Political Weird

Plus News and Notes

It’s been a wild couple of weeks for the word “weird.” Now that Kamala Harris’s VP choice has fallen on Tim Walz — the fellow who got this whole thang rolling a few weeks ago, proclaiming to the Morning Joe crew that “these guys are just weird” — the term has become an active if no doubt transient player in the 2024 presidential campaign. Having written a book on the subject, 2019’s High Weirdness, I can only reply as expected. How weird.

For a couple weeks now, folks have pestered me about the term’s strange new twist of fate. As regular readers know, I am not much of a hot take guy, let alone a party politic opinionator. So forgive me for not diving into the fray sooner. I am trying to have a vacation, dammit!

I am not sure I have that much to add. One thing about being a lukewarm take guy is that I have time to read a bunch of other more deadline-driven writers on the topic, and a lot of it was good enough. If I can add much of anything, it’s mostly in my deeply informed appreciation for this word and its hydra-headed range of meanings, meanings that — until recently anyway — have generally packed more punch than most of us grant. Weird’s wonders are hiding in plain sight. And now two more hydra heads — a folksy midwestern coach and a brat of many colors — have popped out of the beast, adding further nuance to the term.

In High Weirdness, I argue that weird is kind of a waste-basket term. A lot of us drop it regularly, but we don’t think about it much, and we often use it to categorize the sort of things or situations that are nebulous enough — beyond or between good and evil, or even good and bad — that we don’t know what else to do with them. Drugs (or tequila) can get weird in a good way, one that accords with our desire for intoxicating surprise and release. Crazy-good sex can be weird, but sexual advances from people we find gross can be weird in a pretty bad way. Physical symptoms that aren’t quite painful or worrisome can be weird, as can all children if we are paying attention. AI is intensely weird.

Then there’s fringe phenomena like deja vus or synchronicities, experiences that we might describe as weird because we want to voice their uncanny power without invoking any supernatural claims. This use in turn reflects the premodern sense of the term, which begins with the Anglo-Saxon noun Wyrd, which looms as a figure of sometimes personified Fate. Shakespeare shaped it into an adjective for his “weird sisters” in Macbeth, who not coincidentally resemble the three Norns of destiny. The eerie dimension of the term emerges from this sense of unspooling if erratic doom, which informs the word in Romantic poetry and the Gothic through twentieth century pulps like Weird Tales or EC’s Weird Science, all of which fashion the weird into something like the poor man’s uncanny.

I identify three contemporary domains of the weird in the book. First there is weird as genre — a sensibility found in the Lovecraftian Venn diagram overlapping horror, fantasy, and cosmic science fiction. This peculiar aesthetic also seeps into the second domain of the term: the weird as a description of a reality that, while remaining real, sometimes appears to be paranormal, or anomalous, or radically counter-intuitive. (Interestingly, Shakespeare captured something of this deviation by describing his witches not only as weird but as “Weyward”.) The notion of the weird as a feature of concrete reality is embraced not only by cryptozoologists or occult conspiracy theorists but, in a different sense, by actual quantum physicists, who have been describing some of the bizarre features of their research as “quantum weirdness” (or strangeness) since the 70s.

Finally there is the meaning before us now: weirdness as deviancy, as a way to characterize persons who live or behave or believe far from the norm. As far as I can find, this is a distinctly 20th-century development, and one with more than a hint of perversity, especially through the noun “weirdo.” In this usage, weird has some rough parallels with queer, another nounish adjective with a supernatural inflection — a tang of the Fey — that comes to mark threatening non-normative sexuality and is eventually transformed into a positive value or at least a tolerated identity. When R. Crumb named his 1980s comic magazine Weirdo, he was celebrating this subaltern identity associated with adventurous sex, drugs, and a fascination with peculiar beliefs or subcultural refusal.

