Primary Night Global Intifada

Watching the triumph of Zohran with the Lower Manhattan DSA

When I arrived at the Lower Manhattan DSA party Zohran was already in the lead, spirits were good, the party was at an enormous sports bar that apparently has the longest bar table in the whole city and “10 video walls to optimize the sports experience,” which were half set to the sympathetic Hell Gate NYC election coverage and half set to the bourgeois channels where the talking heads looked increasingly unsettled, the place was packed with the democratic socialists beneath the Barstool Sports flags, the parties in Brooklyn were already booked out and presumably even more packed, getting a drink was impossible, Donovan was there and he had been canvassing for Zohran earlier that day, he was there with his Ana his former podcast cohost with a tramp stamp that said ZOHRAN and her fiancé Dan and Antiart and Antiart’s girlfriend (I think) and Geeta and Dove who brought his camera that spooked the organizers (they asked him if he was with the press and if the photos were going anywhere because it’s no press allowed and he said no just for his personal amusement and they said they had to check with the committee to see if it was ok, so they checked with the committee and evidently it was ok), I had given up on getting a drink and Donovan and I walked to the 7-11 across the street to buy tallboys that we brought back into the bar, Dove was telling me about this French girl who was supposed to meet up with him there but his phone died so he was basically stuck ghosting her, oh well, then the bourgeois channels switched over to Cuomo’s election party and the crowd booed as the ghoul took the stage on the screens, he looked scared, humiliated, like he was about to be dragged back to hell for failing his patrons, the landlords and the comprador unions and the Zionist death machine, we couldn’t hear what he was saying on the televisions, and then the roar of cheers, according to the chryon he had called Zohran and conceded the race, people were jumping up and down, tears of joy, these people canvassed for Zohran, ecstasy, the canvassers were all over the city, at least twice they came to my apartment in Flatbush, they probably defended him in endless arguments with comrades over whether he’d become the next AOC and whether that was a good thing, whether he’d become the next Obama and whether that was a good thing (Zohran’s biography fits what the birther conspiracists hallucinated about Obama after all), against the pessimists they defended the necessity of illusions, now there was finally some payoff, if only because it rebuked the smear campaigns that label all criticism of the Gaza genocide as antisemitism, we might not yet have built the structures of dual power to counteract the NYPD but now was still the time for libbing out, at least a little, clinking glasses and shots of tequila, toasts to the downfalls of decrepit dynasties and the foundations of new ones, let our grandchildren overthrow the Mamdani dynasty when that time comes, the social media feeds were lit too, “the intifada would be globalized” everyone was saying, soon all the hated Dimes Square fascists would be paying jizya or sent to reeducation camps, the reactionary vibe shift was over and woke was back, videographer Leia Jospe (“the Amy Schumer of Dimes Square”) posted an IG story with “Just found out how much everyone hate Jews please give me some time to process,” reeducation camps for everyone who ever got a New York Times style section profile, even Nick Mullen had endorsed Zohran (all the fascist men love to imagine themselves shooting the shit with Nick Mullen, doing racist impressions, taking BlueChew and jerking each other off, he’s the cool brother they never had), indomitable Matthew Yglesias was tweeting heroic feats of goalpost-moving, back in reality there was a guy there who greeted me asking if I was Crumps and said that he met me at Sovereign House and mentioned that he was trying to get Matthew Davis to come out to this party because he lives just a few blocks away, then he disappeared back into the crowd, I wish I had asked him if he had voted for Zohran, if he was there as a sympathizer or if he was just there for the spectacle, then Donovan was telling Dove that the French girl was blowing up his phone and Dove winced in shame and Donovan handed him a phone charger, Donovan then told Dove that Hunter Biden was there and credulous Dove ran off into the crowd looking for the moneyshot of the old pervert, we went back to the 7-11 to buy a case of Bud Light, then back outside the bar we were interviewed by one of Donovan’s stripper friends for STRIPPER NEWS, I met a guy who told me he was running a DIY recycling operation on his rooftop and was making sculptures out of recycled materials and he does it with this friend of his who is an outsider artist with a developmental disability who nursed him back to health when he broke his back falling thirty feet out a window, he said he wanted to lobby the municipal government to increase the bottle deposit rate from 5 cents to 10, he said he recognized me from somewhere and asked if I lived in Portland (I haven’t) and then he realized he saw me read from one of the early drafts of my novel at Gasda’s theater last winter, he remembered autobiographical details about my father and grandfather, he told me some elaborate story involving Lena the Plug and then invited Dove and I to come check out his rooftop recycling plant sculpture garden next week, Dove got a ride back to his home in Jersey City with some dude who is apparently running for mayor there (or city council or something?) on the democratic socialist ticket, back inside after midnight Zohran went on and gave a speech that’d hit all the erogenous zones of a hypothetical non-fascist Aaron Sorkin, and at the end he brought up his movie producer mother and postcolonial scholar father and wife he met on Hinge who has lately dazzled the internet with a face from the Fayum mummy portraits, the ooos and aaas of the crowd, what a style icon, like a Jiang Qing for the Met Gala, “I hope they’re looking for a third”…