(Photo by me)
The consensus among the reporters I talk to is that this year’s New Hampshire is missing its zip. Politico captured this mood in a piece, similar to last week’s bleak mood in Iowa, but less solipsistic. Then, there was complaining about weather, which marooned reporters and candidates in the big Des Moines hotels. Now, there is a sense that fewer voters care about this election, even if they can brave the weather.
New Hampshire has political traditions, and you either embrace them or become a joyless Scrooge. If you’re annoyed by Vermin Supreme, the Massachusetts man who runs for president every four years with a boot on his head and a “free ponies” platform, you’re sophisticated. But no one wants to hear it. The video of Vermin jabbering at Rudy Giuliani is a little rough, but the man usually just wants to show up and clown on candidates. In 2012, my short clip of Vermin bullhorning outside of a Rick Santorum town hall got some traction on Twitter. “Rick. Rick,” said Vermin. “Rick. Come out with your pants down and your hands up.” The gags are pretty limited. The joke is in how audacious he is.
Anyway: Vermin showed up for one of Ron DeSantis’s town halls on Friday, events that are still mostly organized by his super PAC, which can’t officially coordinate with the candidate. (Every listing calls the governor of Florida a “special guest,” as if he’s celebrity stunt casting for the Never Back Down players.) The small room, which included 20-odd college students from Connecticut, was overflowing. People who recognized Vermin welcomed him like a neighbor — “Hey, Vermin!” — and he squeezed to the center of the room, where a stage had been set up for DeSantis.
He leapt onto the stage. “I’m the ghost of bootgates past!” he said, a reference to the more-than-necessary news cycles about DeSantis wearing Ariats to look taller. That got a laugh, but remember what I just said about the college students. He moved to a call-and-response: “When I say, ‘free,’ you say, ‘pony.’” That got a bigger laugh, because some of the conservatives in the room were in on it. What if this was planned? You could write the rest of the gag — a burned-out hippie, maybe the last one left, yelling nonsense socialist slogans, booed by New England anti-communists.
Vermin was removed eventually.
I wrote the above section on Sunday, then got absorbed in covering it all again. You can, sure, find downtime for anything important. We’re going for kids and one of my goals for the last year and a half has been ditching teenaged or college kid habits to get ready for that — among them, procrastinating.
Driving back and forth across a slice of New England didn’t make that easier. The internet, surprisingly, did. It’s been a bleak month for my industry, which is one of the few that gets a cheering audience for firings.
(There’s a meme about journalists looking down on blue collar workers in the energy industry and high-fiving when they get laid off; the usual joke is “learn to code!” The basis for this: The usually college-educated people in the media are in a class of laptop yuppies who don’t do real work, and whose confidence in a “climate crisis” is killing blue collar jobs. Some of these media people have, sure enough, written stories about big employers and politicians assuring coal miners that they can “learn to code.” But it’s the employers and politicians saying that; we’re just writing it down! There’s a more sophisticated version of this that sees the media as a distorting, hyperventilating force that destroys social cohesion, which I take more seriously.)
How does this relate to the larger internet? The forces that shut down publications and lay off writers are very bad at keeping my attention. A lot of enjoyable writing is basically nostalgic — albums you missed, wars you were unaware of, history you pretty much know already but enjoy seeing dramatized. The lowbrow reference I think of here is Denis Leary, trying to describe an “asshole” in a few words of a joke song.
I like football and porno and books about war
I got an average house, with a nice hardwood floor
Right, that’s a lot of consumers. For decades, and more than my lifetime, you could make money writing stories and reviews that might interest this reader, material by and for the middlebrow. You could make more money publishing it. That stopped happening, and what’s been replacing it online is bland AI content that gives you the instant pleasure of nostalgia with no meaning.
This has wrecked Facebook — after, unfortunately, it had already wrecked local news profit models. It used to be a place to spend time, waste time, and post articles. When I click it now I see accounts like Real 80s or Prog Monsters post photos of movies and bands I’m already aware of, usually some photo of people off-set or at after-parties. Where is the photo from? Stolen, maybe fake. Who wrote the caption? Probably an LLM.
