I’ve lived in New York for 13 years, which makes this an eerily appropriate time to experience a plague. Some days, I hide from the news entirely; on others I watch the mounting infection rate with rising panic (it’s over 23,000 in the city now, 37,000 in the state, and likely higher by the time this is published). On Sunday morning, I woke up at dawn to hit the grocery store in my Queens neighborhood just after it opened. This turned out to be a good idea; there were only a handful of other shoppers and they were all sensibly masked. I wasn’t masked, because I didn’t buy any protective gear, because by the time I thought about it two weeks ago, all the stores were already sold out everywhere. At one point, in the vegetable aisle, I thoughtlessly touched my face. This gave me a sort of low-level, rolling panic attack for the rest of the day. I won’t be going outside again for a while.

Ah, but at least I live in New York, where our governor knows what he’s doing! Stranger than the emergence of the novel coronavirus is the sudden flowering of praise for Andrew Cuomo, even as the state of New York experiences the largest outbreak anywhere in the country. In Jezebel, Rebecca Fishbein wrote “Help I Think I’m In Love With Andrew Cuomo?”, a joke/personal essay that should probably have remained an r/relationships fakepost. Fishbein begins by describing her (relatably) “lonely and scared and anxious” state as the coronavirus rages everywhere. Then, she realizes she’s grown to rely on Andrew Cuomo’s daily press briefings for comfort and reassurance. The tone of the piece is funny and confessional, in typical Jezebel style. Fishbein acknowledges many of Cuomo’s bad past policies, admits she probably has Stockholm Syndrome, and concludes:

As I sit alone in my apartment on the couch one of my roommates left behind, wondering when I can escape, if I’m already sick, if anyone will ever hug me again, if my 74-year-old father will survive this, only one thing is certain. Andrew Cuomo, Dear Leader, will take care of me. He loves me. He is the only one who is here for me. He will help me get through this.

And when I finally do, I will need an endless amount of anti-brainwash therapy so I can rightfully yell at him for using prison labor to make hand sanitizer.

This is cute, and the terror that informs her feelings is perfectly understandable given the circumstances, but it also fucking sucks. Imagine saying in 1943 that when the war is over, you plan to “rightfully yell” at FDR for his Japanese internment camps. I’m not making the comparison lightly: Our prisons are a horror and a crime against humanity. Many prisoners are locked up for crimes they didn’t commit, and/or for minor offenses they were plea-bargained into rather than face longer sentences. These prisoners are disproportionately Black, because Black people are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. To make New York State’s hand sanitizer, prisoners earn a thrilling 64 cents an hour, a penny less than the purported New York prison average of 65 cents an hour. Prisoners are not permitted to possess the hand sanitizer themselves because of its alcohol content. This measure has been condemned as slave labor, which it is, since the 13th Amendment bans slavery with the notable exception of convicted felons.

And it sounds a lot like slavery if you ask the prisoners themselves. Katie Way of VICE spoke to a prisoner pseudonymously referred to as “Michael,” who claimed that the hand sanitizer operation runs 24 hours a day, in three eight hour shifts, though some people work double shifts for more money. “‘Getting 64 cents is actually really good,’ [Michael] said. ‘I never got paid that much before doing any type of job like this.’” According to Michael, the work is exhausting. “‘We’re completely overworked…They treat us like shit…We don’t really have too much time to do anything…No time at all. We literally… our complete day is booked all the way.’”

On top of that, THEY AREN’T EVEN MAKING HAND SANITIZER AT ALL. The prisoners are working, all right, and being paid 64 cents an hour… to take existing hand sanitizer made by an unknown outside contractor, bottle it, and slap a NYS CLEAN logo on it. As Katie Way reports, “neither NYSDOCCS [the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision] nor the governor’s office would respond to repeated questions about why the state would need to use prison labor to bottle hand sanitizer.” Cuomo has insisted that his NYS Clean hand sanitizer is much cheaper to produce. He’s never said why, but we all know why; slave labor is cheap. But the hand sanitizer ISN’T even made by the prisoners, just bottled and labeled by them in what sounds like an unnecessarily elaborate operation. According to VICE, “the governor’s office [didn’t] respond to questions about Cuomo’s pitch that this was a cheaper, more effective option than buying bottled hand sanitizer outright.”

