DES MOINES — The classic tone for Iowa State Fair stories was “patronizing.” Maybe you’d seen them. A reporter standing in front of a ferris wheel, holding something deep fried; an exegesis on the sort of cra-a-a-azy things that these lumpen Midwest folk were cramming onto sticks, then into their pre-diabetic mouths.
I noticed less of that this year, my sixth coming to this fair on assignment. Some theories. One: Goofball coverage of this event was knocked off the schedule by the horrifying stories coming out of Maui. Hard to transition from images of people losing their homes and lives in a wildfire to “check out this deep-fried cajun-flavored butter!” Two: Strange food and behavior is a constant feature of TikTok; we get “can you believe they’d eat THAT” stories year-round, if we want them.
Three: There was plenty of media here, but fewer outlets flooding the zone with huge teams of reporters. We were busy, figuring out how to cover the Trump phenomenon while not wanting to repeat the googly-eyed wonder of 2015, when Trump rode his helicopter around the fair and invited a few reporters on to ask frothy questions. (Would being rich hurt him politically, like it hurt Mitt Romney? “First of all, he wasn’t rich.”)
We had some fun, too, even if we’d aged out of the clean fun (rides that throw you into the sky as fast as possible) and into the demographic that shows up to day-drink. Not us, obviously — we were working — but many of the people stopping to listen to candidates were doing so on way to one of the bars with beer cooled down to below-freezing temps. I got my refillable cup from Steer and Stein — a “smart cup” that changes color when the contents are freezing, and tracks how many refills you have with an embedded chip — and filled it with ice and Fresca. I lived vicariously through the people, mostly middle-aged women, showing up in New Kids on the Block gear for the band’s Saturday night concert, slowly replacing the day-time fairgoers, losing their minds over “You Got It (The Right Stuff).” They didn’t know or care that biotech entrepreneur had just walked where they were walking, rapping a verse of “Lose Yourself,” then being serenaded by a band of revolutionary war re-enactors. This fair had everything.
I’ll write about all this at my main gig, but the fair really did take over the last week; my story about Ron DeSantis and the ways Republicans were taking power away from left-wing city/county prosecutors was finished, on shockingly reliable wi-fi-, 15 feet away from the rattlesnake corndog booth. (It’s a cliche, but it’s true: This tasted like chicken.) The internet changed how this was covered, then made it a little worse; no candidate wants to be photographed in a manner that will be mocked and memed, which means no candidate will do fun, goofy things on camera. That includes eating any kind of corndog — multiple strategists reminded me of the time Michele Bachmann bit into one, eyes lolling back as if fighting off a possession from Pazuzu. That became a genuine national story, one of two indelible images from her doomed campaign, the other one being a Newsweek cover that used the worst take from a photoshoot. (Poke around in 2011 vintage media and you appreciate why Republicans worked so hard to create alternatives.)
So, no candidate ate a corndog, not on camera. Two men who refused to identify themselves to reporters held a banner near the Des Moines Register soap box reading “Eat a Corndog, You Coward” — funny, I guess, but it explained why they wouldn’t. No one whisked down a giant slide. Stops at the pork tent were limited to the flipping of “pork burgers,” which, unrelated, made me think for the first time about the absurdity of calling a disc of smashed beef a “ham” burger. They played it safe, and made little lasting news, except for Robert F. Kennedy — again, there’s stuff here I have to write about in the actual work newsletter.
Part of me appreciated this. The media trend that’s annoyed me the most recently isn’t one that you see at the fair, or anywhere people gather news in person. It’s the rise of plagiarism and rip-off accounts, mostly on Twitter, that grab any content with the potential to go viral, and share it without a link or, sometimes, any credit to the original source.
I’ve noticed this more over the last year, and you probably have, too — I assume that if you subscribe to a reporter’s weekly diary of random thoughts, you’ve got a Facebook account or something. Every social network is built to addict you then sell you products. If you’re not currently buying something, the next best thing it can do — for the advertisers — is keep you scrolling. So I have a pretty frequent experience, on the networks I do use (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube), of checking my page, scrolling down, and being served something eye-catching or enraging.
To the extent that wasting time is harmless — I think so less and less as I get older, but just bracket that — this is harmless. On Facebook, below any recent posts from friends, I get a collection of vertical videos that fit into three categories. 1) Here is what a celebrity from the 90s looks like now; 2) here is how a fat person lost weight; 3) here is a traditionally attractive woman. On Instagram, another Meta property, I get served “funny” videos that copy the aesthetics of TikTok — indeed, are often just reposted from TikTok. Same thing on my YouTube front page.
Twitter — sure, fine, whatever, “X” — is even more obnoxious, because I can more immediately see the cordyceps effect on people I know. There has been a proliferation of junk accounts that copy content to drive engagement, or post prompt questions — “what’s a movie opinion that makes people react like [image of the guy from “Tangled” being surrounded by swords].” These are written to get people to react to them, often angrily, then waste time arguing.
