The pure emptiness of Katie Britt

If there’s one thing the last 72 hours have taught us, it’s how hard it is to be a woman and a Republican these days.  Take the woman who has dominated the news over the weekend, Alabama Senator Katie Britt. She appeared on national TV to give the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union Thursday and for her efforts was famously lampooned by Scarlett Johansen on Saturday Night Live.

The phrase “deer caught in the headlights” seemed to have been invented to describe Britt as she posed in front of what appeared to be a greenscreen image of her own kitchen. She went from weepy to ecstatic to inordinately sincere and back again, zig-zagging her way through a script some committee of Trump campaign staffers had lashed together for her to act her way through. The disconnect between the words she read off the teleprompter and her voice and expression was, uh…how can I put this? Jarring isn’t quite right. Annoying? Well, yes, there’s that. 

What’s that feeling I’m reaching for, hovering just out of reach of my consciousness? Okay, I’ve got it. Watching Britt’s face and listening to her whisper her way through the introduction of her remarks, I felt embarrassed for her. Really, I did. She had no sense at all of what she was saying, or how to say it, because she was just reading words, not expressing them, or feeling what she said.  She whispered, “our country is less secure,” and then smiled widely into the eye of the camera.  That is simply not the way you say those words, and having said them, how you react to what you’ve said.  It doesn’t even rise to the level of fake.  It’s just…nothing, a pure emptiness knowable only to, yes, Katie Britt.

I’m going to do something I probably shouldn’t attempt. I’m going to try to figure out why she read the phrase the way she did and then punctuated it with her wide, entirely inappropriate and obviously insincere smile.

Katie Britt is a product of the University of Alabama “Machine,” the informal but hugely powerful group of fraternity and sorority members who run the Student Government Association by proxy, electing presidents of the association each year, and through them influencing and in many cases running student life on the university campus.  Being a part of the “Machine” at the University of Alabama is the way you get ahead in the state’s business and politics, which in that tightly-knit southern state are one and the same.

The way you get ahead in the “Machine” is to play along in the university’s “Greek” system, which in the case of fraternities, prizes good old boyism like partying, drinking, adolescent misbehavior and copying what your father did when he was in the same fraternity you’re in, because he got you in.  With sororities, it’s a female version of the frat stuff, bottom-lined by whatever passes for this year’s version of antebellum submissiveness. Britt was president of the Student Government Association (SGA) during the 2003-2004 school year, which on the SGA website appears with an unexplained asterisk next to it. 

In Alabama, the “Machine” is thought to have legendary powers: they elect the student body president, the Homecoming Queen, members of the student senate and other student presidents on campus, and many of those same campus officers go on to bigger and more powerful positions in state and federal government, like, for example, Katie Britt. The “Machine” is often compared to Yale’s Skull and Bones, one of those college frat things that nobody will admit to being a member of, but everybody knows how powerful it is, and how powerful you are if you’re associated with it. The power of the “Machine” at the University of Alabama has held since the 1920s, with the sole exception of 1992 through 1996 when the SGA was banned by the university. 

It's a much longer story, but the banning in 1992 involved the harassment and assault of a non-machine candidate for president of the SGA, who was – you guessed it – a woman.  According to “Crimson White,” the student newspaper, a cross was burned on her lawn, and she was assaulted, causing “a golf ball-size bruise on her cheek, a busted lip, and a knife wound on the side of her face.” I couldn’t find any records of arrests for the assault, or what happened after the woman “fled the campus.”

On its website, the University of Alabama Student Government Association says its goal is to “strive to continue promoting a culture that instills servant leadership in its members so that its constituents may serve societal needs on a larger scale beyond the institution.”

Got that not-so-subtle phrase – “servant leadership” – dripping with Christian theological undertones? Those words also describe the look on Katie Britt’s face and her tone of voice last week as she dutifully read the script written for her by the Trump campaign, masquerading as the Republican National Committee, now co-chaired by one of Trump’s personal servant leaders, his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. 

There is another word to describe Britt’s manner as she spoke for Republicans last week: smarmy. Speaking from what appears to be her kitchen, Britt described the room as “where we laugh together, and it’s where we hold each other’s hands and pray for God’s guidance.” She then studiously looked away from the camera’s gaze, looked back into the camera’s eye and intoned in a mock whisper: “And it’s where many nights, to be honest, it’s where Wesley and I worry.  I know we’re not alone.  And so tonight, the American family needs to have a tough conversation.”

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It's hard to capture just how blatantly studied and overacted and false Britt’s entire spiel was. But the thing that kept coming across to me was how learned her delivery was.  She was good at it in a way that bad actors are – they deliver lines with what they’ve been taught is just the right emphasis on certain words, with just the right turn of the head, flutter of eyelids, pursing of lips, and in the case of Britt, smile after smile so posed and automatic, any emphasis a real smile would have afforded to an alleged thought or fact in an individual line is lost in a glare of teeth and lips. Following her whispered secrets of what she and her husband Wesley say at their kitchen table, Britt settles into a mock-confidence you can only attain if pretty much everything in your life has been given to you by connections and powerful friends and whispered confidences that began in college dorms or sorority bedrooms: “Because the truth is, we’re all worried about the future of our nation.” Delivered by a woman who probably has yet to feel an actual worry beyond having forgotten to pick up diapers from the store or empty the cat box, the line had all the force of a snowflake landing on a gloved hand.

The reaction to Britt’s so-called rebuttal has been brutal. I compared her mockingly to an alien from another planet. Writer Jonathan M. Katz dug into her speech to find the made-up story about meeting an immigrant who she indicated had been trafficked and raped under President Biden’s watch when it turned out that it had happened during the presidency of George W. Bush — in Mexico

But experiencing the speech again, I think we’re missing the point. Watching her face with even just a smidgen of empathy, you can’t help wondering what it must be like to be Katie Britt, to have been given what has to be seen as evident ambition and talent and squashed it in service not just to Donald Trump – that’s bad enough – but to an idea and a way of life that has so emptied her of anything even marginally recognizable as real. 

At least an actor in a role on the stage or in a film knows they are delivering lines, picking up a paycheck and moving on to the next role. Katie Britt is playing a self she gave up rights to long ago. The “Machine” ran her at the University of Alabama. Now the Republican Party runs her. Imagine how that must feel. She’s not a shell, or in words we would apply to a man of her ilk, an empty suit. She is a Republican ideal of womanhood. She did what they told her to do. She said the words they gave her to say. She accomplished everything they set out for her to accomplish. The question is, can reality – any reality – penetrate the pretense of life she and the Republican Party are presenting to the American public?