The Politics of Dancing

Evening, crew:

I started writing this Saturday, after another long, tough work week—sorry, they’ve all been long and tough and they’re going to be for the immediate and probably not-so-immediate future—and now it’s late Sunday afternoon, mabye half an hour before I should get my ass out the door and water the lawn.

I should be up for blabbing about comic books. But I’m not quite there yet? (And between the time I started writing this and now, Marvel did their SDCC Hall H announcements and if Graeme and I were still podcasting, I would’ve loved to tuck into it there. But here, I’m just like: “eh, I get the math on that but maybe because the math is so obvious, what’s there to talk about, really?”

(As I’ve mentioned here before, having people listen to and vindicate the conversations I have with my best friend for over a decade was tremendously fun and empowering—or should have been empowering but unfortunately in some ways I’m me—but being able to now read comics or hear movie news, and either not have opinions about them or have opinions that I can think about articulating and then go, “eh, who cares?” That’s still pretty great, I think.)

(Although the opinions, the takes, the B.S., all of that builds up over the course of time so this newletter is still some kind of crucial release valve for me.)

So instead of talking about comics, I thought I’d talk about politics for a bit. Specifically, the current political climate and this Presidential race. Because, you know, lord knows nobody has been talking about that in the last week. (At least the Marvel stuff is still only a day old?)

But like anyone who doesn’t really know enough about a subject to be intimidated by it, I feel like I have a pretty good take on the politics of running for President.

By which I mean, I should say—the politics of running for President on the Democrat’s side of things. I was three when Nixon was elected, and so my life has been lived under a Republican party that has never been anything other than a bunch of power-hungry servants to their corporate masters. I’ve never given any thought to what the Republican Party is doing and trying to do with their Presidential nominees.

There’s nothing interesting to me there because there’s never any sense there are any lines the Republicans are trying to color within: their goal is to sell shit product to people who should know better, so their goal is always to find the best salesman possible.

And even though that conception is glib and far too simplistic—someone way more knowledgeable can surely sit me down and explain how the last fifty years of the Republican party has been a struggle between two or more major factions tugging underneath the surface—it’s accurate enough for my purposes.

Why, just this morning I was thinking about how, if any of the heavy hitters of the Republican parties actually were who they claimed to be, at the very least there would’ve been a group running Pence as an alternative to Trump?

True, the dude’s a walking, talking piece of dessicated wood animated only by the joy he takes in puckering his asshole, hating women, and indulging in the driest, dustiest religious zeal imaginable, but Pence at least did defy Trump about overthrowing democracy, to the point of having people on January 6 searching for him to kill him (on Trump’s indirect command). And Pence’s religiosity—as antithetical to true Christianity as you can get, admittedly—is very real, unlike Trump’s claims, which are so half-hearted they end up buried in sentences he can’t even be bothered to finish.

In short, Pence is a streak of recognizably “genuine” Republican, who served a term for Vice-President, and actually upheld the rule of law in the U.S. He would be a great candidate to run against Trump if the Republicans really had any true agenda other than “get into power, remove regulation, honor our promises to the religious right, stripmine the economy, and retain power for as long as possible.”

But they don’t, so it didn’t even come up. Republicans!

But the Democrats, for me, are a much more interesting party to look at in Presidential elections, and something I’ve done to varying degrees for three or four decades. Even though they are also a party where goal is mostly to sell shit product to people who should know better, and therefore need to find the best salesman possible, there’s a lot contained in the word mostly.

Oh, and I should really mention reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, which I’d like to say I read during my college years of ‘84 to ‘88, but which I maybe didn’t actually read until between ‘88 and ‘92. Hunter S. Thompson’s simultaneously loopy and gimlet-eyed view of the Presidential election, the bulk of which focuses on the Democrats’ run in ‘72, still seems to me to be essential reading in understanding American politics—in part because he goes ahead and says the stuff most political reporters were unwilling to say back then, and in part because even if his more hilarious riffs have managed to lose their edge, it’s because they’ve grown more relevant.

In fact, I think Thompson’s passion for drug use which led to some very knowledgeable speculation about the kinds of drugs used to prop up candidates on the long election trail isprobably 100% germane to what happened in this election: Trump calling for Biden to get tested for performance enhancing drugs before the debate would’ve gotten a very long column from Thompson were he still alive about it being a perfect example of Trump being human trash in a way that actually makes him compelling—by using the insider knowledge gifted him as a member of the elite to insinuate uncomfortable, untold truths the public would never be privvy to otherwise. Not for the common good or any interest in the truth, of course, but merely because Trump’s a shitbag who sees the advantage in it.

As long as I’m putting words in a dead man’s mouth, I could see Thompson contrasting this to the infamous “adultery” showdown between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush in ‘92—there, Bush’s people had the loaded gun of Gennifer Flowers and Clinton’s adultery but couldn’t use it because Clinton’s people made it clear they would tell the uncomfortable, untold truth of Bush’s own adultery, carried out essentially openly in the eyes of the Washington elite for decades, including during his time as Reagan’s VP.

By contrast, Trump had absolutely no worries outing his own drug enhancement as President for the same reason he had no worries about not paying taxes, about fucking another woman while his wife was pregnant, about caught on tape talking about grabbing women by the pussy: Trump’s horrific calculus is that none of that matters as long as you’re a winner, and the only narratives Trump cares about refuting are ones in which he is not a winner. In a way, it has the Clintonian maneuver of “mutually assured destruction” but it’s as if it’s being done from Bush’s side of things.

So, yeah. Thompson would’ve been one of the only voices writing about the Biden/Trump debate actually unpacking Biden’s difficulties in explaining away his shocking appearance and performance in the debate. The card he kept trying to play—that he was tired, he was overworked, they’d made the mistake of overpreparing for the debate and exhausting him—was essentially a way to signal, “hey, I was tired and overworked…because the drugs didn’t work” without popping the lid off the pill bottle of D.C.’s big secret.

And the relatively rabid insider response and panic was also powered by that very unspoken knowledge. If that performance was the best Biden could do under the battery of drugs he was on? Something was really wrong and it wasn’t the drugs.

The weeks that followed are—at least to this conspiracy junky—an absolutely fascinating coded argument between Biden and the people in the know, with Biden saying, “Hey, they got the drug wrong, it happens. It was a fluke, it won’t happen again—’I’m going to go to bed earlier,’ wink, wink.” and the people in the know being, “Like hell they did. We all know these guys haven’t screwed up a juicing since 1980.”

Really, all you need are a couple of choice Thompson-esque [adjective] [animal] similes—”Of course all of us are now used to the way Biden shuffles across stage like some sclerotic lemur…” or “any person with at least the slightest instinct for self-preservation had long ago shied away from even the appearance of Donald J. Trump, that fired-but-unpainted clay sculpt of a mandrill in a business suit, the kind of two dollar tchotchke you’d find on the bottom shelf of the back rack of a struggling office supply store passive-aggressive accountants would buy to razz a departing coworker” are the two off the top of my head (and a stark example of how long it’s been since I’ve read Thompson)—and the thing could’ve written itself.

And so we come, nearly 1600 words into it, to Kamala Harris. But…either that’s going to have to wait, or that particular avenue will never be gone down. While my imitation of Hunter S. Thompson is far from passable, I apparently do a great job of being the modern day incarnation of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, who digresses so endlessly in the telling of his own life story he doesn’t even get to his birth until volume three.

So it goes!

I’m on the cusp of another work week, but maybe after its return will come another opportunity for me maybe this time get to my point?

As for you—I hope you’re well, and I hope this week treats you kindly!

-Jeff