Very strange. Right now, if you’re spending more time arguing online than you are blocking accounts, you’re doing it wrong. For inspiration, here’s an Instagram account I nuked this morning after it sent me spam suggesting to me — do not laugh — that they’d work with me as a Fitness Influencer.
Oh, what’s the point about the state fair? That I get why candidates were cautious. It was bad enough when an awkward moment might be captured by one of the reporters covering you. When it could be hijacked by PopBase or CrazyAssMomentsInAmericanPolitics? The only way to win is not to play.
The Best Thing I Read: Just one book — “The Midwich Cuckoos,” by John Wyndham, frequently adapted as “The Children of the Damned.” We’ve talked here about rediscovering the source code of modern entertainment, and this has some of it. The myth of the changeling existed hundreds of years before Wyndham, but he turned it, for the first time, into science fiction. You know the story: The women of a small town suddenly become pregnant at the same time, and give birth to a brood of telepathic aliens who rule by terror.
Wyndham, like all mid-century weird fiction writers, lived in H.G. Wells’s shadow, and builds inside his usual structure — the introduction of a recognizable place, the exposition about something that’s going terribly wrong, then the tense scenes of wonder and violence. In Wyndham’s story, it takes a while to create Midwich in our heads, and populate the town with characters who don’t all talk like each other. The exposition, handled by physicians, is blunt but elementally terrifying. It’s also, importantly, handled by men. Women are the victims of the alien brood plot, but it’s up to the doctors to analyze the emotional trap they’re in.
“We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us—but these creatures we should carefully rear.”
A strong, quick read, and it keeps getting re-adapted. Jesse Eisenberg starred in a mediocre re-think of the story called “Vivarium,” in which a modern couple is trapped in a suburban hellscape and forced to raise a cuckoo humanoid alien. It gets the scares all wrong; Eisenberg’s wife (played by Imogen Poots, who keeps being very good in mediocre horror films) discovers the baby on a doorstep, instead of giving birth to it; the humanoid has a distorted voice and bird-like nec sacs when it screams, a great shock but a little silly. Twisting around the concept this way makes it feel like an anti-adoption fable. There’s a new, straightforward adaptation of the novel, using its actual name, which I can’t vouch for. Just read the thing!
The Best Thing I Saw: Just one movie, across two planes, both delayed: “A Few Good Men.” By this point it’s clearly more parodied and referenced than it is seen. When Vivek Ramaswamy is riffing, he sometimes says that Americans “can handle the truth,” then asks if they remember “A Few Good Men” and quotes Jack Nicholson’s meltdown on the witness stand: “You can’t handle the truth!”
I’m speculating that people now reference the line without seeing the film because what Nicholson’s Col. Jessup is confessing to — spoiler, for this 31-year old movie — is that he ordered two marines to kill a straggler who was getting on his nerves and trying to get transferred by sending a letter to superiors, outside the chain of command. He is arrested immediately after confessing this. It’s great pomp, and not something you’re supposed to cheer for. You cheer for what Tom Cruise tells Nicholson as he’s arrested:
“Don’t call me ‘son.’ I’m a lawyer and an officer in the United States Navy. And you’re under arrest, you son of a bitch.”
But it doesn’t jump off your tongue and do a triple axel, right? I’m annoying noncommittal about Aaron Sorkin; I appreciate his wordplay but find it excruciating when he sets up black hat/white hat scenes where we know who to root for. “The Newsroom” is full of that stuff, hours of a smart liberal getting mad at how stupid the politicians on his TV are and writing dialogue where his stand-in can get the comeback exactly right. Sorkin’s characters here are uncomplicated, and you know within seconds of meeting Jessup that he’s a smug, arrogant SOB. Demi Moore is the original model for Sorkin’s classic “woman who’s clearly better than these guys but gets no respect” character — good at it, too, and incredibly convincing when she awkwardly asks Jessup to dinner at a “great seafood place” where she massacres crab legs. There’s a great recurring bit about a newstand operator that Cruise only communicates with in clichés. Good melodrama, much better and less portentous than the Chicago 7 movie Sorkin made for Netflix.
The Best Thing I Heard: Marc Maron with William Friedkin, RIP.
Great stuff. The fair sounds like fun if only for the food which I assume is mostly free and if not I take back the it sounds like fun analysis. And you got to be there for viveks lose yourself, not bad.
The junk accounts on x are quite annoying, but I do like that now they're all chasing the payouts the baits just seem more obvious. It's even more fun when accounts that primarily tweet about politics or business all of a sudden are posting large chested women with the caption, "she sitting next to you wyd?"
I liked the observation on how sorkin writes the setups to his comeback lines. It's something i was aware of if only that his dialogue always felt off to me but I couldn't figure out why. Normally I love well set up one liners (JCVDs "hunting season... is over" comes to mind) but sorkin just hits different.
Hope next week is fun!