NY Times, August 12, 2020
SCREENLAND <https://www.nytimes.com/column/screenland>
The Fandom Around R.B.G. Is Out of Step With Reality
Credit...Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban
ByAmanda Hess <https://www.nytimes.com/by/amanda-hess>
* Aug. 12, 2020,5:00 a.m. ET
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When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed last month that she had been
treated for cancerous lesions on her liver, a YouTube video whispered
across the liberal internet like a prayer. The video, titled “Hang On
Ruthie!” is a 2018 parody of the McCoys’ 1965 hit “Hang On Sloopy,” and
every few months, it is resurrected through boomer chain emails and
Facebook pages with names like the Rude Liberals. Filmed “somewhere in
Oregon” by the musical duo Buffalo Romeo, “Hang On Ruthie!” features the
earnestly progressive trappings of the Pacific Northwest (a local
lesbian choir sings backup in black judicial robes) and a charmingly
amateurish production (still photographs of Supreme Court justices are
made to wink or bob their heads to the beat). The “Sloopy” lyrics are
recast to celebrate Ginsburg’s legal prowess: “You know you argue so
good/You know your briefs are so tight/You got the juris and the
prudence/Keep counsel up all night.”
"Hang On Ruthie!" from Buffalo Romeo.Credit...CreditVideo by Lea Jones
But the subtext is that Ginsburg’s greatest accomplishment these days is
staying alive. Ginsburg is 87 and has been treated for cancer of the
colon, pancreas, lung and liver. With every new health scare — she
headed back to the hospital again last month to clean out a stent in her
bile duct — her online fandom erupts in a panicked frenzy of memes, as
if the sheer force of cultural production alone could sustain her. As a
Supreme Court justice with a lifetime appointment, Ginsburg wields
immense power in American government, but her liberal influence on the
court is extremely precarious. If she dies before President Trump leaves
office, her legacy could be the ascension of a far-right judge to her
spot on the bench.
This national death watch is an absurd and distressing phenomenon. And
yet Ginsburg’s physical frailty is central to her pop-cultural cachet.
The whole appeal of her little-old-lady archetype is that it situates
her as an underdog and makes for a heady contrast to her intellectual
might. In a sequence from the 2018 documentary “RBG” that has been
sliced into GIFs and pasted around the internet as tribute, she wears a
“SUPER DIVA!” sweatshirt as she heaves teensy hand weights over her
shoulders. Even footage of Ginsburg nodding off at the 2015 State of the
Union was celebrated by her fans, especially after Ginsburg explained
that she had not been “100 percent sober.”
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The more Ginsburg’s persona was revered, the more she appeared to be
literally irreplaceable. Any call for Ginsburg to step down risked being
cast as sexist, the brutish dismissal of a powerful older woman who
refuses to shut up. “I love my job,” Ginsburg told The New York Times in
2013, while Obama was in his second term and Democrats safely controlled
the Senate. Besides, she said, “There will be a president after this
one, and I’m hopeful that that president will be a fine president.”
*“The Notorious R.B.G.,”*Ginsburg’s online alter ego, was codified in a
fan Tumblr in 2013 by Shana Knizhnik, a law student at the time, in the
wake of Ginsburg’s electrifying dissent in Shelby County v. Holder. As
Chief Justice John Roberts led the court in dismantling a key protection
of the Voting Rights Act, Ginsburg argued that it was “like throwing
away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Then
she made the rare, pointed move of reading the dissent aloud from the
bench. In the Trump years, the Notorious R.B.G. branding has fused with
the aesthetics of the patriotic liberal #resistance, where knitted pink
pussy hats are Photoshopped onto bald eagles and otherwise staid
government officials are cast as characters in conspiratorial fantasies.
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But Ginsburg, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has noted, is not the most
liberal Supreme Court justice; that would be the Obama appointee Sonia
Sotomayor. In recent years Ginsburg has voted with the majority in favor
of the fossil-fuel industry and against criminal defendants and asylum
seekers. As a lawyer arguing before the court, Ginsburg built the case
for gender equality incrementally, patiently moving conservative male
minds in the style of “a kindergarten teacher,” as she put it in “RBG”;
she counted the archconservative Antonin Scalia as a friend and carries
a keychain that reads “With best wishes, Strom Thurmond.”
Ginsburg’s tendency toward consensus building has only served to support
her brand. She is the ideal heroine for a liberal faction obsessed with
norms and eager for alliances with never-Trump Republicans. In place of
taking to the streets, the #resistance lionizes conservative bureaucrats
like James Comey and Robert Mueller, plugging them into fan-fiction
narratives about stopping Trump. And it lauds Democrats for performing
cinematic acts of civil disobedience: a condescending clap at the State
of the Union or a pointed “dissent” jabot worn behind the bench.
Ginsburg’s recent bending of tradition to voice her political views
tipped her into the realm of #resistance wish fulfillment. Trump, she
said in the summer before the 2016 election, is a “faker” with an “ego.”
She later apologized for the breach, but she had fulfilled her Facebook
fans’ greatest fantasy: a buttoned-up official dramatically breaking
character in opposition to Trump. It’s the ultimate testimony that his
ascent in American politics is not normal.
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The fact that Ginsburg was wrong about Obama’s successor did not temper
her cult. Since Trump’s election, the R.B.G. economy expanded with more
children’s books, action figures, a board game and popular movies,
including the biopic “On the Basis of Sex,” in which Ginsburg herself
makes a cameo. Trump’s rise represents a serious threat to Ginsburg’s
legacy, but as a narrative twist in her mythology, it is thrilling: The
superhero has found her archvillain, whom she must best by cheating
death yet again.
Recently an indie musician named Pleb Mahogany posted a TikTok in which
he appears in front of a janky montage of Ginsburg news photographs.
Hand on his heart, he lip-syncs a song from “Hamilton,” in which Eliza
Hamilton implores her husband: “Just stay alive/That would be enough.”
The TikTok has the quality of many masterful internet videos, in that
its sincerity level is impossible to divine, but the comments are
unmistakably earnest: “SUPERHERO QUEEN”; “We LOVE RBG!! She’s on my keys.”
As Trump’s presidency drags on and Ginsburg’s hospital visits arrive
with ever greater frequency, all this hagiography appears increasingly
misplaced. Ginsburg’s dissents are as cutting as ever, and chemotherapy
does not appear to have slowed her down. It is her fandom that feels
spent. She was fashioned into the star of a mythical vision of the Obama
era that never really existed — the dawn of a “postracial” society in
which liberals were so comfortable in their dominance that they could
consume their own politics as if they were kitschy pop-culture artifacts.
Now that the Trump era has been met by a true activist movement with the
sustained protests of Black Lives Matter, the Ginsburg memes hit like
relics. In 2016, Ginsburg was asked about Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling
during the national anthem, and she called it “disrespectful” and
“really dumb.” She later apologized, admitting that she had been “barely
aware of the incident or its purpose.” Today the symbol of progressive
change looks not like a justice in a chic dissent collar but a regular
person for whom justice was not served. It looks like Breonna Taylor or
George Floyd. It looks like a movement staged not in the halls of power
but on the streets.
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