Illustration by James Zucco The New York Times Magazine 25
‘‘How’s my crying,’’ and had attached to it, with
droll contempt, the White House’s phone number.
Public grief is barely tolerated, yet rarely have we
been fewer degrees of separation from the griev-
ing of others. It occurs to me that somewhere near
the base of the chasm cleaving the country is a
wish to deny the legitimacy of a man who, given
his druthers, might be out there feeling every-
thing all the time, in order to keep installed a man
worshiped, in part, for feeling nothing.
Whose tears don’t arouse someone’s suspicion?
Is this the crying of narcissism or possible gain?
The tears of a clown? Or a crocodile?
The fairness of such questions crossed my mind
in the fall, when the U.S. Open ended with Novak
Djokovic’s weeping hard under a towel. He had
failed to achieve the rare feat they call a calen-
dar-year Grand Slam, in which one player wins
all four major tennis titles in a season, which, in
Djokovic’s case, meant he also missed becoming
the winningest major-title holder. He didn’t always
play his usual exhilarating tennis. The pressure was
too much, perhaps. Daniil Medvedev outplayed
him in the fi nal, but Djokovic also wasn’t himself,
languid against his opponent’s vigor, speed and
guile — frustrated, answerless. A loss like that,
in which the loser is both soundly beaten and
self-defeated, stings. Djokovic appeared stung.
The crowd showered him with sympathy,
which, for him, was a radically warmer outpour-
ing than the jeering he is more accustomed to.
So the sight of him losing so uncharacteristically,
then sobbing like that, in the public privacy of
terry cloth, with just enough of an opening in
the towel to spy each half of his mouth rocking
back and forth, in a convulsive rictus: It got to
me, too. I thought back to that moment when, in
January, he fought against the Australian govern-
ment for an exemption to play in the year’s fi rst
major tournament without a mandated vaccine.
He might have falsely claimed on his exemption
application that he hadn’t traveled internationally
in the two weeks before he got to Australia. And
yet, I thought, there is a decent person in there: I
saw him cry. His self-infl icted harm, his cultivated
villainy, garner a tinge of pity from me. I can hear
the skeptics saying I’m a fool. Th e dude spent that
whole jag beneath the towel. How do we know he
didn’t fake crying, too?
But I believe that even the tears of antagonists
merit our consideration. In November, Kyle Rit-
tenhouse took the witness stand at his murder trial
and proceeded to sob through his testimony. He
was asked to recall the night he shot two men dead
and wounded another in Kenosha, Wis., during
protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Rittenhouse didn’t get far before he appeared to
quake some. He wore a suit that was a touch too
big and lent his little-boy countenance a lick of
dress-up: the teenager miscast as a double murder-
er. If there were any parents on the jury, I imagine
part of them ached at the sight of someone who
could have been their childnatural crier. Other people’s lost loved ones seem
to evoke his own losses, which include a wife and
two children. His ready access to grief, and the
resulting tears, seem right for a time in which a
virus has killed millions of people. But his read-
iness to cry strikes some of us as strategic. Does
this occasion warrant distress or action, emotion
or policy? ‘‘All of the above’’ has become an impos-
sible answer. I recently saw a photo someone
posted to Twitter of a bumper sticker that read,found themselves slapped with a new designa-
tion: crisis actors.
Can public tears ever be pure? Could any
leader now risk more than a cracked voice? A
woman rarely gets away with even the crack.
There was that one time somebody at a cam-
paign stop asked Hillary Clinton about how she
manages it all, and the tears came, along with
a debate that boiled down to whether she was
scheming to appear feminine and what took
her so long.
We’ve traditionally insisted upon stoical
resolve from our elected offi cials. Executive tears
belie national dignity. Joe Biden appears to be a (Continued on Page 42)