Election 2024: Image World (7)

Bringing It

To my amazement, given my unremitting existential dread just six weeks ago, I’m actually feeling optimistic enough to relish the current accelerated pace of this campaign. It moves so fast that the failed Trump assassination attempt in July and the triumphant Democratic National Convention in August nominating the Harris-Walz ticket have already begun to fade from recent memory.

With the Labor Day weekend behind us, we have two months till the election. This means that we’ve reached the point at which, according to statistics, the majority of the electorate actually starts paying attention to the campaigns. Coming up shortly on the schedule: the first Harris-Trump debate, slated for September 10 on ABC News, followed by Trump’s mid-September sentencing in the Stormy Daniels/election interference case in New York.

Then we’ll have the Walz-Vance debate on October 1, followed (possibly) by a second Harris-Trump debate. With the steady drip of Trump’s endless gaffes, his overlapping legal problems, Vance’s insulting past and present attacks on women, the legal proceedings against Rudy Giuliani and others in the failed “stop the steal” conspiracy, the convictions of additional J6 insurrectionists, the inevitable MAGA excesses, the cascading GOP disarray, the new disclosures about Russian election interference, and so much more to fill in the gaps.

So stock up on popcorn. You can help it fulfill its potential and achieve its destiny, passing through what the faithful kernels call “The Rupture” via whatever device you use until they can truly say “We are risen!” (Only a few get left behind.)

I advise making your own, from scratch, and donating to the Democrats whatever you’d spend on pre-popped or otherwise packaged options. For fresh popcorn anytime I want it, which is daily, I use a hot-air Wear-Ever Popcorn Pumper™ that has lasted for decades. No oil, no additives, no single-serving bag waste. There are other hot-air brands that operate on the same principle. Right now a bag of yellow kernels that will last me for at least a month runs a little over $2. Any house brand or on-sale special will do; I have never had a disappointing experience with homemade popcorn. Usually I spritz mine with Olivio Buttery Spray™ and sprinkle on some table salt and garlic powder, but you can explore endless ways of seasoning yours, from sweet to spicy. Brewer’s yeast, chinese five-spice powder, sriracha salt, Old Bay seasoning, cinnamon sugar — hard to go wrong.)

Then sit back, relax, nibble, and enjoy the show — while not forgetting to GOTV (Get Out The Vote)! Start by ensuring that you are registered to vote, dear reader, and that Republican dirty-tricksters have not purged you from the voting rolls.

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… As Weird Does

If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. But sometimes it’s just Donald Trump, looking into a mirror. And sometimes it’s just his supporters, staring at him. — Anonymous

To paraphrase Stokeley Carmichael, “They who control the visual media control the structure of society.” The GQP sure knows how to generate durable memes. First came the adult diapers worn outside their clothes, some of them golden and adorned with Trump’s face:

Next they gave us the Maxi Pads on their right ears at the Republican National Convention:

And just when you think the MAGA Party can’t get weirder … they up the ante. Dedicated Trumpists now sport cups symbolic of JD Vance’s sperm. Because nothing says white male virility like faux-hillbilly faux jizz:

After all, when women think about getting their eggs fertilized, Vance — his virility ensured by his beard — definitely tops the list of prospective semen donors, amirite? Way to go after the female vote.

P.S. Assuming there is something in those cups, and that they don’t want it sloshing around, spilling out, or drying up, I’ll hazard a guess that it’s a squirt of clear acrylic caulk. Perhaps some undercover reporter will snag a sample and submit it for analysis.

P.P.S. Surprisingly ignored (so far) by the Dems, this basic fact about Vance: He took office on January 3, 2023 as the junior United States senator from Ohio. Which means that he has exactly 20 months’ worth of involvement in governance, with not one single piece of successful legislation under his belt. Before that, no hands-on experience running anything. In short, unaccomplished and ineffectual. And the Republicans have anointed him to a potential position a single heartbeat away from assuming the presidency. Surely this represents a useful talking point. Maybe they’re saving it for the October debate with Walz, though I don’t know why they’d hold off on this one — seems an obvious weak point they should bang like a gong.

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They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-By-Democrats

Still waiting for someone to explain to me how and when and why the working class became They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-By-Democrats.

