Versione Italiana – Translation by Paul Rosenberg
[HOUSTON]
On August 7, Kamala Harris nominated Tim Walz, the reassuring governor of Minnesota, to her vice-president in the American presidential election campaign. But Tim Walz had earned the position even before that, with some appearances on the MSNBC network in the last week of July. Without going into too much rumination as a political commentator, he defined Donald Trump and his vice-president JD Vance as “pretty strange guys” (just weird). And with that utterance he redefined the entire electoral campaign. No one could have predicted the snowball effect of those few little words. It was as if a spell were broken, as if an alien fog, worthy of a Stephen King novel, lifted from the territory of half of America – the Democratic part, that is. Of course, Biden’s withdrawal and the entry of Kamala Harris had already been accepted with relief; the party was bringing delegate after delegate to her so that the Democratic Convention at the end of August would not be split between more than one candidate. But something was still missing; that tagline, that slogan, that phrase, that summer tune that gets stuck in your head and never goes away.
Thanks to Tim Walz and his good-natured and combative demeanor – his profile as a good man from rural America, who never went to a prestigious university, enlisted in the National Guard, was a middle school geography teacher and coach of the school football team, all before becoming a popular governor of Minnesota (a state that has produced many characters like him) – well, thanks to Governor Tim that word, that slogan, that catchphrase that was needed has arrived, and the word is weird. When asked to comment on the Republican Party’s efforts to control women’s bodies and ban substantial numbers of books from school libraries, Walz replied that there are some pretty weird people over there (“these are weird people”). He didn’t say that all Republicans are weird, but that there are a lot of weirdos over on that side.
It’s not the first time Donald Trump has been called weird. Kamala Harris herself said it in 2018, as did others, but not on the platform of live television, and it didn’t catch on. We needed the voice of the perfect Midwestern American, of the legendary “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” who, even though he is governor, looks like a farmerstraight out of a 1940 black and white film, someone who, if he sees you messing around on your lawnmower, stops and helps you repair it, the grandfather who dresses up as a Santa Claus and takes children on his knees. And suddenly everything changed.
Referring to Trump, Vance and the former Republican Party, weird is not just an adjective; it is the “narrative” that political strategists relentlessly search for. Defining yourself is important, but it is equally important to define your opponent, and if you nail a word to him that cannot be escaped you have achieved the same result as a thousand election rallies.
Kamala Harris had not succeeded at this on her own. When Donald Trump, in a conversation with the association of African-American journalists, questioned the Democratic candidate’s identity, wondering why at a certain point she became black while previously she was Indian, Kamala Harris responded to his senseless question (since Harris has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, but she has always identified as African American), with a “high-minded” and almost bored tone that did her credit as much as it remained ineffective: “It’s the same old story, the partisanship, lack of respect…”. Oh no, you don’t talk like that with Donald Trump; above all, you don’t talk like that about Donald Trump. There is no point in repeating that he and his acolytes are xenophobic, melanophobic, homophobic, herpetophobic and arachnophobic. These things bounce right off Trump voters’ backs: they are the types who will come right back with “I’m racist? You’re the one who’s black!”. But weird, well, that’s a word that leaves its mark. It has no racial or gender connotations. The definition given by Webster’s Dictionary is “supernatural, otherworldly, bizarre”. Originally it meant “fateful”; the Weird Sisters are the Fates who determine the destiny of humans. But in colloquial language, weird, or rather a weirdo (which really is an insult, and in fact Tim Walz has never uttered that word), is the strange, bizarre, moody, bizarre, grotesque, original, slightly crazy, a little absurd, a little touching, a little bit nuts, even disturbing; not really a creep, which is a slimy and maybe even disgusting type, but almost. A weird person can be your eccentric relative who collects used tea bags or the neighbor who never says hello to you and makes strange noises at midnight. We have all known some weirdos, like the guy who walks around as if he were always obsessed with something, badly dressed, eyes downcast, who talks to himself like the homeless man in Jannacci, or the woman who stops you on the street and starts telling you incomprehensible stories. If they called you that name when you were at school, you felt emptiness around you. The definition follows you all of your life unless you change cities. It’s almost untranslatable, because it is meant to give the idea of something that doesn’t really scare you but makes you feel on edge. It has so many meanings that in the days following the interview with Tim Walz, Google saw a jump in searches for the word weird, 22 percent in the first week and 32 percent in the first days of August.
In the end, what did Tim Walz say to America that was so important? That the king is nude, and he’s also strange. With the prick of a pin, he deflated the hot air balloon Trump was flying in. Trump did not take it well. “They’re the weird ones!”, he shouted. “There’s something weird going on over there. No one has ever called me weird. I am many things but I’m not weird. And JD Vance isn’t weird either. Not at all. They are the weirdos!”. It’s pretty thin stuff: one would expect better from Trump than “She’s an idiot!”.
