Cat Daddy

I'm very happy to report I learned my lesson from last week and definitely, purposefully and consciously did not watch a single minute of Donald Trump's stupid press conference he called together today.

I know, you're thinking "Well, if you definitely didn't watch it, how do you know it was stupid?" to which I would reply by not replying at all, I mean, what kind of a question even is that?

Did I read some recaps about the content of that press conference? Well, yes, but no. I read the news related to this the same way everyone "reads the news" these days, by skimming some clickable headlines that I then chose not to click. Honestly, looking for links to include in this weekly whatever this is (as in the first paragraph) is the farthest in-depth I get into just about any news story anymore. I will say that I am more inclined to click on articles when I'm using this 2011 MacBook Pro running an outdated operating system that it refuses to upgrade under Apple's longstanding policy of planned obsolescence. That means that the version of Safari this runs either won't or can't fully load all the gewgaws and hoodads on websites that are almost exclusively used to auto-run a bunch of bullshit ads. For the low price of about $2,000 in early-2010s money and 13 years of your time, you too can have a pretty effective ad-blocker like this at your disposal. Efficient? Not really, but you sure don't have to update the software of whatever ad-blocker extension your browser is running if it's not capable of displaying pretty much anything. Being broken is a pretty comprehensive application. And it has the bonus of vindicating some of your hoarding behaviors, so it's a win-win-win.

What I know I didn't miss by not watching this press conference: Trump and his campaign have all been freaking out since Joe Biden dropped out and the Democratic Party, in defiance of decades of tradition of being the cattiest, backstabbing-est, pettiest bunch of self-immolating contrarians allergic to message discipline, immediately and uniformly uniting behind the Kamala Harris candidacy. In a lot of ways, I can't blame them for losing their shit over the entire script getting flipped on them in so short a time. I feel for them having to throw out all their strategy and messaging from just a few weeks ago when it seemed certain their main opponent was someone suffering from the compounding effects of a slow petrification spell put on them by a local witch, or perhaps a cursed woodland creature he'd wronged, possibly inadvertently.

The bad news for them is they have to contend with an energetic 59-year-old in her political prime, selected specifically for this type of a role when she was chosen as Joe Biden's running mate in 2020. As Biden was the legislative wizard and steadying hand (you can read that as "old white guy" if you want, it doesn't alter the meaning) for the Obama ticket, Harris fit the Obama role for the Biden ticket (I'll make this shorter by just saying "not an old white guy"). As a result, the depressing election between two old white guys has become something else entirely. The switch to Harris has unlocked an absolute frenzy of pent-up formerly-defeated optimism and forward-looking hope that had at best been leaking out into begrudging support for Biden, despite all the mumbles and shuffles, in light of what the alternative is (mumbles and shuffles, but angry).

There was a lot of anticipation ahead of her running mate selection, which she balanced out correctly by adding old white guy Tim Walz of Minnesota, to keep with the pattern. Since then there has been a race to define Walz, which has begun the next phase of this campaign season in earnest. For a period of time, in the surprising (to me at least, internally) gush of euphoric release,* Kamala Harris was a Magic Box of Anything. The national electorate just knew that she was Not Joe Biden. Without the known contours (and maybe willfully looking away for a while, to bask a little longer in the feeling of deliverance in ignorance), she could be everything to everyone, attaching to her the parts of Biden Administration policy they liked and consciously distancing her from the ones they didn't. Do you have complicated feelings about how Biden has responded to the war in Gaza? There's nothing stopping you in this transitional moment from going "thank goodness, a change" and/or "I feel comfortable this represents continuity but, like, more." She's enjoyed the luxury of being the Schrödinger's Candidate for now.

The selection of Walz is the first peek inside the box for a lot of people, where Harris will stop buzzing around in a state of quantum uncertainty and begin to coalesce into a more solid, tangible, regular-ass political figure. But that's OK. I've said before, she's from California, I've voted for her a bunch of times already. I know who she is as a public personality. And although she's never held an executive position, I do feel like I know how she'd govern, but who can say until it happens? I can say with confidence it won't look anything like whatever bullshit Trump said at his sad-boy press conference today. We just need to keep her way from any curse-bearing entities between now and November and things are, for the moment, looking up.

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*I'm so so sorry about the phrasing, I will never subject you to any talk of any of my gushing, euphoria or release again. I regret everything.