By Bruce Jackson

Read the full article from First of the Month here.

“Bernie’s mittens. In that photo, surrounded by people in skin-tight black leather gloves, he wears a that look as if they’d been made from wool salvaged from an old sweater. The fingers he was relentlessly jabbing at every camera lens or audience when he spoke are wrapped in those mittens. Those fingers, for the first time since we’ve known him, are quiet. Bernie’s face mask: when addressing an audience, he never talked. He barked. A former Congressional colleague refers to him as ‘the scold.’ You can’t scold from behind a mask. Behind the mask, the barking scold was silent.”