As I’ve pointed out in previous comments here, the working class is barely acknowledged in the current Democratic discourse. For example, in the bio video of Harris shown at the DNC, Harris says that as a child growing up in northern California she lived in “a working-class neighborhood” in the East Bay. Then she mentioned it once — once only, and in passing — in her acceptance speech, while emphasizing her and her future administration’s commitment to improving conditions for the “middle class.”

I think that’s a serious strategic mistake.

In that same vein, the Harris-Walz campaign has put out consistently good ads. However, my ongoing cavil pertains: The term “working class” occurs in none of them. The concept appears only in passing, in the phrase “working- and middle-class,” in one of the post-convention first round of three ads. With that exception, the emphasis in these ads — and the empathy they seeks to represent — is entirely on/with the middle class.

The notion that everyone “dreams” of home ownership is as vacuous and unrealistic as the notion that everyone “dreams” of owning their own car. And as problematic, for reasons ranging from the economic to the ecological. Many if not most working-class people don’t need home loans and car loans. They need affordable, comfortable mass housing (i.e., apartments) and affordable, reliable, comprehensive public transportation. Plus affordable utilities and healthcare and food and clothing and schooling. (Those would all also benefit millions upon millions of middle-class people, not incidentally.)

In order to truly dominate the politics of this country, the Democrats need to stop treating the working class as second-class citizens who are for some reason unmentionable, and acknowledge it as a literally and figuratively hard-working, respectable, and indeed honorable status, an integral component of our social, political, and economic structure. (For a clear, useful definition and analysis of the working class, click here.)

Yet here’s Harris’s Labor Day 2024 message on X:

On Labor Day, we honor workers, unions, and the entire labor movement fighting for fair wages, good benefits, and safer working conditions for all. As President, I will always stand with workers, because when unions are strong, the middle class is strong. And when the middle class is strong, America is strong.

Patently, the term “working class” has become a taboo term in liberal public discourse. So everyone above the poverty line but below the billionaire stratum gets magically aggregated into “the middle class” — all presumably unionized, to boot. Call it the Lake Woebegon effect — by which “middle class” becomes a vast, amorphous category in which all its members are above average.

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Mainstream Democrats — and I include Harris and Walz in that category, Trumpist nonsense about their supposed “communism” notwithstanding — refer obliquely to the working class, with phrases like “kitchen-table conversations.” Yet, for reasons I’ve never figured out, they rarely refer to the working class as such. Perhaps scholars of political rhetoric can pinpoint when that began to fade from Democratic discourse, and even explain the why of it.

Whatever the answer, as I see it the Democrats need to engage energetically and enthusiastically with the working class, which begins with calling it by its name. The person behind the counter at your pizzeria, the receptionist in your doctor’s office, the janitor in your apartment building, the nighttime cleaner in your office, the ticket seller at your multiplex, the health aide in your retirement home, most likely do not think of themselves as middle class. But they probably don’t think of themselves as poor, either — and perhaps don’t qualify as such, by the accepted income brackets for those categories.

So when all the Dem concern gets lavished on the “middle class,” in a way that suggests that rubric includes everyone who’s not either extremely rich or extremely poor, how do you expect them to identify? “Working class” is a fact; it’s not an insult, and it’s not some radical leftist/communist jargon. It’s a commonsense description of a huge chunk of the population. Why don’t the Democrats start speaking to them?

Let’s be clear: $20 an hour for a 40-hour work week (or fewer hours so they can treat you as part-time labor and not pay for benefits) gives you, at best, $800 a week in wages before deductions.

That is not a “middle-class” income. That is a working-class income. If Harris and Walz eventually come out in support of a minimum wage of $20/hr nationwide, that will not position them “on the side of the middle class.” It will position them on the side of the working class.

I don’t know why saying that explicitly so terrifies Democrats, but clearly it does. Fun fact: You can support both the working class and the middle class. You can also (a) pretend the working class doesn’t exist, (b) ignore the working class and speak only to the middle class, or c) presume that the working class and the middle class are coterminous or otherwise one and the same. These are the current strategies of mainstream Democrats, adopted at their peril — since they leave speaking directly about and to and for the working class to others.

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Millions of people work for a living but don’t consider themselves members of the middle class simply because they have jobs and make enough to support themselves and their families. Even if they make enough to support themselves and put a little by for emergencies.

