The Triumph of Novelty

President Kamala Harris? America was never meant to make perfect sense.

Boys Wading by Winslow Homer (1873)

I cannot be alone in thinking that judging a person’s worth on account of their skin colour and or genitalia is not as enlightened as we are led to believe.

Back when I was a sprog, that is, before our culture dissolved into a clown show, making judgements on skin colour and genitalia was the stuff of the backwards. How times change, etcetera.

We assumed progress marched forward, and did not, as it seems, chase its tail as would an excitable dachshund.

---

I watch American news channels with the same prurient curiosity reserved for murder shows and tales of the grotesque.

On CNN, or ABC, or NBC, or MSNBC, or whatever they’re called—those news channels appealing chiefly to our monkey brain—the amygdala, or something—talking haircuts discuss through maniacal rictus the latest poll from the Washington Post/ABC News.

This recent survey has Democrats flailing around like a harpooned squid. President Biden is, to further the lazy metaphor, underwater.

On these debasing news channels, frantic chatterboxes gab with shameless abandon. Watch closely enough, you’ll notice that the experts change their minds mid-sentence. They fancy this to be a livestream of a brilliant mind. Reader, it’s not. The psychological term for this is called: talking out of one’s arse.

“This is bad bad bad!” carps Brad or Chester or Wolf or Hudson—one of those standard-issue American TV dwellers, frozen face filled with porcelain teeth, flaunting the psychotic confidence of a high-school superstar athlete with a cheerleader between his paws. He’s the kind which Holden Caulfield said was always asking you to do them a big favour; the kind who gives themselves space before they answer your question.

Brad or Chester or Wolf or Hudson has a point. Indeed, that poll is brutal. Just 36 percent of Americans approve of the job President Biden is doing. Way over half disapprove. Forty-seven percent strongly disapprove.

American politics is more like professional wrestling than anyone would like to admit. In a general deathmatch, sorry, election, Biden would lose his belt, sorry, presidency, to both Donald Trump and Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. Nearly 70 percent of Americans say, Biden, 80, is too old for another term in office. Almost half of Democrats agree. Just under one-third think Biden’s mental acuity is up to scratch.

---

A great and forgotten comedian named Dennis Leary said, ‘Only in America would a guy invent crack. Only in America would there be a guy that cocaine wasn't good enough for.’  

If American politics is crack, then American news channels are the crack pipe. Watching Brad or Chester or Wolf or Hudson is like, as they say on The Wire, ‘riding the rock.’

They cover every sinew, every sizzle, and every step. Each happening is more seismic than the last but never as substantial as the next. Every election is a judgement day. Apart from, of course, the one after that. Like sentient Ritalin, they rattle, and they rave. There's something charmingly American in predicting doomsday at breakfast and forgetting all about it by lunch.

Writ large, this refusal of the ordinary is what makes America great.

For that same reason, I struggle with Brad or Chester or Wolf or Hudson’s chatter. By next week, by the next poll, the entire narrative will look nothing like today’s steel-forged sure thing.

Despite Biden’s troubles, his only serious challenger, Donald Trump, is too in a spot of bother. Independents aren’t yet convinced. Not to mention the other nine-hundred legal rigmaroles Trump’s obsessives have planned.

(Plus, incumbents usually win—save a pandemic, a cratered economy, and the electoral blood-doping known as vote-by-mail, of course.)

Then again, whenever I witness President Biden shamble through a carefully choreographed appearance, I wonder, and millions more do too, just how long this can possibly go on. Most Americans aren’t too political. Over half, 54 percent to 36 percent, said Trump handled the economy better than Biden. For most, that’s what matters.

Tellingly, when asked what they thought of a Biden versus Trump rematch, nearly forty percent of Americans—eighteen months from the election—found the prospect ‘exhausting.’

---

Perhaps the madness onscreen has burrowed into the deeper recesses of my brain. Crazy thought: We must consider vice president Kamala Harris as President of the United States.

If forty percent are exhausted at the prospect of a Biden-Trump redux, it’s more than possible the incumbent stumbles into a second term. To dislodge an incumbent takes more than meh.

With Biden, all eighty years dripping off of him, and with time being a thing, it is not crass to suggest that Kamala Harris would then be one stopped heart from the presidency.

For Kamala Harris, whom Biden in his own words elevated on account of her skin colour and sexual organs, to become the first female president, would be the most American of things.

A Harris presidency would affirm the triumph of novelty which defines much of our age. Reality TV would have won the final battle over reality itself.

---

Why not? America has a genetic allergy to the ordinary. America is double cheese and triple bacon and supersize fries and a man on the fucking moon. America is not supposed to make perfect sense.

During the opening scene of The Wire, Detective McNulty chats with a murder witness. Just a few feet away lies a slain body by the name of Snot Boogie. After robbing for the thousandth time a dice game hosted by his friends, Snot Boogie got lined in chalk.

“I’ve gotta ask you,” says McNulty. “If every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away… why’d you even let him in the game?”

“What?” says the witness.

“Well if every time, Snot Boogie stole the money, why’d you let him play?”

“Got to,” says the witness. “This is America, man.”

Yes, Kamala Harris is as suited to the presidency as a spoon is suited to the peeling of a potato.  President Kamala Harris. Why not? This is America, man.

---