This stuff sucks, and I’m not inclined to click it. Five years ago I had a few bookmarks for sites that always had something fun to read. A few of them have blinked out of existence, and I haven’t replaced them. Last week, I talked about my waning interest in movies as a solo activity, on a home screen. Communal activity, sure — my wife and I will see “American Fiction” tonight, hopefully with other couples who’ll laugh at the jokes. But there are so few distractions I want now. I’m either reading or working or walking outside. Try it for yourself! Listen to mom and wear layers.
The Best Thing I Read: Like I said last week, doing this primary right means not kicking back and reading. I had 15 spare minutes at the Trump rally, where cell service was spotty and wi-fi was a sick joke — the 15 minutes when the campaign staff has gone backstage. I spent them reading Amber A’Lee Frost’s “Dirtbag,” a memoir told through long and short essays about growing up poor in Indiana, shoplifting with the young husband she was about to divorce, watching Occupy Wall Street fail, canvassing for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, getting abortions pre-Dobbs (Forst was “cursed with rampant fertility”), and very briefly, co-hosting Chapo Trap House.
(Blurry photo from Chapo’s Soundcloud)
I’ve read other memoirs by leftists who worked on or around the Sanders campaigns, but this is the best one. And it is grim. Frost puts hopeless left organizers in three categories — masochists (who want to suffer, not win), pedophiles (betting on The Children who’ll fix all this) and necrophiliacs (settling for the end of useful work and a future of organizing healthcare professionals, tending to the “ever-expanding misery”).
On my drives, I listened through “Born Standing Up,” the incredibly brisk memoir he wrote of his early years, ending at the success of “The Jerk” when he was 33 years old. (There’s an epilogue about his parents’ deaths.) It’s mostly about work, and has a small following among the people who like self-improvement books for that reason. At the moment, that’s me. Audio was the way to go here; Martin meticulously describes comedy routines that are as available in the boomer/xer/old millennial memory as presidential inaugurations. I owed my purchase of the book to young millennials, as they’d thrown one of their anti-culture fits over Martin’s “King Tut,” and it made me think: Hm, well, I got the joke. Martin’s comic style was all pauses and broken expectations; “distraction is the enemy of comedy,” he wrote, and right now most comedy is enjoyed in short bursts as a distraction. Also recommended.
Books purchased
Amber A’Lee Frost, “Dirtbag: Essays” (Still North Books & Bar, Hanover NH)
Books read
Amber A’Lee Frost, “Dirtbag: Essays”
Joshua Green, “The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics”
James Howard Kunstler, “The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape”
Steve Martin, “Born Standing Up”
The Best Thing I Heard: Mid-way through my trip I fell into a Sade hole. I’d just read R.J. Wheaton’s short guide to trip-hop, illuminating stuff on a genre that was peaking when I moved to England in 1998 — at an age where I hated the “popular” thing. It’s still not my music, except for Massive Attack, and even there I like to listen to the dark Giger-ish instrumentation and tune out the lyrics. (“You are my angel/ Come from way above/ To bring me love, to bring me love.” Sure!) It took Wheaton to connect Sade, whose music had always hummed in the background for me, to the trip-hop I liked.
The connection clicked to me with “Feel No Pain,” a simple lyric about poverty in a recession with a relentless bass line from Paul Denham.
I listened to that a few times and ran the rest of the catalogue while I drive. That was about it for the week. Next week: An on-time diary.
Sade ... so fire. I'd wondered reading these how you keep sane, focused, moving on assignment in the vast American Trumplands beyond my beloved Beltway. But now Sade's stuck in my head as I hit this weed and posit aloud to Roxy, my lil ginger doggo whose tail wags her whole body when she gets excited ... like when I tell her that Weigel, through Sade, couldn't have been clearer that to slay a newsbeat you just gotta "Feel No Pain", or something. Coffee when you return? Feels overdue.