Cuomo read Fishbein’s piece, and called her; you might have expected that she took the opportunity to rightfully yell at him for exploiting slave labor just so he can pretend to make cost-effective hand sanitizer in the middle of a pandemic, not to mention how he’s kept the prisons open in the first place as coronavirus spikes through them. Alas, Fishbein was too overwhelmed. “I did not ask a single substantive policy question,” she writes. “I did not ask about the hand sanitizer. I did not ask him to go on a FaceTime date with me. Somewhere in there, I thanked him for his leadership. I may have blacked out.” Help, I think I hate Rebecca Fishbein??? I’m sure that’s unfair. She’s probably a lovely person who is struggling at this terrible moment, as we all are.

I am at a loss, at times, for how to convince people that the world is real, that prisoners like Michael are not abstractions but human beings, that a public official is not your daddy in any sense of the word no matter how cutely you couch it. Fishbein is hardly the only culprit here. In Vogue, Molly Jong-Fast bravely answers the question few outside the media were asking: “Why We Are Crushing on Andrew Cuomo.” She begins, as Fishbein does, by acknowledging a few of Cuomo’s notoriously shitty actions as governor (I will have a lot more to say about this in a bit), but her criticisms are primarily aesthetic. She doesn’t mention the prisoners and the hand sanitizer at all; her problem with Cuomo is mostly that “[he] just didn’t speak to me, or rather, he spoke to me in a gruff, gravelly, overly emphatic and slightly obnoxious way about obscure bureaucratic infighting. He felt joyless, not exciting. I liked him, but I didn’t like him like him. He was no Sherrod Brown, no Chris Murphy, no Val Deming, no Tammy Duckworth.” (Oh, for the sizzling sex appeal of…Sherrod Brown?) But rather than thinking about what it means to like a politician and why that matters, Jong-Fast admits that thanks to the coronavirus crisis, she’s fallen for our governor. She gushes, “Andrew Cuomo may be imperfect, but he’s still the closest thing we have to an FDR for our time.” (Again, when it comes to the internment camps, this may actually be a fair comparison.) Jong-Fast also admits her jealousy for Fishbein, who actually got to talk to Cuomo, on the phone. “He was MY competent governor/imaginary boyfriend,” she whines. In case you were beginning to wonder, yes, both Fishbein and Jong-Fast are adult women.

Listen, I’m as stupidly horny as the next idiot, and totally agree that sexual attraction is subjective, even random. This pandemic is a living nightmare, and a certain amount of silly eroticism is necessary and even expected when faced with invisible death particles that could kill us at any moment. But no amount of manufactured sexual consent will ever get me to agree that Andrew Cuomo is either physically attractive or worthy of respect. As my friend Jason Adam Katzenstein puts it, Cuomo has the vibe of a “featured extra on Entourage who looked directly into the Ark of the Covenant.” Looks are rarely indicative of character, but Cuomo happens to be both ugly and mean, and in his case he’s ugly because his face contorts into mean expressions, and he makes mean expressions because he’s a mean person. Jong-Fast was right to label him “joyless” and “obnoxious,” but she missed the reasons why she used to feel this way; it’s because Andrew Cuomo is a jerk, and he sucks.

Andrew Cuomo is a Garbage Person

Some New Yorkers remember this, some don’t. Some have happily put their intelligence aside because our brains are full of the gibbering specter of death right now and it’s a lot easier to think with our collective junk. As Bronx-based comedian Desus Nice tweeted with uncharacteristic irritation: “cuomo is trash and u ppl are gonna get a hard on from these pressers and make him president one day bc you’re all stupid.” Governor Cuomo has long harbored presidential ambitions, and last year he threatened to run for president if “close ally” Joe Biden didn’t. Given Biden’s likely victory and manifest unfitness for the presidency, there is some hope and speculation that Cuomo, among others, might be proffered by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in Biden’s place. (Weirder things have happened, and with a global pandemic hitting during an election year we are officially in Chaos Mode.) To Rebecca Fishbein’s credit, she has taken ownership of her role in Cuomo’s recent popularization, and has said, “I feel like I have helped create a monster, but Cuomo should not run for president, and I spent like 99 percent of my professional career writing about how much he sucks.” But why is Andrew Cuomo such trash? Why shouldn’t he run for president? What has he done that our thirsty, shameless, pants-off press is so quick to forget?

A short list:

But What About Coronavirus???

