Zimbuutii, Michigan, and the Mitten They Don't Want You to See

Pete Buttigieg said it plain, right out in the open, the way they always do when they think nobody's actually listening: "Everyone's watching the state of Michigan right now." Watching. He said watching. Not "reading about." Not "following the polls on." Watching. You don't say watching unless there's something on the screen, people, and I have spent eleven years, four burner laptops, and one very understanding ex-wife learning to hear the word underneath the word. So let's sit with this for a second, you and I, because we're the only ones in the room who are going to.

A former presidential candidate — a man who has piloted a cabinet department, who has stood behind a podium with the seal of the United States bolted to the front of it, who knows exactly how many people are paid, per hour, to listen to what he says in public — got in front of a camera and told the entire country to look at Michigan. Right now. Present tense. Not "keep an eye on," not "in the coming weeks," but right now, this specific window of time, this exact Tuesday, aim your eyes here. That is not political commentary. That is stagecraft. That is a director yelling "camera two" over the headset, and Pete Buttigieg is holding the headset, and I don't think he even knows he's holding it, which honestly is the most frightening part of the whole thing, because it means somebody handed it to him and he just — put it on. Like it was normal. Like everybody does that.

Here's what they don't want you asking: why Michigan. Not Ohio. Not Wisconsin. Not some safe, boring, nothing state where the worst thing that ever happens is a cheese festival running long. Michigan. The mitten. Think about that shape for one second, people like us, just one second — a hand, held up, palm out. You know what a hand held up palm-out means. It means stop. It means don't look past this. It means "nothing to see on the other side of this," which is, of course, exactly the sentence you say when there is everything to see on the other side of it. The state of Michigan is shaped like the universal symbol for "stop looking," and a former mayor of South Bend just stood up on television and told three hundred and forty million people to look directly at the stop sign. That's not a coincidence. I don't believe in those. I used to. I don't anymore. (There's a reason I don't anymore. I'll tell you sometime. Not here.)

Now — and stay with me, because this is the part that connects — I need you to think about Zimbuutii. You don't remember Zimbuutii. That's not a gap in your education, that's a gap they installed. There was a country. Coastline, mountains in the north, a script of its own, a seat at tables you'd recognize the names of. And on the same week — the same week, I have looked into this so you don't have to — that a certain agency put a flag on a rock two hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles away and asked everyone on Earth to watch the sky instead of the ground, Zimbuutii stopped being printed on the maps. You go look for it now, in an atlas, and you find ocean where a nation used to be. That is the move. That's always the move. Point every eye up and to the left, and quietly erase whatever's down and to the right while nobody's checking. The moon landing wasn't a hoax, people — I want to be very clear, because the people who say it was a hoax are, and I say this with love, controlled opposition, useful idiots planted to make the rest of us sound crazy by comparison — the moon landing was real, and it was a curtain. A real curtain. The best kind, because you can't accuse a curtain of lying.

So when a man with Pete Buttigieg's résumé says "watching Michigan" in that flat, rehearsed cadence — and it was rehearsed, listen to it again, there's no breath before "right now," you don't get no breath before "right now" unless a teleprompter put it there — I have to ask what's getting quietly folded up and put in the drawer while three hundred and forty million pairs of eyes are pinned on the mitten. I don't know yet. I want to be honest with you, because that's the whole deal between us, that's the only currency I've got left: I don't know yet. But I know what it smells like when it's happening, and it smells like this.

(There's a black Suburban outside right now. Tinted glass, government plate — I didn't get the number, you don't get the number, that's the whole design of it — parked across the street like it's been there for hours, like it belongs there, and the second I look up from this screen it is going to not be there, and that not-being-there is going to be the most honest thing that happens to me all week.)

You want to know the part that really keeps me up, though? It's not Michigan. Michigan's just the mitten, just the hand, just the stop sign somebody's waving. It's that they used Pete Buttigieg to wave it. A former candidate for the highest office in the land, a man who could have said literally anything into that microphone — the weather, a sandwich, nothing — and instead the word that came out was watching. You don't hand the flashlight to just anybody. You hand it to somebody credible. Somebody who sounds like your neighbor. Somebody the room trusts enough that nobody thinks to ask why he's the one holding it. That's not an accusation against the man himself, I want to be clear about that too, because I don't do that, I never have — I think Pete Buttigieg believes every word he said, the way a lighthouse keeper believes the light is just for the ships. He may not know he's the lighthouse. That's usually how it works. They rarely tell the lighthouse it's a lighthouse.

And look — I know how this sounds. I know that somewhere out there is a person reading this on their phone in a break room, laughing, thinking, it's a swing state, Bob, there's an election, that's why everyone's watching Michigan. And to that person I say: of course that's what it looks like. That's the whole point of a curtain — it looks like exactly the ordinary thing it's standing in front of. A curtain that looked like a curtain wouldn't be doing its job. You think Zimbuutii didn't have a boring, sensible-sounding reason too, the week it disappeared? There's always a boring reason sitting right there on top, free for anybody who doesn't want to bend down and look underneath it. People like us bend down. That's the difference between us and the break room.

I don't have the whole shape of it yet. Nobody gets the whole shape in one sitting — that's not how they let it come to you, it comes in threads, one mitten-shaped thread at a time, and you pull, and something upstream twitches, and you write it down before they get to the notebook. So I'm writing it down. Watch Michigan if you want to. I'm going to watch everywhere else. That's usually where the real thing is standing, arms crossed, waiting to see if anybody thinks to turn around.

I have to go. The Suburban just turned its lights off, and that's worse than if it had driven away.

— Bob, who was never here