U.S. presidential race is getting a bit weird

One word has been used repeatedly by Democrats to describe the Republican side in the U.S. but Rosemary Sorensen asks, does it have the impact the Left intended?

WHAT’S WEIRD about the way the American Democrats have hit paydirt with their strategy to call presidential candidate Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance “weird” is that “weird” is a word claimed with some honour by non-conformists.

Peripathetic, a book of essays by Melbourne-based writer Cher Tan, has a section that talks about outsider subcultures and weirdness. Tan has made a name for herself with unconventional writing that nevertheless deals impressively with how old-fashioned power is clashing with emerging technologies and what that means for humanity.

The book sets itself against presumption, so we’re warned not to think we’ll know the writer of these essays, just because she tells us personal things and rails against injustices with sometimes vulgar anger.

It’s confessional but also sly: she’s a trickster writer who judges her own performance.

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She writes:

‘It’s nice to feel like you’re changing the world. It’s nice to feel like you’re the cool kid; it’s nice to feel like people are finally taking you seriously.’

Then immediately judges that thought:

‘Is it nice? Maybe for a little while. Then I think to myself: I’ve gone and aired our dirty laundry again. And for the sake of what? Perhaps this is due to the absence of relationship with a mother. I just want to be seen, to be held, to be wondered upon.’

Tan’s very readable writing swirls ask how someone outside the mainstream can survive and whether being drawn into what you’ve previously been critical of means you’re no longer “authentic”.

This brings her up against enormous problems at a time when the contest for power is upending anything and everything that used to have stability.

As she writes:

In a world where even those on the Right can now be considered anti-establishment, it’s difficult to parse a sense of solidarity and desire that isn’t obstructed by hyperbole and aggressive loneliness, where weirdness is both novel and individualised. This is how edgelords are born.

I don’t get off on aloneness or uniqueness — for me, weirdness has always been social; it is the normality of weirdness amongst others that allows my self to continue the work of living.

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Words are constantly changing meaning, so that’s neither new nor weird. When Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, his “weird sisters” were witches who could foretell the future and the term denoted the supernatural. Shakespeare had a great time with these “crones” who cooked up a spell in a pot to which they added some most unsavoury ingredients, including the finger of a “birth-strangled babe”.

Nowadays, when you say something is weird, you might be suggesting that it’s surprised you, in a way you can’t readily explain. “That’s weird,” you might say when you are sure you left your keys on the kitchen table but find them in the bedroom.

But if you say to someone, “You’re weird”, you’re probably insulting them — which is why the Democrat side of American politics is using this simple insult to neatly open the Trumpian side to ridicule. To be called weird like this is to be considered unworthy even of consideration.

According to Tan, whose younger self found solace and much-needed solidarity – indeed “cachet” – in the self-appointed weirdos of punk music and subcultures, “weirdness” is everywhere; it’s the normal that is hard to find and she may have a point.

She writes:

‘Normality is a rare and exulted state of being that’s so normal it hardly begets attention. It’s the paragon of virtue, the form to strive towards, the ideal condition that, once achieved, exists without fanfare, completely invisible.’

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“Ordinary” is another way of saying it, equally puzzling but rarely challenged.

“Normal” is certainly what those who want to inflict their values on others, who believe they are what everyone else should aspire to be, wield as a weapon, which is why being called “weird” seems to be infuriating the loony Right in the USA.

Tan writes:

‘Talk about weirdness and it’s almost always immediately relegated to felons, angsty teenagers, miscreants, the criminally insane — basically those who end up rejecting normalcy, whether on purpose, by accident or chance, for reasons attributed to desperation, mental disorder, childish rebellion, something unnameable.’

How this battle for (or against) the weird pans out between felons and angsty teenagers might sound like a good bit of theatre, a spectator sport to be manipulated by media for titillation. Unfortunately, on it rests the viability of democracy in the United States and thus probably the rest of the world.

Now, that’s weird.

Rosemary Sorensen was a newspaper, books and arts journalist based in Melbourne, then Brisbane, before moving to regional Victoria, where she founded the Bendigo Writers Festival, which she directed for 13 years.