KLMNO

Style

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2020. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ SU C

BY MAURA JUDKIS

T

he humorist David Sedaris, considering the

psychology of the undecided voter, once

envisioned a scenario on an airplane. A

flight attendant comes through the cabin

offering passengers a choice of two meals:

chicken, or a “platter of s--- with bits of broken glass in

it.”

“To be undecided in this election,” he wrote, “is to

pause for a moment and then ask how the chick en is

cooked.”

Sedaris was writing about the choice between Sens.

Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008 — a bitter

election cycle that looks impossibly serene in retro-

spect. This year, many people see the choice as some-

thing like chicken (boiled, unseasoned) vs. flying the

plane into a mountainside.

How could anyone not be able to make up their

mind between that guy and that guy?

Yes, they are both elderly White men. But President

Trump and Joe Biden have pitched voters on very

different visions of America — different ideas about its

history and its future, about justice and mercy, about

the truth and how one figures it out, about how a

president (or, really, a person) should behave.

Biden has been on Washington’s main stage for

nearly half a century, and Trump’s lack of filter over the

past five years has left little doubt about who he is and

where he stands. What’s left to decide?

“To be undecided in 2020, to me, you literally would

have to be on an ice floe,” says Tom Nichols, a national

security professor and senior adviser for the Lincoln

Project. “If you’re just coming back from an Antarctic

research station, I would understand.”

Undecided voters are the butt of jokes. But they also

tend to be venerated — by media, by campaigns — as

freethinkers, tough customers, keepers of a rarefied

common sense that exists above the partisan tug-of-

war. They are granted special audiences with candi-

dates, who must persuade them personally while

other Undecideds look on. They are, Nichols says, “the

prized unicorn in the political menagerie.”

In 2020, they’re the “mentally impaired unicorns,”

Stephen Colbert said on a recent episode of “The Late

Show.”

With so much on the line, the Undecideds have

become more mystifying — and frustrating — than

ever.

Nobody believes they are real.

Oh, and everyone hates them.

SEE UNDECIDED ON C3

In the center, a.k.a. the bull’s-eye

It’s the most vitriolic

political season

in living memory,

and t he undecided

voter has inspired

a special

kind of scorn

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

BY ROSA BOSHIER

“How is it that we have been so

conditioned to privilege the emo-

tional comfort of white people?”

Ruby Hamad asks in the intro-

duction to her essay collection

“White Tears/Brown Scars,”

which tracks the fraught legacy

of White womanhood across the

globe. Catalyzed by Hamad’s viral

2018 Guardian

article, “How

white women

use strategic

tears to silence

women of

colour,” “White

Tears/Brown

Scars” posits

that White

women’s tears

signal power,

not weakness.

“When white

women cry,”

Hamad writes,

“it also makes

them able to

leave the con-

versation and

choose not to

listen, whereas

women of color

do not have the ability to choose

to leave.” Highly anecdotal — full

of first-person accounts based on

exhaustive reporting — b ut also

meticulously cited, the essays

outline how this tactical affect

upholds the status quo of White

privilege and power, and its glob-

al and social ramifications.

SEE BOOK WORLD ON C3

White

women’s

tears, seen

through

WHITE TEARS/

BROWN SCARS

How White

Feminism

Betrays

Women of

Color

By Ruby Hamad

Catapult. 304

pp. $16.95

BOOK WORLD

BY ELLEN MCCARTHY

In her three years as a child pro-

tective services investigator, Aman-

da Neal has been called to examine

horrors upon horrors: babies with

broken bones and golf ball-size con-

tusions, toddlers crawling on floors

littered with broken glass, children

who had been molested day after day

by grown-ups they loved. She’s seen

kids who were angry, hungry, hospi-

talized. But what horrified her the

most was when the calls stopped

coming.

“I can’t investigate something I

don’t know about,” she says. For

seven months and who-knows-how-

much-longer, the coronavirus pan-

demic has confined people largely to

their homes — a place of comfort for

many, but a source of danger for the

children Neal works to protect.

Before the pandemic, it wasn’t

unusual for Neal to be assigned two

new cases a day by her bosses at the

Michigan Department of Health and

Human Services. By the third week

of March, as Michigan closed its

schools, her caseload dropped to two

SEE INVESTIGATOR ON C2

‘I can’t investigate something I don’t know about’

Child protective services

agent worries about

the kids she isn’t seeing

ALI LAPETINA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Amanda Neal, a child protective services investigator in Michigan, has noticed calls slowing down and her

caseload dropping during the coronavirus pandemic. She doesn’t take it as a good sign.

BY MICHAEL CAVNA

The futile pursuit of analyzing

comedy has long been likened to

dissecting a frog: You bore the

audience and end up with a

lifeless, croaked amphibian. Yet

is there something true to be

learned if instead, you study a

comic frog?

In the case of “Feels Good

Man,” the Sundance Festival

award winner now available on

demand on various platforms,

you end up with one of the most

politically relevant films of the

year.

On one level, the 90-minute

documentary is about California

cartoonist Matt Furie and his

globally known creation, Pepe

the Frog. The benign, chillaxin’

character was plucked more than

a decade ago from the relative

obscurity of the Myspace-sprung

slacker-life comic “Boy’s Club”

and transmogrified into a meme

by 4chan users and others and

cribbed by pop singers — before

swimming into the sociopolitical

mainstream in 2016 as a symbol

co-opted by the alt-right and

shared on social media by the

campaigning Trump family.

Through a wider lens, though,

“Feels Good Man” speaks to how

Internet culture has come to

influence this precise moment in

SEE PEPE ON C4

A ribbiting

take on a

culture war

Film follows cartoonist

trying to reclaim his

work — and reality

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

“The Race” returns, kinda,

to the campaign trail. C2

CAROLYN HAX

A mother’s cutting remark

to the fun aunt. C2

KIDSPOST

Trump, Biden

and the issues

that matter

most to kids. C8