So, apologies upfront. This week’s column is a shambolic fustercluck of sparkly unicorn poop thrown into a ceiling fan but omifuckigood look at the sparkles!
Kamala Harris looks like she could be the Jacinda Ardern of Bob Hawkes*, and turn Donald Trump into the Tangerine Mussolini of Jabba the Hutts. I don’t know about you, but until this week, I’d unsubscribed from a whole bunch of politics podcasts and US news feeds because they were giving me a preemptive anxiety disorder. Now I’m like a Brazilian cocaine shark getting its frenzy on in a hot tub with a sushi train.
Yeah, okay, I know that didn’t make a lot of sense, but what does this week? It’s the vibe, man. And the vibe when last we met was grimdark, raised to the power of torture porn. That’s why I wrote last week’s column as an absurdist Republican Convention Cthulhu mash-up. There are many formulas to comedic writing. Tragedy plus time is Mel Brooks’s well-known equation. But tension plus torque is another. In a fraught situation, you increase the pressure until the point of near intolerability, then hit the latch with a joke.
I needed a joke last week.
But this week is the joke, and it’s hilarious.
It’s apparently not true that Lenin once said there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. (He wrote something similar but much wordier in a 1918 pamphlet, but he stepped on his own punchline with a lot of meandering references to the revolutionary praxis of turnip-powered ploughing engines.) Still, the praxis bit hit hard this week.
As a professional writer of occasionally batshit over-the-top narratives, I’m here to tell you that the last five days would not have survived a first edit.
Even here in the High Golden Age of Television, there are simply no writers good enough to pull off a script-flipping exercise like that in one weekly episode. It wouldn’t scan. It wouldn’t play. There would be notes.
And yet here we are. Fake Tan Thanos and his beardy minion boy Mountain Dew Junior were taking a victory lap before the worst Marvel villain ever had even thought to snap his fingers and disappear half the world into prison camps and… snap!
Everything changed. But not the way they had planned.
This could have gone so very, very wrong. It was surely headed there, fast. And we could still end up in a terrible sequel. But as Charlie Sykes boiled it down:
Leading in the polls, Trump was buoyed by a failed assassination attempt, emboldened by a series of court victories, and the uncontested master of his party. When he chose JD Vance as his running mate, he was spiking the football. MAGA was ecstatic, bordering on giddy. And then Biden pulled out.
This. This is Jujitsu. No not the hilariously awful Nicholas Cage movie, but the six-hundred-year-old martial art. Trump lined up an almighty hammer fist to swing at a doddering old man. He took his shot. And… the old man wasn’t there.
Just clear air, gravity, and the inexorable laws of physics.
And then, suddenly, old Joe was back. Handing in his notice. Stepping on Trump’s convention bounce. Choking off any sympathy for Cheeto Dust Hitler after a deranged school shooter chose to target his rally instead of a kindergarten. Kicking the legs out from under a campaign that was celebrating a landslide victory before a vote was cast.
I confess I’m overextending this metaphor. But like Trump, like everyone, I’m dazed and confused and free-falling through the backdraft of whatever the fuck just happened.
Like everyone except Kamala Harris it seems.
If you look back at how she handled the terrible days and weeks after Biden fell apart in that first debate, her every move was millimetre perfect, up to and after the moment the old boy stood aside. For somebody who’d been written off as a hopeless campaigner, her campaign to secure the Democrats’ nomination was a ten-hour master class in lightning war.
It doesn’t guarantee her a win in November. She has to earn that, and she knows it.
But Donald Trump has gone from acting like he thought he couldn’t lose to someone who’s terrified he might have already fucked everything up, and I’m so here for it.
But first I need to have a sit down.
I promise to be more coherent next week.
* For the small but growing number of overseas subscribers to ASB (seriously, what are you even doing here?) Jacinda Ardern and Bob Hawke were last-minute switch-hitters for their Democrat-adjacent antipodean Labor parties, running away with elections that had all locked up for the conservative opponents.
Ohohohohoooo you are BACK IN THE ROOM, JB. Teeheee ‘ Fake Tan Thanos and his beardy minion boy Mountain Dew Junior’.
🤣🤣🤣
I want front row tickets to the Kamala vs Trump debate. Cannot cannot wait. You’re right, I’ll be blown away if the States let a woman (!) of colour (double gasp) become president, but she’s going to lick him upside down with her lawyer mouth before the end of this year. Blockbuster series coming up :)
Kamala's lines write themselves: "I prosecuted felons, you are a felon. I prosecuted rapists, you are a rapist. I prosecuted sex-traffickers, you scoped the dance floor with sex-traffickers". Her ethnic origins and gender are making the MAGA cult froth hysterically. The more MAGA say she is a DEI hire, the more they alienate independent voters. Normal people see her as a hard-working and highly capable (regardless of their views on her politics).