“Cocktails with Cathy,” a meditation on my Congresswoman in the Inlander.
Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers and I did not go out for cocktails. We did not sip martinis and talk about poor people or the blind or bass fishing or abortion or all the acid we took when we were Deadheads crossing paths at various shows before Jerry died. We did not talk about Pavement or Public Enemy or Sonic Youth or all the other bands we loved so much when we were young, before we had to worry about crumbling infrastructure and socialized medicine and men trading their penises for vaginas and women trading their vaginas for penises and everyone saying “penis” and “vagina” constantly, all those college kids everywhere demanding safe spaces. We didn’t talk about Cathy joining the Republican Whip Team in Olympia, or how she fought like hell to keep the word “Asian” from replacing “Oriental” in state documents, perhaps hoping one day to replace “Oriental” with “Chinaman.” We did not talk about how she came into herself as she ascended, revealing her essential Cathy-ness once she landed in D.C. Proud. Conservative. Pliable. Buyable. Tripping her ever-loving brains out.
Read more at the Inlander.