At the 2016 Democratic Convention, Michelle Obama said: when they fly low, we fly high. The sentiment was noble, but useless; in politics things don’t go that way. There is no point in attacking your opponent where he is weak; you have to surprise him where he is strong. If you hit him where he is weak you will gain a small victory, but his strength will remain unchanged. If you open a breach where he is strong, he will not be able to call upon his weakness for help. Donald Trump’s strength is that it has never been possible to define him. He’s not a Republican, he’s not a Democrat, he’s not an independent. As president he did things that both parties could have done equally, and he did others that would have aroused horror in both (if there was still a Republican Party, of course). He goes where the wind blows but would like the weathervanes to turn as he pleases. He would like to be a tyrant but gives the impression that he would prefer to spare himself the trouble. Sometimes he says things that seem left-wing, other times he says things that are absolutely right-wing, but most of the time he says things that simply don’t make sense. At his most recent rallies he has been repeatedly saying that it wouldn’t be bad to go to dinner with Hannibal Lecter (yes, the cannibalistic psychiatrist from The Silence of the Lambs); when asked by one of his constituents what he intends to do to guarantee a future for his children and grandchildren Trump replies that the cost of bacon has quadrupled (which is not true), that you can no longer order bacon, and it’s a horrible thing, without bacon we live like crap, and that we need to have China in our hands, which treated us so well when he was president, and that all those countries need to be taught how to behave and that they will therefore have to stop again (“all of these countries are gonna again, stop like”).
As if to say, he’s just plain weird, he’s a bit down, out of his mind, out like a balcony, it’s not too fair, he fell out of his high chair when he was little, he doesn’t have every Friday, he’s missing a training wheel, his brain is fried, and if you listen to him he even convinces you that Jesus Christ died of sleep. It took us eight years to figure it out. Isn’t this a bit weird too? Haven’t we caught a contagion of weirdness in recent yearswithout knowing it? We’ve been weirded out: he stressed us out with his weirdness.
But there are those who worry. Various commentators fear that the weird memehas the same negative effect as that definition of “deplorables” that Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters with during her campaign, when it still seemed impossible that the masses would really follow him. The weight of that word was then magnified to the point of making people believe that if Hillary Clinton had not offended Trump’s electorate, then perhaps she would have won. There is no basis for this statement, but it is true that “deplorable” sounds elitist – it is Latinized English (it means “that makes you cry”, like crying at a funeral) – it is not what you say to your schoolmate who keeps a collection of quartered lizards in glass jars in his room. Saying “deplorable” offends, but it doesn’t hurt. Weird on the other hand, precisely because of its colloquial use, really hurts.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of totalitarianism and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, wrote on the MSNBC website that “strong men” are often insecure. Calling them evil doesn’t have any effect on them (perhaps, I might add, they feel flattered), but they can’t stand being ridiculed. If Trump can’t take a joke, this is a weapon Democrats can and should use [Why MAGA Republicans are upset at Tim Walz for calling them ‘weird’ (msnbc.com)]. In fact, they are already using it. It is true that, in Italy, those of a certain age remember very well when Dario Fo repeated “It will be a laugh that will bury you”. It was never true, in fact the meme was soon changed to “it will be laughter that will bury us “. And sure, it won’t be a meme that will bury Trump, yet the fever has broken. For eight years Trump was taken terribly seriously, as if he were Baron Harkonnen descending on Dune to destroy the gentle House of Atreides. Calling him “quite old and weird”, as a recent Kamala Harris campaign statement did, puts things back into perspective.
And then, let’s seriously ask ourselves who should be offended. Trump’s candidate for vice president, the ineffable Vance, has just written a book-jacket blurb for a well-known far-right provocateur, a certain Jack Posobiec. In the book, entitled Unhumans,Posobiec argues that leftists cannot be considered human beings, that democracy is powerless in the face of the inhumanity of the left, and that America must get rid of the left and follow the models of Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet.
Vance, a candidate who expects – supposedly – to be voted for democratically, approved these arguments. As for Jack Posobiec, eight years ago he was the one who spread the rumor according to which the Democrats, under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, were sacrificing children in satanic rituals that took place in the basement of a pizzeria in Washington. Okay, he’s a fascist. But he is also a weirdo, as is the person who wrote for the book jacket. Who should Democrats be careful not to offend? Maybe the Trump follower who believed Posobiec’s rumor and broke into that Washington pizzeria with an AR-15 in hand, only to discover to his disappointment that it didn’t have a basement?
Or should they be careful not to offend Sid Rosenberg? He is a right-wing radio commentator who on July 30, in a conversation with Trump, called Douglas Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ Jewish husband, a crappy Jew, to which Trump nodded, “Yeah.” Crap is a colloquial term for “shit.” Complete the translation yourself. Emhoff responded by condemning the anti-Semitic rhetoric. Kamala Harris didn’t even respond. They really flew high. But if you fly too high you never hit the target, who isn’t even Trump, but a young 23-year-old truck driver named Draic Coakley, who has already attended various Trump rallies and who told a Huffington Post journalist: “Trump sees people like me. Biden and Harris, well, they’re part of what I think is the elite. President Trump may be a billionaire, but being rich is ok. He understands us. He really understands us, and he understands the country.” It’s Draic Coakley who needs to be convinced, and you don’t convince him by telling him that Trump is a fascist, because he has to get by with his truck and doesn’t have time to find out what fascism is. But he knows for sure what a weirdo is. And maybe, if you point it out to him, he’ll think about it. Perhaps.
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