Ok fine, so Cuomo’s record is often bad. So he’s a preening, self-aggrandizing, untrustworthy, unlikeable, vindictive valor-thief in the pocket of well-heeled donors. But what about the current crisis? Aren’t the times so extraordinary that they require our memories to be shorter than even the usual goldfish span required of the Democratic rank-and-file? Isn’t Andrew Cuomo handling this particular crisis well?

Let’s take a look.

I’ve already brought up the whole slaves-pretending-to-make-hand-sanitizer issue. But on top of that, only about 300 people have been released from New York’s overcrowded jails and prisons, even as coronavirus rips through Riker’s Island and other city jails. As of the time of this writing, over 100 people in the New York City prison system—both prisoners and guards—have been diagnosed, but the numbers are likely higher. As the Associated Press reports, “New York officials have consistently downplayed the number of infections in its prisons and jails.” Rather than release prisoners into safer environments (de Blasio has already released the 300 mentioned above, and may release more, but not enough), Cuomo has preferred to go ahead with his plan to reverse New York’s recent bail reform measures. (Editors’ note: on the afternoon of 3/27, Cuomo finally decided to release 1,100 people locked up in New York state prisons for minor parole violations.) And at Cuomo’s Monday presser, he glommed onto the conservative meme of “human lives versus wealth creation, gotta hear both sides” with a graphic that balanced “Protect Lives” with “Economic Viability.” If you’re swooning over Cuomo’s short-sleeved outfits while he’s openly weighing the costs of killing workers, you might need therapy.

“But,” you might say, “that’s not the Cuomo I love. I love the Cuomo who went on TV and yelled at Trump, the Cuomo who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times demanding more hospital beds and medical supplies from the federal government. That was great. That’s what leadership looks like.” Well, if you’re curious why New York will soon run out of hospital beds, it’s not solely because of the huge number of COVID-19 victims. It’s also because Cuomo has been closing down hospital space for years via his Berger Commission, which has sought efficiency in the name of “budget cuts and insurance overhauls.” This Cuomo-appointed panel just decided to cut Medicaid even further, including specific cuts to city hospitals. They didn’t arrive at this decision pre-crisis, but literally last Thursday. It would have been evil at any time, but now, as a highly contagious virus cripples the city, it’s unconscionable.

Cuomo is “probably the single most important person in terms of the drive to close down hospital beds in this state over the last 20 years,” said Sean Petty of the New York State Nurses Association in a terrific interview with Democracy Now. Petty continued, “Specifically because of policies that Governor Cuomo has pursued, we are now 20,000 beds behind where we need to be in terms of trying to scale up our capacity.’” A flattering U.S. News article titled “How Coronavirus made Andrew Cuomo America’s Governor” (an obvious reference to the way Rudy Giuliani was called “America’s Mayor” after 9/11) points out that in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, the governor has “us[ed] New York’s resources to buy personal protective equipment and expand hospital bed space.” But does that actually mean anything, given that Cuomo trimmed the budget—much like the quarantine buzzcuts everybody’s been doing—way too close in the first place?

The fact is that Cuomo’s past and currently suggested Medicaid cuts have put New York hospitals in a horrible position. “Governor Cuomo is currently trying to reduce Medicaid spending in the state by almost $2.5 billion dollars during this pandemic,” Petty said. “And this will absolutely result in a decrease in healthcare capacity and keep the state from getting matching federal dollars for Medicaid spending.” That $2.5 billion figure is over several years; Cuomo aims to cut Medicaid by $400 million alone in 2020, in the middle of the worst pandemic the world has faced in 100 years.

New York’s ventilator shortage also seems to be, in many ways, the governor’s fault. A 2015 report from his administration predicted that when faced with a “severe” influenza or influenza-like pandemic (such as, say, the one that’s upon us right now), New York would fall 15,783 ventilators short of the necessary amount. Cuomo’s plan, according to documents dug up by journalist John Riley, was to “allocate” ventilators rather than just buy more to have in readiness. While the federal government has obviously done a poor job of supplying ventilators, medical supplies, and hospital beds to the most afflicted states, it doesn’t help that Andrew Cuomo has been kneecapping New York hospitals and their workers during the decade he’s been in charge. The governor’s poor planning is one reason that New York hospitals are already overwhelmed, with health care workers at Mount Sinai West forced to wear trash bags due to lack of protective gear. Kious Kelly, a 48 year old assistant nursing manager at Mount Sinai, died on Tuesday from coronavirus complications. Some of his coworkers blamed the hospital as an institution, while others said that the supply issues have been going on for some time. A nurse told the New York Post that within the last year, even before the coronavirus hit, “‘we had to hide our own supplies and go to other units looking for stuff because even the supply room would have nothing most of the time.’” While Cuomo obviously can’t be held solely responsible for Mount Sinai’s supply problems, his healthcare cuts certainly bear some of the blame.

