to a lot of protests recently, so I wanted to add this one to my rotation. Some erudite analysts are even out there saying these Tesla ones have been effective.

Protesting is more than a little cringe. You literally write your feelings down on a sign. Then you go out into the street and hold it up. You chant hokey slogans and yell things. You honestly look like a damn fool.

The type people at these things are definitely not the cool kids. Frankly, most of them are women of a certain age, dressed in mom jeans but like the kind that aren’t fashionable by purposely trying to be unfashionable (I have frankly given up trying to solve this rubik’s cube). They’ve got on their fanny packs, stuffed with snacks and chapstick and absolutely zero F*cks. These ladies have pulled over some minivans in their time, and your cool kid judgement does not register.

The folks at this Tesla one were particularly tight-knit. A lot of them had been coming for six weeks now, twice a week. They welcomed a newcomer with open arms. Most seemed to be retired Feds. DOJ, Commerce, NIH, FTC, USAID. Apparently a group called Third Act, which helps channel retired Americans into activism, is involved in organizing these Tesla Takedowns.

This week, the star of show was a 96-year-old woman who had grown up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. She had come with her neighbors, and regularly told them to leave her alone when they beseeched her to use the chair they brought. She told me she remembered the liberation of her town by the Allies, and since then, she had been to her share of protests. She was a spitfire.

Shoot this into my veins

All of these people cared enough to stand on a sidewalk and wave signs at passing cars like idiots. Most of the drivers honked or waved, even the ones driving Teslas. We got a few middle fingers and Trump hats. I felt more conspicuous than I have at other protests, at which I was just standing in a big crowd facing a focal point. At this one, you could see the bystander drivers’ faces, again, many of them friendly, but on the neutral ones, you could project an eye roll or ridicule.

I felt uncomfortable at first, but then the community enveloped me. I wasn’t alone. There was plenty of cringe to go around.

I have kind of always known I was cringe. I even had a boy break up with me in Jr. High because I cried over the basketball team losing to our big rivals, which he thought was cringe.¹

I wear my emotions on my sleeve and don’t regulate them terribly well. If something is on my mind and in my heart, you’re gonna hear about it, probably at high volume of some kind. I have no doubt made many people squirm with an over-the-top email or letter telling them how much they mean to me or how grateful I am for what all they have done for me or how very sorry I am 20 years later for dumping them in the 9th grade.² The older I get, the more drunk on self-expression and vulnerability I become. And the less I care.

So I am biased in this whole conversation about the best way to save democracy. I am a cringe person, and I tend to adore other cringe people. Bono and Oprah are probably my two favorite celebrities, and you’d be hard pressed to find bigger cringe icons. The Bulwark—lot of cringe, even resident cool guy Tim Miller. He’s kind of the most cringe. Sarah Longwell manages to pair her cringe with strategy, which is frankly superhuman.

But I do believe cringe is what we need. I mean, MAGA is terribly cringe. In a bad way—Donald Trump is bad cringe personified—but also in more positive ways. They revel in their hokey outfits and crazy rituals and seem to have fun doing it, when they aren’t stockpiling weapons for the coming drag queen invasion. Trump has definitely embodied and unleashed authentic emotion, it’s just really too bad most of that emotion is a paranoia and bigotry driven fear based on a slew of lies.

So to the sophisticated cool kids out there, y’all keep strategizing and pontificating. I may even join you later, once I finish going through the cycles of grief. I can pretend to be a sophisticated cool kid for an evening (at most).

But please leave us cringe kids to our protests and our rallies and our vigils and our art projects and our filibusters and our emo songs and whatever else we feel led to do. Because while you’re over there devising the perfect strategy, we are already out there, making friends, building community, finding scraps of hope and bits of joy and picking up shards of shattered dreams.

You’re welcome to join us when you’re ready.

1. There is some doubt about whether he actually broke up with me or if the whole relationship was a bet he lost. Someday I will find out the truth. Or not.

2. True story. And cringe.