Back of the book: Defending the ‘weird’ from the ‘lame’

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

After a lifetime of being called “weird,” it’s strange to see that word having its cultural day in the sun, though being deployed to such devastating political effect. “Weird” is a schoolyard insult that is so effective because it’s amorphous. “Weird” is as much a feeling as it is a state of being; it signifies the casting out of a person, place, thing or even idea from the channels of the norm.

Of course, that makes it subjective and freighted with the context of its usage on a case-by-case basis. That said, I generally like “weird” things, and don’t automatically assume it’s a pejorative. I’m a lover of the uncanny and mysterious — an avid reader of “weird fiction” and, as a kid, wished that I could somehow join the Addams Family. I have pictures of vultures on my walls, listen to podcasts about medieval necromancy and own an accordion.

If all that’s “weird,” and many have called such things thus, then I’m happy to bear that descriptor. I always have been. Which is why I’m wary of “weird’s” current cache as a rhetorical roundhouse kick to people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance — two men who are manifestly unfit for any position of authority, and I wouldn’t even want to be caught in an elevator with, much less see serving as the president and the vice president of the United States, respectively. They are an insult to “weirdness.”

I get it, though. “Weird” is disquieting but a little silly, and therefore deflates the target — simultaneously denigrating and rendering it harmless. That’s why it works so well against authoritarians. A rabid dog is one thing, a weird one is another. There’s something comical about the “weird,” and if there is one thing that authoritarians hate, it’s comedy.

Trump hates Kamala Harris’ laugh because he’s probably never laughed in his life, other than in instances when his foot is on someone’s neck. The abject horror with which the conservative chattering class has responded to the Harris campaign’s signature joviality is symptomatic of the essential brittleness of its ideology. This is not unusual among tyrannical types, whether they have power or not.

Joseph Stalin was rumored to have loved a joke, but always at someone else’s expense. Adolf Hitler was famously unhumorous, and despised above all the reporters of the Munich Post, who in the early days of his thuggish ascension to political power saw immediately what a boob he was, and what buffoons everyone around him and who supported him were, and pointed this out with all the subversive glee that they could muster. He had their offices destroyed and locked up as many of them as he could. He couldn’t take a joke.

I’ve been a student of history for as long as I’ve been considered “weird,” and in many ways that’s probably related, and so I’m aware of the hazards of Stalin-Hitler comparisons. However, I also know that the office of the United States presidency holds powers more awesome and potentially destructive than any ever dreamed of by those dictatorial paragons. I know that’s not lost on Trump. If he gets his hands on those levers again, he has made no secret of his desire to use them against his enemies, and they are those who have made fun of him. Who have called him “weird.”

Again, though, I must come to the defense of the “weird.” Trump and his faux hillbilly (neck)beard Vance are not “weird”; they are, like Stalin and Hitler, deeply “lame.” Stalin was so self-conscious of his acne scars that he forced Soviet photographers to airbrush his image whenever it appeared. Not doing so meant the gulag for any honest proto-photoshopper. Hitler subsisted on a diet of beans, cabbage and mineral water (and drugs), thus he was constantly farting. 

With Trump, it’s that his hands are huge, his crowds are huge, his skin is flawless in its orange immensity, his hair is real and the best hair and, due to his massive consumption of fast food and soda, his presence has been said by some to also be announced by a cloud of flatulence, which during his criminal hush money trial reportedly left his lawyers gagging. 

None of this is “weird,” because it is not uncanny or mysterious, nor is it even interesting. It is lame, as in misshapen and pathetic, wounded beyond repair, tedious and defective. If they are “weird” in any sense, it’s in uncoolest of ways. They’re not the Addams Family, they’re The Hills Have Eyes. They are people you wouldn’t want your kids to spend time with. If they sat next to you on a flight of any duration, you’d inwardly groan and wish you could sleep on planes.

All that said, if we’ve come to the point where we’re actively insulting these people with schoolkid taunts, we ought to be more circumspect about the disparagements we use. It would be a terrible shame if the “weird” ended up as a casualty of the “lame.”