In defense of weird

When you're not paying attention, "good weird" can become "weird weird" or downright creepy pretty fast.

When I was in junior high (I’m sorry to anyone born after me, it’s now “middle school” but without sixth grade), a girl told me I was weird. But she said I was “good weird” versus the more icky “weird weird.” I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, but I think the label fit well. When I was 14, I went with a bunch of friends to wargaming conventions in southern Maine, held over a weekend at a private school gym, where we all slept on the floor (if we slept). I think today that would be called a pedophile garden party, but back in the 80s things were less helicoptered (and none of us, to my knowledge, were molested). I was one of a long line of “good weird” kids.

Noah Wulf, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Jonah Goldberg got me thinking about weirdness, which is not in itself weird, because weird is what made me fall in love with Jonah’s writing in the first place. He lamented that “abnormal is the new normal” and how that “ain’t great for America.” Oh I beg to differ, and I’ll get to that, but let me first finish watching this wedding Haka.

I am certainly no expert on what’s weird around the world, but I consider myself somewhat conversant on what’s “good weird” in American culture, at least among my generation and my kids valued opinions. There’s some very well-heeled, “normal” people who, on weekends, partake in activities like the Society for Creative Anachronism, dressing up and playing medieval characters, which itself falls into the general category of LARPing—live action role playing. There’s Civil War re-enactors, who dress up as Billy Yank or Johnny Reb and fire real cannons (spiked, but able to fire smoke charges) at each other.

There’s Trekkers (real Trekkers don’t call each other Trekkies, which is the derogatory term used by non-Star Trek people), Marvel and DC Comic lovers, Harry Potter wizards, Star Wars fans and others who enjoy dressing up in their favorite costumes, broadly known as “cosplay.” The whole thing is an enormous industry, with giant conventions: Comic-Con merits a whole weekend in Anaheim, while Atlanta sports both MomoCon (if you hurry you can attend) and Dragon Con.

All that stuff is “good weird.” It might not be everyone’s thing, but the folks who do it are regular people who go back to their jobs and lives after a weekend of camaraderie and (typically) spending a ton of cash.

Some people like to hike the Appalachian Trail. Not for a weekend but the whole 2,184-mile thing from Springer Mountain in north Georgia (many depart from Amicalola Falls, the trailhead of the seven-mile AT Approach Trail and my favorite place to hike) to Mount Katahdin, deep in the 100-mile wilderness in Maine. It’s not weird to experienced hikers, who don’t go by their real names, but by trail names. They’ve got their own vocabulary and commandments, which include “HYOH” (Hike Your Own Hike, meaning live and let live) and LYT: Leave No Trace; what you bring in, you pack out, minus what you bury in a Cat Hole (which you can look up yourself).

You might think it’s weird to spend a summer fighting sprained ankles, sore legs, wet socks, and bat-sized mosquitoes. But veteran hikers love that stuff. It’s all “good weird,” and pretty healthy for you too. Other people like to sail in the open ocean, alone. Dangerous? Heck, yes. I think they’re mad as a spring hare. But it’s a thing, and yes, they’re weird. I think it’s marginally “good weird,” but my “good” compass begins to swing to “weird weird” the more extreme things get.

Every weirdness has its extremes, and that’s where the icky “weird weird” factor begins to creep in. I have no problem with cosplayers or LARPers. But “furries” trip my creep meter. I can’t even joke about them without my kids cringing hard and telling me to stop (“seriously dad, no!”). There are kids who in real life want to identify with their little furry creatures to the point where it becomes their full-time identity, and that—to me—is a form of mental illness, or some kind of nascent disorder adults should not feed.

The same creepies hit me when I read about grown men who are unusually attracted to “My Little Pony”—Bronies. When adult males get their jollies doing stuff with toys meant for six-year-old girls—just no. This is not the kind of thing that daddies do playing with their daughters; it’s a group of men who get together—with each other—to (play?) do things I would rather not dwell on. The idea of it is perilously close to pedophilia in my mind, and even if I’m dead wrong, it’s flat out creepy.

