The pure emptiness of Katie Britt
If there’s one thing the last 72 hours have taught us, it’s how hard it is to be a woman and a Republican these days. Take the woman who has dominated the news over the weekend, Alabama Senator Katie Britt. She appeared on national TV to give the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union Thursday and for her efforts was famously lampooned by Scarlett Johansen on Saturday Night Live.
The phrase “deer caught in the headlights” seemed to have been invented to describe Britt as she posed in front of what appeared to be a greenscreen image of her own kitchen. She went from weepy to ecstatic to inordinately sincere and back again, zig-zagging her way through a script some committee of Trump campaign staffers had lashed together for her to act her way through. The disconnect between the words she read off the teleprompter and her voice and expression was, uh…how can I put this? Jarring isn’t quite right. Annoying? Well, yes, there’s that.
What’s that feeling I’m reaching for, hovering just out of reach of my consciousness? Okay, I’ve got it. Watching Britt’s face and listening to her whisper her way through the introduction of her remarks, I felt embarrassed for her. Really, I did. She had no sense at all what she was saying, or how to say it, because she was just reading words, not expressing them, or feeling what she said. She whispered, “our country is less secure,” and then smiled widely into the eye of the camera. That is simply not the way you say those words, and having said them, how you react to what you’ve said. It doesn’t even rise to the level of fake. It’s just…nothing, a pure emptiness knowable only to, yes, Katie Britt.
I’m going to do something I probably shouldn’t attempt. I’m going to try to figure out why she read the phrase the way she did and then punctuated it with her wide, entirely inappropriate and obviously insincere smile. Katie Britt is a product of the University of Alabama “Machine,” the informal but hugely powerful group of fraternity and sorority members who run the Student Government Association by proxy, electing presidents of the association each year, and through them influencing and in many cases running student life on the university campus. Being a part of the “Machine” at the University of Alabama is the way you get ahead in the state’s business and politics, which in that tightly-knit southern state are one and the same.
The way you get ahead in the “Machine” is to play along in the university’s “Greek” system, which in the case of fraternities, prizes good old boyism like partying, drinking, adolescent misbehavior and copying what your father did when he was in the same fraternity you’re in, because he got you in. With sororities, it’s a female version of the frat stuff, bottom-lined by whatever passes for this year’s version of antebellum submissiveness. Britt was president of the Student Government Association (SGA) during the 2003-2004 school year, which on the SGA website appears with an unexplained asterisk next to it.
In Alabama, the “Machine” is thought to have legendary powers: they elect the student body president, the Homecoming Queen, members of the student senate and other student presidents on campus, and many of those same campus officers go on to bigger and more powerful positions in state and federal government, like, for example, Katie Britt. The “Machine” is often compared to Yale’s Skull and Bones, one of those college frat things that nobody will admit to being a member of , but everybody knows how powerful it is, and how powerful you are if you’re associated with it. The power of the “Machine” at the University of Alabama has held since the 1920s, with the sole exception of 1992 through 1996 when the SGA was banned by the university.
It's a much longer story, but the banning in 1992 involved the harassment and assault of a non-machine candidate for president of the SGA, who was – you guessed it – a woman. According to “Crimson White,” the student newspaper, a cross was burned on her lawn, and she was assaulted, causing “a golf ball-size bruise on her cheek, a busted lip, and a knife wound on the side of her face.” I couldn’t find any records of arrests for the assault, or what happened after the woman “fled the campus.”
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I am reliably informed by a person familiar with the Machine at the Univ of Alabama that the asterisk next to Katie Britt's name on the Univ of Alabama Student Government website refers, without saying so, to the fact that 4,500 fake votes were cast online in the 2003-2004 election. My informant doesn't say who the fake ballots were cast for, but after this little mini-scandal, they went back to paper ballots and Katie Britt won. I don't want to note how, uh, familiar this sounds, but...
VAPID is your word: adjective. without liveliness or spirit; dull or tedious: a vapid party;vapid conversation. lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavor; insipid; flat: vapid tea. I am a 76-year old woman who smashed some glass ceilings, not without shedding blood! Heartbroken to say the least, at so-called women like this vapid piece of crap.