To the degree that we understand weird to mean abnormal, we of course require something normal to also stake its claim. This norm itself shifts over time, both culturally and statistically; previous norms, like super-tight corsets or a conviction of Biblical inerrancy, are now fetishes of one sort or another. But as I have argued elsewhere in the case of AI (which has its own deep relationship to the weird), weirdness can also flip into its opposite, and become banal. Psychedelic imagery is a great example here, or Halloween monsters, or snarky self-referential animated cartoons. Weirdness, then, is a moving target, and somewhat in the eye of the beholder, so much so that many of us suspect that “normal” that attends it, stated explicitly or implied, has little value beyond a scrawl on the back of an envelope.

That said, by the back of my envelope, today’s Republican party is still pretty fucking weird. Trump himself is a lewd, carnivalesque, bizarre figure, capable of slipping into dreamtime with a nightmarish ease. The 4chan sensibility that minted Pepe Nazi memes and helped shape right-wing troll culture is aggressively weird; indeed, most of the podcasts I did when High Weirdness came out bemoaned the fact that Operation Mindfuck launched by Robert Anton Wilson and the Discordians in the 60s, has proved rather successful of late. And though loony conspiracies have played an active role in the populist right since long before the Birchers, the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy narratives that motivate both base and superstructure have reached a new surreality (and new banality). Even their Christianity is weird. Far from restating old Moral Majority fundaments or the dispensationalism of yore, the Dominianism of Christian Nationalism derives from a heterodox reading, not only of the gospels — it was render unto Caesar, not seize his throne — but of old school millennialism. Today’s Dominionists don’t want to rapture, they want to rule.

At this juncture I cannot help sharing a recent clip of Texas state representative James Talarico, pushing back against Christian Nationalism in Christian terms with solid preacher style. Sure he looks like a Mouseketeer, but that’s part of the point, and you need balls of steel to take positions like this in Texas, especially in the name of the Lord. Talarico doesn’t mention the weird, but he does do a masterful job of decentering Christian Nationalism from its increasingly normative position within American faith, reframing it as deviant and unbiblical. Secular folks, whose suspicions of Christianity make them too susceptible to the Dominionist’s own revisionist claims, would do well to absorb Talarico’s critiques.

Like Talarico, but much more economically, Walz used the word weird to shift the locus of normality back into the Donkey zone. “These are weird people on the other side,” he told the TV people. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.” These aren’t yesterday’s Republicans, which by implication Walz still respects. These folks have rejected conservatism and embraced a countercultural and authoritarian radicalism that demands divesting itself of its own centrist, neoliberal, and Reaganite currents. But here’s the sneaky trick that Walz calls out: though the Trumpephants have gone edgelord, their commitment to populism means that they also need to front as Normies, to continue to rest on the party’s Nixonian laurels by presuming to represent a bedrock of good old ‘Mercan middle-of-the-road (and middle-of-the country) values. But now one of those middle-of-the-country more-or-less mainliners has called their bluff. Let the Normies know what the edgelords actually want to do to them.

It’s a slippery game. One feature of today’s metacrisis is that norms are ever harder to come by, even rhetorically, even as most people continue to accept all manner of unconscious or unreflected standards of thought and behavior. This makes the precarious contingency of norms even more exposed and available for reconstruction. Walz and the Democrats who followed in his wake have tried to reclaim the norm indirectly, by pointing a finger at its opposite, and the force of the reaction seems to suggest its temporary success.

But there is another twist to the taunt. As many commentators have pointed out, the Donkeys have long tolerated and even celebrated marginalized and even scapegoated identities by weaving them into an ever-expanding rainbow of diversity. In this sense, the Donkeys are the party of the weird becoming the formerly weird, though of course without using the term itself, since that might offend somebody. Homosexuals were seriously, even repulsively weird to vast swaths of Americans only a handful of decades ago, and they are so no longer. In this, progressive politics resembles the Star Trek narrative universe, which so often serves up seemingly alien aliens who reveal enough “human” characteristics over the episode to give them a run at joining the Federation. Are you a kid who wants to scramble gender and modify your body with grammar and sex-change drugs? An immigrant from an arcane and exotic land? Are you visibly or even baroquely “differently-abled”? Come on down!