There also remains the open question of whether Cuomo’s supposed best action—the “stay at home” order he issued—even happened in time. New York’s coronavirus case numbers have been sky-high; 100 people died on March 26th. (Update 04/08/2020: 731 people died on 4/7/2020). You could of course dispassionately argue that during a highly contagious global pandemic, we would expect that the largest and most densely-populated city in any given country would have the most cases, and the most fatalities. On March 12th, as coronavirus burned through New Rochelle just north of the Bronx, the number of coronavirus cases in NYC jumped to 95, and de Blasio declared a state of emergency, I started self-quarantining (I work from home, so it’s not much different than my regular life). But Cuomo only issued the “stay at home” order, closing all nonessential businesses throughout the state and encouraging people to stay indoors if they can—on March 20th. The order didn’t even go into effect until the 22nd, the same day as my terrifying grocery run. (Update 04/08/2020: According to Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, former head of the CDC and also a former commissioner of the NYC health department, “if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent.” )

As it is, essential businesses in New York include not just grocery stores, but also construction workers building luxury apartments, which frequently go unsold anyway. Even the otherwise worshipful New York Times has had some tepid words for Cuomo about his delay:

The governor’s actions have not always been at the forefront: He waited several days last week, as the count of confirmed cases continued to rise, before instituting an order to close nonessential businesses and ask residents to stay at home, even as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California had already done so.

The Times pins the blame on Cuomo’s legendary quarrel with de Blasio, saying that the question of issuing an order “degenerated into a semantics debate.” Was mid-pandemic the right time to have a stupid semantics debate with Bill de Blasio? I guess it depends on whether Cuomo felt like de Blasio started it first. Now, let’s be fair: There’s plenty of reason to blame both Cuomo and de Blasio and, to paraphrase the original Ghostbusters, treating public officials like dirt is every New Yorker’s God-given right.

It’s notable that the recent flurry of distinctly un-New York hagiography over Cuomo has less to do with his actions—which have been decent at best, and hideously cruel at worst—and more about his attitude. We hear a lot about his “steady and calm leadership,” and his daily “public updates [that are] assertive and reassuring, calming and urgent.” I don’t want to dismiss the emotional significance of these daily briefings: They make people feel safer, and that really is important in these awful days. Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted, “No matter what you think of his politics, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is modeling crisis leadership right now. Fact-based, blunt, knowledgeable, firm and calm. He is clear the responsibility lies with him and that there is a plan, that there will be pain but we must all share in it.” While Trump has denied responsibility for the crisis, even though his personal inattentiveness and inaction are largely to blame for the unchecked scale of the coronavirus’ spread, Cuomo has said, “I accept full responsibility. If someone is unhappy, if somebody wants to blame someone, or complain about someone, blame me. There is no one else who is responsible for this decision.”

But the fact is that Cuomo hasn’t taken responsibility for his many errors, and what’s worse is that no one seems to care.

In a sexually repressed but infinitely depraved piece for the New York Times called “Andrew Cuomo is the Control Freak We Need Right Now,” Ben Smith praises Cuomo’s authoritarian strength. He comments admiringly on Cuomo’s “capacity to bend the bureaucracy to his will,” and how, “without inspiring much love…[Cuomo] wins elections by grinding opponents into dust before they can make it to the ballot box. He governs by transaction, not inspiration, as a dispenser of favors and destroyer of insurgents’ dreams, the purest master of the machine since Lyndon Johnson in his prime.” Piling scorn on Cuomo’s enemies, Smith writes that, “the people most passionate about politics these days—the New Left and the Trump-led right—dislike him because he governs as both a social liberal and a friend of business. Many moderate and liberal politicians, who ought in theory to like Mr. Cuomo, simply fear him.” Smith, as is typical of the writers of these slavering essays, speaks more about Cuomo’s “leadership” and his powerful presence than his actual actions. However, Smith does state, without inflection, that one of Cuomo’s impressively decisive decisions during the coronavirus outbreak has been to “put state prisoners to work making hand sanitizer.” There’s no judgment here, no mention of the condition of the prisoners or the prisons, no whisper of the fact that they aren’t actually making the hand sanitizer in the first place, and definitely no use of the accurate phrase “slave labor.” Yet Ben Smith scorns the “New Left” who fail to appreciate Cuomo, as though we are being unreasonable for wanting social and economic progress—both at the same time—and also for thinking that human beings shouldn’t be locked up in cages especially during the outbreak of a killer virus. Are we greedy? Are we impractical? Do we fail to love Cuomo as he deserves?

