A Field Guide to Mocking the Rich and Powerful

Forget gun fights. I’m so tired, I just brought a knife to a cup of yogurt.

It’s part of this thing I’m trying—the yogurt, not the knife—where the first thing I consume in the morning contains some level of protein. Not in a Real Men Are Warriors So They Gnaw Raw Ribeyes Instead of Brushing Their Teeth way. More in the way of telling my nervous system that I am keeping it safe and regulated to start the day, aside from eating off of knives.

Thus, when the second thing I consume is a batch of takes on the current machinations of the rich and powerful, my stress hormones also have something to chew on.

The takes on this particular morning are still about the latest senator to die without using a single day of his pension. This should surprise no one—most sitting senators vote from the belief that every American must work until the day they die, and (this part is crucial) that congresspeople ought to live to the same standard as their constituents.

Nor should the death itself be surprising: the average age of U.S. senators is old enough for scientists to want to make sourdough bread from their prehistoric microbiomes.

I licked the yogurt, with its very contemporary microorganisms, off my butter knife one dip at a time as I read these senatorial takes. They bothered me, the takes. Not just the rosy condolence tweets—though I for one think it’s rotten to say things about the deceased that you’d never have said while they were alive. And not the snarky takedowns, either—live as though you don’t want the internet to laugh when you die, love.

No, what stuck in my teeth were the people taking down the late senator not for any of the reasons he deserved it, but by riffing on the speculations about his closeted sexuality.

But also look at where the punches are landing.

There’s this glorious impulse, especially when a dead (or possibly dead) politician so throughly tees up the easy jokes, to assemble like the Avengers and rush to the targets while they’re still ripe.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for not ganging up on these senators. Those in power have done plenty to be roasted for their actions and their words. But as happens with the Avengers saving major metropolises, plenty of hasty blows land where they don’t belong: on those who aren’t in power.

Rather than continue to engage in comments sections and risk looking like I’m defending those who neither need nor deserve it, I put together this Field Guide to Mocking the Rich and Powerful. It’s got three simple guidelines (so far). It’s also a working document, like that “I quit!” email in your Drafts folder, or the Constitution. If you don’t like it, blame my opponent.

The first guideline bears repeating:

When we mock someone—even someone rich and powerful—for being gay, we broadcast that being gay is mockable. When we mock them for being closeted, we broadcast to all those closeted (many of whom are not even elected representatives) that they should stay put. Plus, we are speculating, which is not a good look for us when we come up for reaccreditation.

Our attempts at mocking have an unintended blast radius. (Unless it’s intended, in which case, you are no longer mocking the rich and powerful and I’ll show you where to stash this Field Guide.)

This isn’t just about sexuality: it’s about mocking people of anything but purely straight sexual orientation for being part of a group that does not, generally speaking, hold power in our society.

Instead, we can and should:

Let’s say—and I’ll keep it vague—that a member of the congressional majority stumps on taking away basic civil rights from LGBTQ+ people, while simultaneously stumping for anonymous airport bathroom hookups. To stick to the party platform, he abides by the two-genders-no-exceptions bathroom standard, which means his only moral choice in Atlanta International is to install Grindr on the burner phone usually reserved for insider trading.

Yes, congressional business is so dull and predictable that even my hypotheticals are ho-hum. If you can mine this scenario for anything mockable that such a representative has done, go for it. Just hold close to your heart that it’s not his sexuality that’s in play, but rather his hypocrisy—if you can manage to find any.

You and I are legally unallowed to lie to Congress. We can go to jail for it.

Congress is legally allowed to lie to us. They can’t go to jail for it. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t make the rules. They did.

There’s a power imbalance here. And it’s not incidental—politicians asked for the job. Which means, we are entitled to give it to ’em.

Anything at all related to how they choose to present themselves, or to how fit they are to do the job we gave them, is in bounds.

Q: How is he still a sitting senator after seven terms?

A: Because if he stands up, he’ll fall again.

This quip doesn’t work if the senator in question lost their legs in a combat zone or a car accident. A senator’s brain may be in his pants, but it’s not in his legs.

But when a senator cannot stand because he was appointed to fill the vacancy left by Warren G. Harding’s election, we are within our rights of mockery to question if the rest of the senator’s person is up to the grueling and critical work of governing far beyond the life expectancy of a land tortoise.

To be clear: even when many such jabs are cheap, they are still valid.

Look, I can sometimes enjoy pointing out resemblances between representatives and reptiles as much as anyone who’s not a political cartoonist. There’s a bit of gold left in them thar hills.

But the mockery is meant not to stop at visual gags. It’s meant to tug the power dynamic back into … well, not back into balance, exactly, but at least back into play.

The rich and powerful exist to be mocked. But when we’re careless and sloppy—when we bring butter knives to a yogurt bar—we risk bringing each other down with them.

Or worse, instead of them.

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A version of this post appeared in the Abiquiú News.