Weird

 

When I started "blogging" (or whatever you call this), I had to come up with a name for the blog.

My first attempt was to name it "Alan's Alley" since that was the name of a weekly sketch on The Fred Allen Show. It was a radio show way before my time. (Before some smarty boots mentions it, "Allen's Alley," featured a character named "Senator Claghorn," who eventually became the basis for "Foghorn Leghorn" in the Warner Brothers cartoons. Never say this blog is not educational.)

That didn't work out, so I considered some other names before settling on Humor Me. One name was "Wierd."

You may notice this is a misspelling of the word "weird."  The kids at Wheeler could not spell the word weird because they took the "i before e except after c" very seriously.

For some reason, this word appears frequently in my yearbook inscriptions, as in "Alan, you are one weird guy" or something similar. Actually, it read: "Alan, you are one wierd guy."  As Five For Fighting said, "it's not easy to be me."

 
I decided against it because nobody would get the joke except my mid-70s Wheeler classmates, who would argue with me that they spelled the word correctly and that I was a "wierd guy."

Since we are in the "throw anything against the wall and see if it sticks" portion of the election season, it appears the Democrats have found a new word to describe Donald Trump and company.

Weird.

Out with the "existential threat to Democracy," and in with "weird."  Trump's weird. Vance is weird. Six out of the nine Supreme Court justices are weird.  Ninety-nine percent of the people who vote for the Republicans are weird, and they must be made fun of at times.

Over the past ten years, I have come to realize that Trump has acted like Trump for decades if not centuries. The way he acts in 2024 is the way he acted in 2014, 2004, 1994, et al.  When he was bringing money into NBC for his goofy game show, nobody said he was weird.  When he was sending money to Democratic Senate candidates, nobody said he was weird.

 Now, all of a sudden, Trump is weird. He is strange, man, and not in a good way.

JD Vance has also been tagged as weird. His statement about "childless cat ladies " has caused such a stir that both Chelsea Handler and Jennifer Aniston felt compelled to comment on it.  So you know it was serious. 

For the record, Vance said in 2021, in an interview with Tucker Carlson (oh heavens!), that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

It was a hyperbolic, sarcastic remark, but it didn't say anything about couples unable to have children and being against IVF.  It was cutting, to be sure, but I'm not sure it was weird. 

He didn't say all childless cat ladies are miserable-just this bunch.

But, if people want to get up in arms about it, well, that's politics. Welcome to the NFL, JD.

What was weird about JD's introduction to National politics was a thread about Vance being sexually attracted to couches.

I saw dozens of Vance couch jokes on X and I wondered where in the world it came from.  Someone said it was in his book Hillbilly Elegy.

Well, I read Hillbilly Elegy and I don't remember him expressing interest in couches.  I think I would.

Business Insider tracked down the creator of the Vance and Couches joke.  It was some guy on X that wrote a joke about Vance. That's it. 

"Perhaps, Rick (the X poster) said, whether Vance actually had carnal knowledge of one or more couches is immaterial. Rick suggested Vance making love to a couch may best be viewed as what Werner Herzog has described as the  "ecstatic truth" — in Herzog's words, "a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual," encompassing falsehoods that "make some essence of the man visible."*

In the past eight years, people have correctly noted that Trump has told some tall tales, to put it nicely. When considering this, it is best to acknowledge that if Trump actually lied is immaterial. It is best served by thinking it as "ecstatic truth" because he was trying to make the essence of his opponents visible**.

As for his decision to include a fake citation (Rick listed page numbers from the book) in a post about a man having sex with a couch, Rick claims highbrow inspiration. "Not to  egghead it up," he said, but he was an English major "and I do have  certain literary tastes." Listing page numbers was "in the vein of"  authors Jorge Luis Borges and John Fowles, who used excerpts and citations, real and invented, to lend an air of authenticity to their  fiction. "It's something I've found funny my entire life," he said."***

I'm all in favor of political humor and appreciate a lot of it. I used to read National Lampoon when I was a kid and regularly come across pictures like this:

This was tasteless and not very funny. But, there was truth in it and the truth was the main reason Edward Kennedy never became President. ****

The joke about JD Vance is tasteless and not very funny either. The problem is, at least from a humor stand point, is there is no essence of truth about it.   The joke just says, "I don't like JD Vance because he's from the opposite party so let's post something distasteful and make him deny it. Ha. Ha."

If this is what this election cycle will be like, we're in for a bumpy ride. 

Footnotes:

*Business Insider, July 30, 2024

** That's a joke son, a joke. 

***Business Insider, July 30,2024

**** The cartoon is titled "The Delegate From Chappaquiddick"