For them, “middle-class” — including the vaunted “dream of home ownership” — may well be aspirational, if not for themselves then for their children. But it’s not how they see and identify themselves. So the mantra of “raising up the middle class” not only doesn’t speak to their situation, it symbolically excludes them.

Bernie Sanders and AOC and others left of center understand that. For which reason they regularly speak about — and speak to — the working class, using that descriptive term and treating it not as shameful and unmentionable, something to avoid, but as a respectable and honorable economic and sociopolitical category in itself, worthy of acknowledgment and support, with different issues and problems and needs than the middle class. (Click here for Sanders’s January 2023 “State of the Working Class” speech.)

I would like to see Harris-Walz, and Dems across the ballot nationwide, start to speak directly to them as well. Because working-class people deserve political representation, which they’re surely not getting from the GQP. And that representation begins with actually recognizing that they exist as a class, and naming that class, and honoring it and those in it by doing so.

And also because those people, millions and millions of them, vote, and will vote in droves for the candidates who acknowledge their existence and make them feel seen by speaking to their situation and experience and issues. And because to defeat the looming Christofascist takeover we need every vote we ca get.

In sum, we need more presentations like More Perfect Union reporter John Russell’s short speech at the DNC, and the video that the organization More Perfect Union premiered there. Joe Biden showed the way by actually joining a union picket line. Time for the entire Democratic Party to follow suit, by reaffirming its historic commitment to the working class.

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Lettuce Prey

Meanwhile, across the Great Water ex-UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has endorsed Trump (because of course she would). Notably, she did so during an interview promoting her new book, Ten Years to Save the West, during the course of which the projected image of a googly-eyed head of iceberg lettuce captioned with the words “I CRASHED THE ECONOMY” descended slowly into the stage set from the catwalks.

That picture of a lettuce with its caption is the main point of this video (which I encourage everyone to watch — LOL-worthy). But, while you watch, tear your eyes away from Truss and the prank — orchestrated by the anti-Brexit collective Led By Donkeys — for just a moment, to make note of the context: She’s on a stage somewhere in Suffolk, England, hawking a book that no one will read, getting interviewed by and/or dialoging with a fat, unshaven slob in an untucked short-sleeved shirt and crumpled khakis, slouched back in his chair and clearly not hanging on her every word.

This is the low level of moderator and book-tour event to which Truss’s gross ineptitude and terminal fecklessness have reduced the possessor of the record for shortest UK PM tenure in all of history (just 49 days). Truss later whined on X, “This is done to intimidate people and suppress free speech. I won’t stand for it.” Alas for her, short of staying out of the public eye entirely she can’t do much about the ritual humiliation that her appearances henceforth will evoke. So she’d best get used to it, because that head of iceberg lettuce will show up regularly from now, and will feature in her obituaries.

Of course I wish her a long life.

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As they’ve had centuries more than we Murcans to troll their excesses, the Brits have long since mastered the art of lampooning their government(s). Here’s how people who really understand political satire get it done: Honest Government Ad | Visit the UK! 🇬🇧 —  published in advance of the July 2024 election, which saw the historic defeat of the Tories.

All the same, we’ve become dab hands (to borrow a Britishism) at political parody on this side of the pond. For example:

• Someone on Threads has done a delirious “Trump in the Bunker” episode. Note: This is a variant of the “Hitler Rants” parodies that have become a fixture on YouTube, based on a scene from the German movie Der Untergang (Downfall).
• Fred Trump speaks to Donny from the grave (courtesy of The Lincoln Project).
• “Man of Constant Sorrow (Donald Trump Song Parody),” by Patrick Fitzgerald.
• “TRUMP INTERVIEW” — A Bad Lip Reading.
• “We Are Cowardly,’ by The GQP Singers.
• “Trump’s Tiny White Balls 1” (An AI MAGA-mercial). When I wrote that artificial intelligence (AI) would play a major role in this election, I didn’t have anything like these AI-generated ads in mind. However, funny as they are, they certainly exemplify the problematic future.
• George Conway, ex-husband of Trump fluffer Kellyanne Conway, has founded The Anti-Psychopath PAC. He and his PAC don’t exactly do parody, but they’re in the ballpark.
• Finally, this site offers a constantly updated, simple, yet delicious fact: Donald Trump’s Debt: Live Counter.

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This post supported by a donation from Carlyle T.

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