I might be accused, as leftists often are, of expecting politicians to be perfect. I don’t. This is a horrible, unprecedented disaster that has stretched the flaws in our social fabric to the limit, and the governor of a U.S. state—even if he were a good person, which Cuomo is not—wouldn’t be able to magically save the lives of all his citizens, or cancel the infection rate of this hideously contagious disease. (Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, however, does seem to be doing a fairly good job, and if you simply must lust after a governor, he also has decent politics and is objectively a total babe.) It’s also true that New York is testing aggressively in comparison to other states, which is another reason our infection rate is so high (though it’s likely even higher than the stated numbers, as many people with mild or asymptomatic cases are not getting tested at all, including some friends of mine.)

But the fact is that Cuomo, at multiple times in the past including literally last week, has failed to use his authority wisely. He’s a good showman, but his commitments are as superficial as his outfits. He rarely takes responsibility for his actions, doesn’t accept criticism, and is devoted to railroading opposition either openly or behind closed doors. As New York Magazine reports:

De Blasio grew exasperated…going on NY1 in 2015 and accusing Cuomo of waging a “vendetta” against anyone who dared disagree with him. “With all due respect, maybe what the mayor was witnessing is something different,” a former Cuomo adviser says. “Which is ‘We hate you until we need you, and then we love you.’ Which is not hard to understand, and right then, we were in the ‘We hate you’ phase. But there will come a point in time when we need you, and then we’ll love you.’”

Have we come to the point in time where we need Cuomo? Do we have no choice now but to love him?

Is He Hot Or Are We Just Desperate

I don’t watch cable news, so even before the quarantine I’ve sometimes had the experience of living in a locked-in dystopian novel. I’ll just be going about my business when lots of people suddenly start saying something incredibly stupid, all at the same time. I can try to argue with them using facts and documented events (for example, Cuomo’s whole history). But even liberals who pride themselves on their love of facts and documented events will simply reply with something like, “Andrew Cuomo is American’s governor. I trust him.” How to explain this mysterious infection of unreason, of willful ignorance, in liberals—not conservatives—who will say they’re never ill, there’s nothing wrong, they feel fine, they know and care about the facts! You can trace the virus back to its sources: fawning essays in legacy publications, and TV news networks, and the feedback loop between the two. Fox may be Trump’s propaganda network but let’s be honest about what MSNBC and CNN have become (and to some degree have been for a while). As the New York Times gushes, “[Cuomo’s] briefings—articulate, consistent and often tinged with empathy—have become must-see television. On Tuesday, his address was carried live on all four networks in New York and a raft of cable news stations, including CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News.” These press briefings are rarely presented with the honest framing or context needed to explain who this suddenly lauded state official really is or what he’s actually done in his career. No further information is necessary; Cuomo is the hero of the moment, and we all need a hero right now, or rather we shouldn’t question why we think we need a hero. For liberals, the moment Cuomo brusquely critiqued Trump on TV he became a champion of the #Resistance and a sex symbol, the new Robert Mueller, the strongman we can trust up until the day he too inevitably disappoints, and is swept under the rug like so many other forgotten statues, functionally identical to the last one.

Unless, as Desus Nice fears, we make Cuomo president instead. In response to activist Wendy Brandes, who tweeted, “[Cuomo’s] the same as he’s always been, but someone needs to sound decisive now and Americans are complete fools for charismatic savior types,” Desus replied, “the bar is so low literally oj simpson could be president of this country if he gave like 3 good speeches.”

