EPISODE 542: YUB NUB, Y'ALL
46.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Elections are strange times, as are elections where there are no results for days because everyone mailed in their ballot but in some states the ballots were due on election day and in other states they are not due until next week and there’s no clear sign of when there will be results either but sure, you want to say before 9am PST on Saturday, let’s do that.
In a strange way the intervening days were like an ever-expanding block party on Liberty Island, except the Statue of Liberty was covered and so no one knew whether the thing being built underneath was Gundam or a statue of Cthulhu eating the continental United States. (Don’t look so surprised, Hawai’i, you always knew you were going to be okay.)
(By the way, Japan has spent the last year building an actual 60 foot Gundam robot that will apparently be able to walk. It goes live December 19th, because apparently Japan hasn’t heard that it’s still 2020.)
Some of my favorite tweets in recent memory came from sitting around waiting for Steve Kornacki to look our way.
Like this one.
Or this one.
Or this one.
Marriage Story, the movie that seemed just, you know, fine when you watched it but apparently holds the shorthand for pretty much every kind of event in our lives.
We had plenty of time to learn stuff. Like this fascinating thread about the relationship between the blue swoosh in the south and slavery. (Click to see the full thread.)
Or this Avengers: Endgame rewrite about fighting voter suppression.
(Okay, fine, but Spider-Man as the representative of California? Come on, that should be Tony Stark, FOR SURE.)
There was occasionally snide talkery aimed at Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, whose vote counting took a while, but I much preferred when people offered the tweet equivalent of a gentle smile instead.
Meanwhile our friends overseas were also waiting and watching us wait and had some hilarious thoughts of their own.
At some point, we clearly all went crazy.
I like this because by this point I very much felt like I was Pac-Man racing around a maze where there were no more pellets to eat and it was just me being chased by all my fears.
The look on his face. He’s so happy, you’d think the United States was an unfertilized egg.
(Yes, that is a Mandalorian joke. Watch the latest episode. Also, be ready to feel VERY anxious.)
Baby Yoda helped people in so many ways these days, but probably none more mouthwatering than this.
Tasty it is.
Then, well…
I’m sure you saw some of the shots from big cities. As I came across some of those I kept thinking about this:
This is a political map of the United States as it actually is. That is to say, it represents the fact that in every state there are Democrats and Republicans. The actual question is one of proportion, not either/or. Even California, which today is considered so blue, has tons of Republicans in it, particularly inland.
Here’s the site that’s from. It also allows you to see how states have changed over the last 40 years.
I wondered, what’s going on in “red states” like Nebraska or Alabama? How are people celebrating there?
So I created this thread of happy responses from all 50 states plus as many territories as I could find.
A couple favorites: in Puerto Rico, almost every tweet was related to paper towels.
In both Hawai’i and Alaska, almost every tweet was locals having to explain to Republican voters that their states are actually in the United States and therefore saying you’re leaving the US and moving there makes no sense.
Some of the best moments were just little groups of people playing a song for themselves or sharing a personal story, like this one.
And since?
Well, there’s this guy, who I’m pretty sure is Robin, having got tired of Batman and wanting to go outside incognito but also there’s still a pandemic on.
And there’s this idea (click on Salerno).
We think of America as the place we live, but really the destination we hope to be headed, and the journey to get there. As much as it’s a noun it’s actually more immediately a verb, something we do, choices we make to pursue the ideals set out in the founding documents of this country.
And so when we make progress, like electing the first female vice president, the first black vice president, the first south asian vice president, the first biracial vice president that’s us stepping farther up and farther into America.
(C.S. Lewis uses that term “farther up and farther in” to describe people traveling in Heaven. You’re never “there”, there’s always more to see and farther to go.)
That tweet of Kamala Harris with all the former vice presidents, and Leight’s comment about it, that’s the story of America.
Of course, we don’t want to get overconfident about any of this.
It is still 2020, you guys. There are still some scary freaking Ewoks out there.
(Supposedly that really is an Ewok. Which kind of shook my world.)
But the thing that’s spoken to me the most is this:
For me one of the unexpected parts of the Obama presidency was that after two years of building a movement once he took over he mostly inhabited the typical presidential relationship with the country: him and the government making calls, us living our lives.
Now is not a time for that. It’s all hands on deck (even if the deck is actually our own decks at home, and the hands are only seen via Zoom). And I don’t know about you, but I want to help build a wave out of hope and joy.
See you next week.
PS A favor: a couple people complained to me last week that they didn’t get the newsletter. Which is weird; there was one! If that happened to you, too, would you let me know? You can post a comment or email me at jptmcd@gmail.com.
Also did not get the newsletter last week but hadn't thought anything of it given...gestures widely...all this.