The Weekly Wit: No Vacancies
Biden versus Trump; the meaning of Meghan's haircut. And the beautiful game.
Welcome to the fourth edition of The Weekly Wit, a satirical review of news and culture.
Jurassic Stark
Perhaps for good reason, any American with their eyes on the White House must be at least 35 years of age when assuming office. Mercifully, this rule prevents anyone with a TikTok account from being taken too seriously.
Apparently, Americans apply this rule to its very extreme.
This week, President Joe Biden announced his bid for re-election, promising in a video announcement to ‘finish the job.’ Quite what job he refers to is anyone’s guess. Though in better shape than Great Britain (a bar so low it’s a carpet) America is not having the best of days, weeks, months, years, decades, or twenty-first centuries.
Biden wasted no time. His sales pitch? He’s not Donald Trump. Evidently, the Biden team assumes Trump will steamroller over Ron DeSantis en route to the Republican party nomination. It’s 2020 again.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but every time I see ‘2020’ written down, or the mere words ‘twenty-twenty’ seep into my eardrums, my heart flutters, my brain jangles, and a panic attack seizes control of my body with all the charm and consideration of a central African coup d'état.
Americans seem to agree. Seventy percent of Americans don’t think the 80-year-old Biden should run for re-election. Even 51 percent of Democrats nod their heads. Meanwhile, sixty percent, including one-third of Republicans say Trump, 76, should not run for president.
President Biden is not the most spring of chickens. Half of those who think he should sit this one out say Biden’s age is a ‘major’ reason behind their thinking.
To put it mildly, this decade hasn’t quite gone the way of the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ In 2019, I told anyone with ears that this decade would be the decade of decades. Reader, the jury is out. By ‘out’ I don’t mean they’re busy making their considerations. By ‘out’ I mean the jury is riddled with hollow-point bullets.
Perhaps that’s why a 38 percent plurality told pollsters they felt ‘exhausted’ over the very idea of a Biden versus Trump rematch. Twenty-nine percent said they felt ‘fear’ whilst just under a quarter felt both ‘sadness and fear.’
Which brings me to vice president Kamala Harris. This week, we learned of Biden’s intention to rehabilitate Harris’ image. Harris hasn’t had the most illustrious of tenures. Why? Well, let’s just say VP Harris is suited to other modes of employment. Ideally, Harris would find her feet in jobs which don’t require speaking in coherent, plain sentences and jobs which place a premium upon one’s ability to laugh at the most inappropriate of times. Reader, I’m about as socially attuned as a headbutt. Unlike Harris, I’m not literally one stopped heart away from the presidency.
It cannot be that a country of 330 million people, one which correctly claims to be the greatest country on earth, must limit itself to re-running the worst year in recent history.
And yet, there’s quite some time to go before the serious business of campaigning kicks into gear. If this horrendous decade has taught me anything, it’s that conventional wisdom isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
The Meaning of Meghan
According to The Telegraph, Meghan Markle’s new haircut is of cosmic importance.
Recently, the Duchess of Sussex has been away from our screens. Curiously, this uncharacteristic hiatus started right after South Park lampooned Meghan and Harry and their charitable definition of ‘privacy’ in an episode entitled ‘Worldwide Privacy Tour.’
Anyway, Meghan is back. In what The Telegraph called a ‘pivotal hair moment,’ it appears Meghan has had a haircut, lightened said hair to an agreeable copper brown, and adopted the ‘polished, chief executive school of thought,’ that is the ‘Gwyneth Paltrow’ style— ‘flawless, glowing and minimally made-up complexion.’
“To the untrained eye, the Duchess’s hair length (uber long) and texture (super straight) isn’t drastically different from her usual style, but she has a history of subtly changing her hair and makeup to make a statement at key moments,” says The Telegraph.
Why am I boring you with this, you ask?
Reader, I admit fault. I’m not entirely sure whether the piece in question is serious. The feature, its topic, and the writing style reminded me favourably of seventeenth and eighteenth-century high burlesque in which writers such as Alexander Pope elevated a trivial topic by writing in utter seriousness.
Back then, readers understood the writer’s intention. They were, as we say, in on the joke.
The finest example of this literary genre is Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock which satirises the 1700s upper-class of London. That mock-epic poem elevates a trivial event (the cutting and theft of a lock of hair) into an epic of the gods.
But this is 2023, a time in which satire and reality are often indistinguishable. Perhaps the joke is on me.
It’s Called Football
This decade is hardly teeming with genuine, feel-good stories.
A plucky little football team called Wrexham last week ended fifteen years of tribulation and turmoil by winning a promotion back into the English Football League.
Back in 2011, Wrexham AFC was nearly no more. An unpaid tax bill threatened to wipe the club quite literally off the pitch.
Anyway, just a few years ago, Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney stumped up a few million to save the club from itself. Before they came in, Wrexham played before a few hundred supporters. Now, fans and celebrities pack the Racecourse Ground to the rafters for every game.
In a story of truly Hollywood proportion, Wrexham fans have a license to dream.
Ryan Reynolds, the co-owner, said he’ll take tiny Wrexham all the way to the giant, billionaire’s playground of the Premier League.
That brings me to my motive for writing this little ditty. Americans call our beautiful game of football by its incorrect name, ‘soccer.’
If Wrexham Association Football Club climbs league after league and makes it to the promised land, it would be only right for the naming rights to be settled once and for all. It’s called football.
Witticism of the Week
“Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”
— Ernest Hemingway
What I’m Reading
The American Prospect: Tucker Carlson: The Smuggest Man on Air by Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein
The Weekly Dish: The Tucker-Bobby Insurgencies by Andrew Sullivan
The Free Press: Sports Betting is the New Oxycontin by Eric Spitznagel
Book: Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
YouTube: Real Time with Bill Maher: Elon Musk
If you missed it…
A personal note…
Thank you for reading Oxford Sour. Feel free to send this column on to like-minds. And of course, please subscribe.
In vino veritas,
Christopher
Oxford Sour
I've read the Lionel Shriver piece too, very thought provoking and a view that has been floated by others. I agree to an extent, but it doesn't explain all the men suddenly demanding access to women's spaces and sport.
"I’m about as socially attuned as a headbutt" - beautiful. Just beautiful.