I suppose teenage me doing weird wargaming and D&D with my school buddies and middle-aged men (mostly men, some women) at a private school gym all weekend might be creepy to some adults. Grown-up me probably wouldn’t let my kids drive off in a van with such a crew (even if I trusted the adults), or drop them off to sleep on a gym floor among them.

But then again, danger is everywhere, when you’re not paying attention. It’s certainly not weird to send your kids to church camp for the summer, or to scout camp, or to Kanakuk Kamps—a Christian camp in Branson, Missouri. But if you read Nancy French’s exposé of Kanakuk’s cover-up of pedophilia and abuse, you might think twice. Summer kids’ camps and certain jobs in ministry, coaching, or scouting seem to attract groomers and (bad, the worst) weirdos, since they go where the kids are found. Don’t even get me started about the sordid world of child actors.

And now let’s smoothly shift gears between the respectable antics of those meddling kids in vans to the guys who give candy to kids in vans. Yeah, dark stuff. But I’m talking about politics and entertainment.

Back in 1976, and then in 1980, young me thought it was weird that a former actor was running for president. Ronald Reagan wasn’t even an A-list actor; he co-starred with a chimpanzee. But he was governor of California, and he was a very serious thinker, with a folksy way of explaining serious issues to regular people. Reagan’s critics never got past the weird actor part, but the country as a whole loved The Gipper. Arnold Schwarzenegger won on a recall election to serve two terms as governor of California. If only the Governator was born in the USA, he would have had quite a shot at the presidency. Then the prophetic vision of “Demolition Man” would have been complete.

In 2000, Donald Trump ran a truncated presidential campaign for the Reform Party. In 2012, he decided to run again as a Republican (after being a lifelong Democrat) when he saw how Mitt Romney—a man Trump later described as “straight out of central casting”—was vilified in the media and lost to a cult of personality Barack Obama. Trump knew he couldn’t win a presidential race on qualifications, but he could definitely run as a cult leader. Which he did, and he won.

Our American cults of personality are as unhealthy as ever, but it’s not like they’ve always been healthy before. This is where I think Jonah Goldberg was doing a little cultural smuggling. He wrote how it’s not normal that Robert F. Kennedy was written up in the New York Times for having a dead worm in his brain, or how Trump is now defending how he might have had sex with a porn (star?) actress, who after making a career of doing it with men she doesn’t know under the hot lights and close-up lenses of film cameras, said she was ashamed of that act.

America has a long history of sexual claims and counterclaims, even extortion, dealing with political figures. It’s even in the mainstream culture—have you seen “Hamilton”? Also, some of the worst cults of personality have inhabited the White House. Woodrow Wilson was a wannabe Fascist, a statist, and an authoritarian who wasn’t afraid to squash the First Amendment, lock up people for speech he didn’t agree with, or jail whole groups because they were political enemies. FDR did the same, even threatening to “pack the [Supreme] Court” to get his way.

The only difference between what goes on in presidential coverage and politics then versus now, is that the media was largely a collegial group with unspoken agreements on what they’d report—about presidential mistresses, trysts, and infidelities. John F. Kennedy’s many trespasses would never make the news, also Lyndon B. Johnson’s rather prolific displays of his…johnson…at meetings, even cabinet meetings didn’t get reported.

We know that the feud between Alexander Hamilton and then-Vice President Aaron Burr ended with Burr killing Hamilton in a duel. But in 1798, Rep. Roger Griswold caned Rep. Matthew Lyon after Lyon spit tobacco juice at Griswold. Lyon countered with fire tongs, but neither was expelled when Congress voted on the matter. There was the infamous matter of Sen. Preston Brooks of South Carolina beating Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death with his cane, after Sumner gave a speech titled “Crime Against Kansas” in 1856.

In 1858, two dozen Members of Congress engaged in a melee when Rep. Lawrence Keitt (again, South Carolina) lunged at Rep. Galusha Crow (a Republican from Pennsylvania). Sen. Ben Tillman (guess which state?) was punched in the face by Sen. John McLaurin (again, guess), because Tillman accused McLaurin of a “willful, malicious, and deliberate lie” when McLaurin voted with Republicans on the annexation of the Philippine Islands. Both men were Democrats. Between 1830 and 1860, at least 70 fights happened in Congress, according to historian Joanne B. Freeman.