Even many of us who grew up in the pocket of whiteness and privilege, especially in the 80s and 90s, readily accepted our identity as weirdos. We might have had odd obsessions with drugs or sex or nerd culture, or rejected idols like high school sports or the God of the churches. Riding the long wake of the 1960s, these relatively risk-free non-normative positions have gradually, ironically, and resoundingly became the norm, as Noah Smith points out in a sharp piece on the weirdness debate. Subversion, code-scrambling, and radical self-expression have long characterized the commodified rebellion offered by Hollywood and consumer capitalism. But they are also now a social reality, albeit one playing out within the invisible digital cages of surveillance and control we all navigate. Lots and lots of people smoke pot, believe UFOs are more real than the Holy Spirit, and fuck in a wide variety of modes — or at least know people who fall into these categories, and more to the point, don’t care that they do.

So the deeper level of Walz’s playground taunt rests on a more paradoxical situation: the less-weird representatives of the unnamed party of weirdness call out the demonstrable weirdos driving the purported party of Pinks. This asymmetry brilliantly complicates the inevitable rebuttal. Trump is a magnificent playground bully, but in this case cannot resort to the classic “I know you are but what am I”? As an insult, “weird” can’t be turned back against the Democrats because, even though some progressive positions are pretty weird, the troops are ready to defend the marginal, rhetorically at least. JD Vance cannot sputter, “Yeah, Governor Walz, you signed that bill to establish the Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway with purple ink, which is, like, totally weird, but not even as weird as Prince himself, who was all, like, gender-bendy and galactically hot and fantastically talented and changed his name to a glyph and ate drugs.” Ain’t gonna work.

The other important point about “weird” is that it’s not that weird. That’s why it’s a waste-basket word: it’s ready-to-hand, and doesn’t lock you into much of a metaphysical or moral commitment. As a term of abuse, weird is more like smelly than Satanic. In that sense, the taunt represents a notable and deeply appreciated de-escalation of the hysteria fueling many Donkey attacks from Biden and the online left, with their language of fascism and purges and the death of democracy. This apocalyptic hysteria, whatever its basis in reality, all too simply mirrored the apocalyptic visions of the right, with its paranoid horror of civil servants, its literal demonizing of certain public figures, its QAnon dog whistles and great replacement theories. With Walz’s taunt, Democrats instead perform a casual and matter-of-fact self-confidence that had previously been owned by the right, and especially by trolls. Consider the classic set-up whereby rightwing meanies circulate an offensive joke, often though not always unfunny, which like clockwork triggers the shrill schoolmarms of the left, whose intensely serious rejoinders in turn can be dismissed with a casual, “what’s the big deal” shrug. But that’s what weird does now: “OK, whatever, you guys are just weird. I don’t want to hear about it. Just stay away from the corridors of power.”

As a guy who had made (too) much of the weird, and has an abiding fondness for the marvels and discomforts and ambiguous peculiarities the term has covered over the centuries, I admit a certain vexed grief that scientific racists, Pizzagate suckers, and really nasty Christians have been invited into the ranks. But this sense of linguistic loss is a familiar feature of the Internet era, which so readily parasites the cooler words of our common tongue, gamifying them, weaponizing them, and reducing them to fodder for apps, memes, and online influence campaigns. It’s the sort of disappointment I recently experienced when I reread one of my favorite English Romantic poems from my lit major days, Keat’s “To Autumn.” I read it out loud, and was really luxuriating in the rich language as the poem soared to its final four lines:

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I don’t care about Musk changing the name to X: that last line is a digital ruin. Reading “twitter” here is like hearing a cell phone going off in a concert hall, or finding a QR code on the corner of a Botticelli. And so I stand in solidarity with my fellow freaks of the Weirdosphere: left or right, in-between or off the map, we bemoan the politicization of weird. But what are you gonna do? The chamber of commerce mantras “Keep Austin Weird” or “Keep Portland Weird” were bad enough. “Keep Weird Weird” is even worse. At least the thing still has teeth.

