Busboys, Poets and AOC

    

Taking up my brother's challenge to meet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) during my stint in the States, I'm elated to discover she's giving her congressional inaugural address in New York on the Saturday after my arrival. My old pal Paul takes an overnight bus from Savannah to join me for this moment of serendipity.

The event is five miles north of Manhattan, deep in eastern Bronx - the Boogie Down, the birthplace of hip hop. Our bus passes clusters of mud-brown high-rise housing projects, common in many corners of New York, stopping next to a freeway, outside the Free NYC WiFi range and far from the tourists. There appear to be few nearby amenities, save for a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. A couple of inconspicuous A4 sheets of paper sellotaped to the wall state simply ‘Inaugural address this way’, leading us to the Renaissance High School for Musical Theater and the Arts.

We’re uncharacteristically early but queues are already forming and we get chatting to Justin, a friendly 15 year old pupil at the school. He describes himself as a conservative but is open minded enough to give up his Saturday afternoon to hear what this famed democratic socialist has to say for herself. His older brother couldn't countenance such an idea so Justin is here by himself.

There’s a party atmosphere as the hall fills up, with sporadic “AOC! AOC!” chants as supporters unfurl their Puerto Rico flags. This is a big moment for the activists who helped pull off her stunning victory, ousting the district’s long-term incumbent and Democratic Party establishment figure, Joe Crowley. Silence falls for the salute of the flag before a senior pupil takes to the backlit stage for a rendition of “Star Spangled Banner”. This muted, earnest display of national reverence is a little unsettling in its routine convention.

Local activists and community leaders follow the anthem. A young woman performs a couple of moving poems, one about the inspiration she takes from her mother, who helped keep her family afloat “working two and three jobs”, that classic American trope. Addressing AOC directly, another speaker pays fervent tribute for “putting us on the map”; for showing courage in “vision and voice”; and for “intuitively understanding the future of the Democratic Party". Cheers and whoops follow his triumphant identification of AOC as following in the tradition of “bold, loud Latinas from the Bronx”.

Finally, the congressional oath - up steps the woman of the hour. Former bartender and poster girl of the American left. Millennial icon and subject of the most viewed video of a politician on twitter. Touted as a future President and eight weeks my junior. One of the previous speakers had proclaimed this as a “day for the oppressed and downtrodden to band together”. AOC’s intersectionality - beyond the insipid and misconstrued ‘identity politics’ cliche - lies at the heart of her appeal and is a key theme of her speech. She represents a resurgent group in US politics that isn’t afraid to talk about “the working class” or economic inequality, but equally unwilling to underplay the significance of race, class, gender and sexuality in shaping life chances. We must reject a zero-sum mentality, she insists, in which one person’s gain necessitates another’s loss.

It’s a politics that recognises the inextricable ties between economic, social, racial and ecological justice, encapsulated in the Green New Deal. AOC reveals that the FDR-inspired proposal, an ambitious plan to resuscitate industry through renewable, clean energy and resource efficiency, is backed by 84 co-sponsors and all Democratic Presidential candidates. It's legislation for indigenous communities, she declares, for coal miners in West Virginia, for those without clean water in Flint. For the victims of wildfires in California and hurricanes in Puerto Rico. For the workers in Appalachia and the children breathing dirty air in the South Bronx. She demands a Living Wage, dignity for working people, and migration and healthcare as human rights, warning “we will not take no for an answer”.

Before closing, she emphasises the power of community - "knock on your neighbour's door" - and invites the audience to greet one another another. For all her undoubted intelligence, charisma and star-factor, this gathering is a collective celebration, an inspiring expression of solidarity, and it's only by building a resilient movement that lasting change will come about. We join the line for photographs after. There's only time for cursory introductions, but I trust she'll be on the next plane to Scotland. There could be a spot opening up on Clackmannanshire Council.

