beyond mittenology: sitting with the bernie sanders meme.
The map of Iraq looks like a mitten, / and so does the map of Michigan— / a match I made by chance.
— Dunya Mikhail
A funny thing about a Chair: / You hardly ever think it’s there. / To know a Chair is really it, / You sometimes have to go and sit.
— Theodore Roethke
As Naomi Klein proposed (“The Meaning of the Mittens: Five Possibilities,” The Intercept, 21 January 2021), the now omnipresent meme of cranky Bernie Sanders is all about the mittens. They rest, criss-crossed, on his lap, oversized, practical, unfussy, realistic, and ready for reaching out to touch the broken world as it is, with all the urgent need for getting to work to fix it. Yet the meme also contains another symbolic element that has gone less noticed: the chair.
In particular, the image signals the political meaning of chairs. They don’t call it a “seat” of power for nothing. Think of the Iron Throne, the chairman of the board, the party chairman. Where, after all, was one of the first places the insurrectionists went when they got into the Capitol but a week earlier than the inauguration of Joe Biden outside the same building? They sat in the chairs on the dais of the Senate and House chambers. They sat in Speaker Pelosi’s chair and put their feet up on her desk.
Sitting is power. Even when it becomes a weapon of the oppressed, as in the civil rights sit ins, the capacity to be not only in good standing, but also hard sitting is a potent expression of protest, a way to mark issues of inclusion and exclusion. from the polity or from civil society. Do you have a seat at the table, or even at the Woolworth’s counter? Who gets to sit at all, and where they get to sit, really matters.
One image that came to mind from the resonances of the Bernie mittens meme was the controversial official portrait of Barack Obama, painted by Kehinde Wiley in 2018. What is Obama doing in the painting? To be sure, most attention about this controversial image was given to the almost surrealistic wall of foliage and symbolic flowers from which Obama emerged, but: he also sits in a chair. In this case, it is a wooden one that draws upon the Regency style blended with more contemporary elements. The chair is crucial to the story the painting tells.
Bernie, in contrast to the Obama portrait, sits in a flimsy folding chair. He looks cold and grumpy, not suave and elegant. He is typically frumpy and disheveled. At the same time, he is but one of the few present at the inauguration at all due to Covid-19 safety restrictions, right down the aisle from the Obamas themselves. This Social Democrat now has a place closer to the centers of power in American politics. After all, he is now the chair of the Senate Budget Committee.
In this way, the original photograph is as much about the chair as it is about the mittens. To be sure, the mittens steal the show. As Klein eloquently put it:
In that moment, Bernie’s crossed arms and sartorial dissonance seemed to be saying, “Do not cross us.” If, after all the hoopla, the Biden-Harris administration doesn’t deliver transformational action for a nation and a planet in agony, there will be consequences. And unlike during the Obama years, those consequences won’t take years—because the revolutionary spirit is already on the inside, and it’s wearing mittens.
But it’s not just that Bernie is bemittened that made the image proliferate so much; it’s also that he’s sitting in his chair. And not only that the chair is kind of floating, as if not quite part of the larger organized spectacle in which he will soon, ambivalently and ambiguously, take his place. In the circulating meme, Sanders sits everywhere else too, both joining the images in which memers have placed him but also always slyly commenting on the images, sitting outside them.
One might say that, sitting on a temporary folding chair somewhere on the steps of the Capitol Building, an august member of its upper chamber yet also a democratic socialist from the margins, he is not exactly a naif, an innocent accidentally wandering through the iconography of history. He’s not a pure outsider like Forrest Gump or Zelig. Instead, he is at once both insider and outsider. And so too in the memes, he is in whatever mise-en-scène into which he is placed, yet never quite of it. He is part of things, yet always comes from another place, bringing a different vision of how the world might be. He is portable, on the move, passing through, at once in place and yet easily capable of relocating—maybe even through his sheer cranky, cold chutzpah one day relocating the place or the scene to him.
To use the musical term for dropping in as a guest with a band, Bernie sits in with all these images, including the original photograph snapped so brilliantly by Brendan Smialowski. He can play along, but he is also autonomous. Whatever it is that Sanders symbolizes, it is part of the picture, but at any moment it can fold things up, adjust, and relocate to a different setting. It is mobile. Seated in front of the Capitol, perching on ledges, sidling up to counters, sitting on benches, joining famous movie scenes and tv shows, finding a place among rock bands and pop stars, popping up with politicians from the past, the Sanders meme floats through, joining in, but also unfolding a dissonant commentary as well. The man sitting in this photo seems to ask a set of questions. They kind of arrive in a whisper, perhaps a bit muffled by the comedy of the outer wear, but if you listen closely you might hear them: hey, look at this mess? Aren’t you tired of it? Don’t you feel cold and miserable, too? It doesn’t have to be this way!
The Bernie meme, in this way, is a stand in—er, a sit-in—for the whole question of social democracy in the United States, just as Klein suggests. While some have interpreted the meme as a “cutesification” of Bernie’s radicalism, and the radicalism he has come to symbolize as a cultural meme, there is more to the image than just a Seinfeld-ification of Sanders, a taming of the wagging finger. The more it circulates, the more it suggests that Bernie’s political sensibility lurks more places than one might think. It proposes that enough is enough with the lack of universal health care, with racial injustice, with student debt, with climate change unconfronted, with tax cuts for the rich and the squeeze on everyone else. It signals that there are no-nonsense policies that can start to address these long-running problems. You don’t need a throne for this. A bunch of folding chairs will do. What are we waiting for? We are many (and our hands are warming up), they are few.
As with any iconic image, the deeper frequencies are inchoate; but they more you look, the more they start to spring up everywhere you look in the photograph: the man’s fancy black shoes in the upper left contrasted to the woman’s pink hat on the right, which to my eye serves as a kind of phantom, a trace, a reminder of the 2018 “#MeToo” Women’s March whose protests remained incomplete, unanswered, even undermined by 2021 by the Dobbs decision and much else.
Yes, Bernie is cute here, comical, sweet, but thre is also an edge. Maybe it is because he looks a bit zoomorphic, at once a cuddly cartoon character and something far more fierce and determined. The giant Vermont-made mittens start to look a bit like paws. With his arms and paws crossed, it is posssible Sanders might be poised to pounce. With all that he represents, he seems about to spring from his seat, not only into the halls of power, but also perhaps across the breadth of American culture. The more one looks, the more those mittens start to seem like they might, maybe, if we want them to, have claws.