Jamaal Bowman Is Transforming into a Memorably Dumb Recurring Sitcom Character By Jeffrey Blehar
A confession: I just assume that anyone as attuned as I am to the ongoing carnival of trolls that is Trump/Biden–era Washington must also be a fan of weird, bleak satire. You can’t do this job without a healthy sense of the absurd, at least not without having your spirit crushed. And I’m coming to realize over time that many of the keenest observers of American politics have become in their own way art critics as well, as one must be in an era of performative nonsense.
So what I’ve come to appreciate about New York congressman Jamaal Bowman is how he has played so predictably to a script, slowly morphing into an entertainingly dense bit player whose intermittent appearances in the news always promise a memorably dumb episode in our politics, like Tim Whateley the dentist converting to Judaism for the jokes on Seinfeld or George Santos showing up to sheepishly reveal a competitive Brazilian drag performance alias. He doesn’t dominate the narrative insufferably, like Matt Gaetz — the smug, prat-faced Wesley Crusher of Congress, forever inserting himself into random narratives as a useless B-story for 15 minutes of time-wasting. Instead you can rely on Bowman to pop up every now and then, get caught saying and/or doing something refreshingly funny in its hopelessly flat-footed stupidity, then disappear backstage again into what threatens to be a marvelously entertaining Democratic primary race this spring.
Like any solid character arc, this one begins a few episodes back, back near the end of Season 2 of the 118th Congress, when (as viewers will recall) Kevin McCarthy got unceremoniously axed from the show. Since National Review doesn’t do clickbait “episode guides,” I’ll just remind everyone that — spoiler alert — the day before McCarthy got decapitated as speaker of the House in an ending that perfectly mirrored the first season of Game of Thrones (most viewers were surprised, but I had already read the book), Jamaal Bowman yanked a fire alarm in the Cannon Building in order to delay a vote on a 45-day temporary debt-ceiling increase. As he had been caught on camera, his left-wing partisans then resorted to a delightfully mounting series of get-me-across-pitch defenses: He was confused! He was late to a vote! (He ran out of gas! He had a flat tire! He didn’t have enough money for cab fare! His tux didn’t come back from the cleaners!)
Actually, he was guilty, which is why he confessed when confronted by Capitol Hill Police with surveillance video showing him trying to first trigger a fire alarm by opening an emergency exit door before finding it locked and, in frustration, simply turning and yanking the wall alarm to get the deed done. As I pointed out the other day, I don’t even particularly care why he did it. I’m just enjoying the comedy of it all, how everyone pretended to think he was innocent or misunderstood right up until the moment he admitted, “Yes, I knowingly did this,” and then instantly we are all expected flip ahead along with Bowman to a different page, where the only lines written for him to speak are, “We’ve talked about this already.”
So get ready to see a lot more clips like these in the future, where the man comically freezes up under simple but painfully direct questioning by reporters. “Why did you plead guilty to knowingly pulling the fire alarm when you said to us you ‘didn’t know it,’ initially?” That’s a reasonable question that you’d think Bowman should be prepared to answer, but then this is a cringe-comedy after all, not Noel Coward. So instead he just tries to deny the problem away: “Why are we still talking about this, man; that’s been adjudicated, it’s behind me, it’s done!” Do yourself a favor and go watch the entire clip right now — it’s stone-cold hilarious the way, like an adolescent caught by his parents in an obvious lie, he seems to think that merely repeating, “I have nothing to say,” will magically make the issue disappear.
When it is pointed out to Jamaal Bowman that this issue is not, in fact, “done” given the fact that he still hasn’t told the world a straight story about what the heck happened, he rotely falls into filibuster mode, defensively repeating, “I was very straight; I was straight from the beginning,” like George Costanza being reamed out by his boss. (I must assume that, right after this clip ends, Bowman then asks, “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell ya, I gotta plead ignorance on this sort of thing, because if anybody had told me that pulling fire alarms was frowned upon . . .”) It’s a satisfying moment, and I think we can count on Bowman to give us many more of them until he either comes clean about the truth or faces his voters this April. I hope he doesn’t, honestly — because his continued embarrassment every time he pokes his head out in public remains one of the more reassuring side stories of Washington’s go-nowhere Congress in all its hapless stupidity.
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