The bar is indeed extremely low. As Ben Smith of the New York Times proudly points out, “Mr. Cuomo holds news conferences filled with facts and (accurate) numbers almost every day. He explains systems and challenges and decision-making with a command that Mr. Trump lacks. He even models social distancing by having speakers stay six feet apart from one another.”

Facts! Accurate numbers! Correct behavior! It’s a liberal wet dream. Cuomo, for the moment, has managed to look the part. He’s handling the crisis better than Trump (again, extremely low bar), so his record doesn’t matter, either his past actions or his shitty present ones. Cuomo is popular because he is on TV, because he looks like the kind of guy who ought to be on TV. He’s wearing short sleeves; he seems tough, but sometimes he speaks—with relatable sympathy—about his daughters. He’s the divorced dad hero of an action movie, a mostly useless and unpleasant asshole who gets to step up when the situation calls for it, just in time to prove to his family and his ex that he knew what he was doing all along. For some people, this is enough. All they want is someone who fills the role. Of course, if all you want is for someone to successfully play the role of hero and governor and then possibly president, maybe you should have elected an actor after all. It’s a shame that despite Cynthia Nixon’s excellent policies and documented activist commitments, Miranda from Sex and the City wasn’t the right kind of character.

There are certain ways we want a governor—or president—to look on TV. They have to talk about their plans, and Getting Things Done, and pragmatism, and tell stories about “a woman I met in Topeka, who works out of a mine shaft and has a heart valve condition and five adopted frog-children, and she said to me…” Candidates need a certain kind of cadence, like the one that Buttigieg stole and filled with completely empty nonsense-words and yet still won 26 delegates. They have to sound presidential, which basically means sounding like presidents in disaster movies. They have to reassure America in a very calm voice. They have to project strength, and display “leadership,” which means they are in charge, and you are not. They don’t necessarily have to be white, or male, though clearly it’s an advantage most of the time. What’s really important is that they have to project a particular kind of reassuring dad or mom energy. They need to make you think “if I vote for this person, I can switch my brain off and let them handle it.” Trump, ironically the ultimate president on TV, obsessed with his ratings and his coverage, is still not a “TV president.” This is half of why many liberals object to him (and half of why his fans trollishly like him). Unless he’s praising the military, Trump rarely looks or acts the part. Bernie Sanders, with his working-class Jewish accent, never does.

I get that people are frightened. I am completely fucking terrified every second of the day. I understand that, right now, any reassuring figure on the TV seems nice. But on the other hand, I feel like maybe it’s a bad idea to encourage authoritarians who love attention, get embroiled in petty vendettas, fundamentally despise you, and believe better things are only possible if rich people sign off on them first. Andrew Cuomo seems like the dad who will tell you what to do; Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, feels like the ethnic grandpa who will yell at the people who aren’t doing enough for you, and insists that you yourself can do more. I appreciate why one is more comforting than the other right now, but—and this is hard to hear—you actually aren’t doing enough.

Instead of lulling yourself into the false hope that Cuomo or anyone else will provide for your needs over those of rich people, you can take action. A great way to battle that sense of helplessness is to look into your local organizations and mutual aid groups; whether you need help or can give it, these organizations deserve your money and your time. (I linked a few good ones in the previous sentence, but if you like here’s a master list of all the mutual aid networks in North America). The federal government—and Cuomo—are debating sending people back to work in a few weeks, well before it’s safe. But this doesn’t have to happen if we agree not to go; that is, if we embark on a general strike or take other large-scale collective action. The economy doesn’t work without us; we’re stronger than the bosses right now. There’s a lot we can do to help each other. We’re not alone.

We’re definitely living in unprecedented times, and we’ll never return to “normal.” Whatever future is headed our way, it won’t resemble the past. You’re totally allowed to have nostalgia for that of course; I can’t blame you for a moment. But please don’t worship a daddy figure who says he’s going to stand up to the bullies and fix everything. One, because it isn’t true—Andrew Cuomo is also a fucking bully, and has been for years—and because you’re a grown adult, and it’s time to take charge of your life. We’re in this together, which means we aren’t here to be passively led, or saved, by the nearest guy we decide is cute just because we’re horny and scared. We have to be our own sexy heroes and heroines. We have to save ourselves, together.

Cover photo Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council announcement, credit Zack Seward.

Sincere thanks to Guy Ben-Aharon and the good people at NSFWonks who provided me with links to some of the many, many appalling things that Cuomo has done.