Ten days later I join my friend Rose and her partner Mukil at a "Progressive Town Hall" event in Washington DC. On the panel are four of AOC's close conspirators: Pramila Jayapal, the first Indian-American woman to serve in the House of Representatives and the first Asian-American to represent Washington in Congress; Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress and nemesis of Trump ("we're gonna impeach the motherfucker"); Ilhan Omar, the first naturalized citizen from Africa and first Somali-American elected to Congress, as well as the first person to wear a hijab on the House floor (Tlaib and Omar are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress); and Mark Pocan, LGBT activist and co-chair with Jayapal of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. All these 'firsts' provide some hope in the gloom and farce of the Trump era, but the panel are quick to stress that their mere presence is not enough; they're determined to advance an agenda to improve the lives of working people and marginalised, exploited communities.

I recall AOC's remark that "what is right is not always popular - but we can make it popular", and according to Mark Pocan this is already happening. Whether it's Medicare For All, a $15 an hour living wage, the Green New Deal, or raising top rate of income tax, polling shows majoroties favouring these policies. Passing them into statute is a different proposition, but it sounds like progress is being made. Pramila Jayapal details her Medicare for All bill in the House of Representatives, with 107 co-sponsors and, for the first time, the backing of major labour unions. It would provide the same quality of healthcare regardless of wealth, with guaranteed long-term care for the elderly and people with disabilities.

But how are you going to pay for it? The panel preempts the question and points to savings under the new system, also proposing a Financial Transaction Tax and highlighting the $690bn military budget fuelling America's Forever Wars and covert conflicts. The discussion moves to Israel-Palestine and Ilhan Omar's recent claim that AIPAC lobbying group plays a similar role in Congress as the NRA or the fossil fuel industry, for which she faced accusations of antisemitism. She's visibly hurt by the suggestion, and speaks with raw, eloquent passion - the same uncompromising voice which called out Elliot Abrams, the Cold War hawk appointed special envoy to Venezuela, for his role in covering massacres by death squads in Guatemala in the 1980s. I know what hatred and fear feel like, she protests, revealing she'd seen "Assassinate Ilhan Omar" scrawled in a toilet cubicle in her home state of Minnesota. A Jewish woman in the audience voices her support for Omar and Palestinian freedom, while Mark Pocan calls on his colleagues in Congress not to leave it to the two Muslim congresswomen to advocate for Palestinian rights.

The focus on foreign policy is encouraging, as it's often an afterthought in the US media and electoral contests. AOC’s warning that "until America tells the truth about itself, we're not going to heal" is as true for the nation's international affairs as it is for its domestic. Honesty about its crimes in Vietnam, in Korea, in Iraq, in Latin America, is as important as facing up to slavery and Jim Crow, the genocide of Native Americans, or the persistence of poverty in the richest country on earth. In both arenas, American exceptionalism lies at the heart of the problem. The notion that if the United States does it, it can be justified by definition, must be dispensed. It’s not about surrendering influence in the world, or being naive to geopolitical realities, but pursuing a future focused on peace and international cooperation.

I'm sceptical about whether there is any value in regarding "America" as a set of ideals, rather than just a  term for a group of people living between arbitrary borders. It can very easily slip into jingoism and a Monroe doctrine imperial desire to spread the 'American way'. But if national mythology has any positive resonance, it can be found the poetry of Langston Hughes, which, with weary caution, evokes the 'self-evident truths' of the enlightenment and Declaration of Independence. Busboys and Poets, the name of the bookshop and bar hosting the discussion event, was named in honour of Hughes. He worked as a hostel busboy in the 1920s in Washington DC, where he plucked up the courage one day to approach the poet Nicholas Vachel Linday with several of his poems. In local newspapers, Linday marvelled about his meeting with this talented "busboy poet". Like the new batch of upstart Congresswomen, like Martin Luther King's Dream of Equality in the 1960s, Hughes tied the freedom of his own people to that of all oppressed groups, underpinned by a strong sense of economic and social justice:

...Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay!

Of owning everything for one's own greed!..

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!

“Let America Be America Again”, Langston Hughes, 1935