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Listening

• A Sense of Rebellion. The more I learn, the more I think, and the more I feel into the gut-punch ontological vertigo of technological life today, the more I am convinced that the best way to get a historical handle on the chaos is to familiarize yourself with the cybernetic — or “systems theoretical” — course of the twentieth century. Cybernetics, which goes by many names, is at once a technological mutation, an informational invocation, and a theoretical monster slang with all manner of rich, vacuous, and contradictory outcomes. Just follow the feedback loops: the information technologies of World War II, and the three or four decades of systems interventions that followed, including the Macy Conferences, Norman Wiener’s articulation of cybernetics, the rise of ecology and “holistic thought”, thinkers like Bateson and von Foerster and Luhmann, management theory and scenario planning, and the “systems countercultures” explored by historians like Andrew Pickering, Fred Turner, and Bruno Clarke. Speaking of which, you could do much worse than take the twelve-week Cybernetic Countercultures Intensive offered this fall by Clarke and David McConville through San Francisco’s wonderful Gray Area, a technoculture incubator and curator with its cyborg heart in the right place.

For a narrower but deeply satisfying alternative, I heartily recommend Evgeny Morozov’s ten-part podcast A Sense of Rebellion. Morozov had already made his name as a trenchant and articulate critic of Silicon Valley and its cult of “solutionism” when he got a PhD in the history of science at Harvard. His project centered on the Environmental Ecology Lab, a Boston-based experimental cybernetic research lab whose ideas and prototypes were years ahead of their time. Though many fascinating characters were involved, including an incisive female researcher we get to hear a lot from, EEL’s soft technologies and responsive machines sprung from the vast egos of three peculiar men, the most important of which was Eugene Brody, whose career path led from psychiatry to Warren McCulloch to CIA flirtations to hippie communes to Maoist ideology.

Morozov deftly and intricately deploys material from a vast archive he gathered over many years, resulting in a richness and complexity all too lacking in most history podcasts. Given the foolishness and failures of the Lab, I had initially assumed that Morozov was going to turn the whole thing into a bitter allegory of Silicon Valley arrogance and stupidity. But the portrait that emerges — of hubris, vision, technology, money, the Sixties, phenomenology, and human enhancement — is rich, nuanced, and deeply resonant. Besides giving us a masterclass in Science and Technology Studies, Morozov gives us a cybernetic symptomology that foreshadows current conditions, and whose philosophical and technological implications Morozov draws out in three crisp lectures offered as addenda. But what animates the thing is Morozov’s critical sympathy for the flawed and fascinating people at the heart of the story, a sympathy that directly speaks to the humanism that motivates Morozov’s sometimes abstract technological critiques. The website is also, uhm, cool.

Appearances

• Nikita Petrov runs the highly recommended Psychopolitica Substack — which I love partly because it runs at the same sort of inconsistent, real-life pace that Burning Shore favors. Nikita also attended the Psychedelic Universe course I taught with Christian Greer earlier this summer, and recently offered up some of the marvelous notes he took in the course.

• A few links for the Davis trackers. I did a career-spanning interview for Retrofuturista, a site whose tagline reads “Arcane Cosmo-Entities from the Non-Euclidean Beyond.” Michael Pearce wrote a kind and nuanced review of Blotter. And two podcasts landed recently that I particularly enjoyed recording: an in-depth conversation about writing and creativity with Artist Decoded, and a looser, funny, gather-round-the-bong bubble with the sweethearts over at No Simple Road.

I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to support my work, you are encouraged to consider a paid subscription, though for now I will not be offering any subscriber-only content. You can also support the publication by forwarding Burning Shore to friends and colleagues, or by dropping an appreciation in my Tip Jar.