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A few weeks ago, the entire conservative mediasphere was mad that Democrats, at the instigation of eventual veep nominee Tim Walz, had started calling them “weird.” Boy oh boy, that made them mad, and they all brought out their skull calipers and obsessions with other people’s genitals to prove that they were not weird.
They’ve since found something new to be mad and resentful about: They really don’t like that Kamala Harris has made “joy” a campaign theme. As the New York Times noted Friday (non-paywalled syndicated reprint), Harris was, early in her term, acutely worried about the Right’s criticism of her laugh, and “privately wondered to confidants whether she should laugh, or show a sense of humor, at all.” But they told her, nah, be yourself, even as she took on serious issues like abortion rights, gun control, and foreign policy. In the last year, Harris has also been touring to reach out to young voters, especially at historically Black colleges and universities, where the tone could be more high energy, too. As the Times put it,
So it is no accident that joy — a battle-tested version of it — has become the backbone of Harris’ campaign in recent days.
“The thing we like about hard work is we have fun doing hard work,” she said at a campaign event with autoworkers Thursday in Wayne, Michigan. “Because we know what we stand for. When you know what you stand for, you know what you fight for.”
Sounds a hell of a lot like Saint Molly Ivins’s call for progressives to
[Keep] fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.
Hey, is Yr Wonkette the first outlet to point out that the Harris-Walz campaign is operationalizing Molly Ivins? Must give credit!
Walz, who has a knack for these things, recently extended his critique of Republican weirdness to make the related point that all the Right’s constant culture warring has Made America Mean, and we should all say the hell with that. From the Times story:
“The one thing I will not forgive them for is they try to steal the joy from this country,” Walz, who has presented himself as something of a walking bear hug, said Wednesday in Detroit. “But you know what? Our next president brings the joy. She emanates the joy.”
Not surprisingly, many on the Right are not having it, which makes them look even weirder as they get angry about joy. Here’s Fox News host Julie Banderas in an excerpt from Thursday’s edition of “Outnumbered,” explaining that joy is bad, and probably even dangerous, when everything is so terrible right now, so knock it off!
BANDERAS: I just have to call her out on using the word joy.
How weird is that for the vice president to come out of this presidential mess for the last four years and refer to it as joy? Okay, the American people are not joyful about their checkbooks. They are not joyful about inflation. They’re certainly not joyful about the economy.
So what in the world is she talking — what is there to be joyful about? Our borders? [makes buzzer sound] No there. Like there is nothing to be joyful about other than getting a president in here to clean up the mess.
Of course, the country is only completely joyless in the rightwing imagination; in reality, the economy is literally the envy of the world and inflation has dropped considerably since its high point of two years ago.
More generally, rightwing discourse is almost never about joy. Hell, even rightwing comedy, such as it is, tends to be bereft of joy. It’s about winking while being racist, pretending Archie Bunker was the hero, imagining how funny it would be to kill people they hate (just joking, only serious), and of course making the One Joke They Have about trans people.
There’s also the grievance trope where righties get mad that someone else is happy when they shouldn’t be. How dare Chelsea Handler say she enjoys not having kids? How dare a pop song celebrate women getting aroused? And drag queens! Oh god, the drag queens are having fun when they should be ashamed and hiding in a closet, and possibly seeking conversion therapy. And of course those “childless cat ladies” should be having babies for the Fatherland, but instead think they’re allowed to live as they wish.
It makes perfect sense, then, that conservatives simply don’t know what to do with a candidate who says she’s having fun while pursuing policies that will help Americans. Here’s Sean Hannity mocking Harris on his Thursday show for that quote we started with, where she said “we have fun doing hard work — because we know what we stand for.”
Prior to the bit in the clip, Hannity complained that Harris “hasn’t lifted a finger to reduce violent crime, gas prices through the roof … she barely does one event per day.”
Pretty funny stuff in a week where Trump did just one campaign rally, in Montana, plus one lie-filled televised meltdown at his home. But worse, Harris laughs, and even claims she enjoys hard work, which can’t possibly be true because she’s so stupid and lazy and laughing:
The rest of the day she’s hiding in the equivalent of Joe Biden’s basement and they’re covering for her like they did for Biden in 2020. And yet for some reason grinning from ear to ear, and when she has a moment, giggling. And announcing today that she was just, she just loves “hard work.” Loves hard work, loves it.
Hannity very graciously refrained from calling Harris “shiftless,” but it was certainly implied.
So far, then, the “joy” thing seems to be having its intended effect: On the positive side, like “weird,” it’s drawing a sharp contrast with the joyless meaniepants Trumpers and Bible-thumpers who want to close libraries and interfere in your life. And it really makes a difference that she and Walz are both kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, and what’s more, havin’ fun doin it.
It also has the salutary effect of driving Righties into weird rants about how joy itself is bad, maybe even dangerous.
Campaigning is srs bns. Governing, even moreso. But hell yes, it can also be fun, because the work is worth doing.
PREVIOUSLY!
[NYT (syndicated reprint at Deccan Herald) / Media Matters]
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