And more recently, Republican Reps Mike Rogers and Matt Gaetz nearly scuffled on January 6, 2023 after Gaetz voted against Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House.

So violence and insults on the floor of either house of Congress isn’t a new thing. What is new, is the social media influencer/reality television version of it that we see today.

I thought Sen. John Fetterman’s wearing of sweat shorts and hoodies to the Senate was weird. Since even people like Gaetz wear a coat and tie, in deference to the rules of conduct and dress in each house, Fetterman’s flaunting of proper attire seemed to me, to be on the “weird weird” side of weirdness. But now, I think Fetterman’s wardrobe choices are more “good weird,” as he’s turned out to be rather sane and thoughtful on many positions. I thought Pennsylvania voters had chosen a brain-addled stroke victim over Trump-endorsed Dr. Oz (a genuine surgeon and also a genuine reality show huckster) because of a middle-finger to MAGA. But they didn’t make a terrible choice.

On the other hand, there are no redeeming qualities for the voters of the 14th Congressional District in Georgia choosing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her wardrobe choice is a red MAGA hat for the State of the Union address, which she repeatedly interrupted. Her preferred argumentative is the cat-fight. MTG’s nemesis is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former bartender from Brooklyn. Now the voters in the 14th Congressional District of New York could not be more different than the voters of the same numbered district in Georgia (but what’s with the number 14? Is that some numerological curse? Tell me, readers, in the comments). The Brooklyn voters are crammed into about a 20 square mile fully urban jungle, while Georgia’s are spread over about 3,000 square miles. Not a single horse grazes in NY14 (a few might pull tourists or be ridden by NYPD); I’m certain there are more farm animals and horses than people in GA14.

The two districts have in common a taste for the extreme and absurd, a display of the modern equivalent to a good caning from the 1850s. In the 1850s, it was creepy and “weird weird” to have Members of Congress and Senators caning each other. And now, it’s creepy and bad to have MTG and AOC hurling insults over their appearance in a congressional hearing.

If—and a big if—it happens, the debates between two elderly men who are both known for, uhm, feisty exchanges, will not be “good weird.” It will be creepy to the max. Perhaps this is why the Biden campaign insisted that there will be no live audience (no MAGA infiltrators to feed off Trump). I pity Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who get to ringmaster this circus of extreme cringe. The good news is that nobody outside the Washington political press, talk radio hosts, and pundits will want to watch this macabre display.

The bad news is that while we are not paying attention, the culture of extremism, insults, threats, and actual violence will continue to spread, just like it did in the 1850s. Except now, we don’t have clear lines between North and South states. We have 24/7 entertainment as politics, with upside down American flags flying over a Supreme Court Justice’s house as a chaser.

All of this is weird. I’m all for weird, and the weirder the better. But none of this is good. It’s not “good weird.” It’s “weird weird” and we need to pay attention.

*** Iran’s president is dead. The mountainous region between Azergaijan and northern Iran is not to be taken lightly. The moment I learned that the helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Iran’s foreign minister disappeared in the mountains, I assumed he was dead. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one (say Occam’s Razor). While I’m sure there’s no shortage of people crying “good riddance” at Raisi’s death, there are plenty of others who will use this event to blame their favorite targets (Israel and the U.S.).

*** Trump trial in final stretch. Today the trial resumes in Manhattan, where Michael Cohen’s cross-examination by Trump attorney Todd Blanche will finish up making Cohen say “because I’m a liar” as many times as he can jam into the record. But perhaps Trump’s strategy of spending so much time proving Cohen is a crook could backfire. I can imagine on redirect that the prosecution will concede that Cohen is a criminal, but note that their star witness told the truth on the stand in this trial. He’s already been to prison. Plus, in closing arguments, I wouldn’t be surprised if the state argued that Trump’s mens rea, his state of mind, was criminal since he picked the biggest, crookedest, most extreme liar to be his fixer. The “it takes one to know one” argument is only helped by Cohen’s cross-examination.

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