Democrats have deployed "weird" as an insult to attack Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). The word is suddenly constant among left-wing pundits.
Apparently the insult is meant to appeal to young and female voters in particular, for whom "weird" is a catch-all term for everything bad, creepy, or threatening.
But there is nothing immediately "weird" or odd about Vance, save for his beard: there hasn't been a bearded male on a presidential ticket since the late nineteenth century.
The only thing unusual about Vance is his biography. Raised in working-class Appalachia, he overcame the difficult circumstances of his family life. He joined the Marines, graduated from Ohio State, and went on to Yale Law School.
That's not "weird"; that's extraordinary. And it is a journey that the left celebrated before Vance decided to enter the political arena. But suddenly, the elements of that journey are being described as sinister, threatening, and strange.
What is most "weird" about Vance, apparently, is his Christian faith (he embraced Catholicism) and his working-class origins.
To this day, the country's elite struggles to accept the fact that rural working-class voters choose Republicans; they describe it as an odd phenomenon, since they assume that the Democrats' redistributionist policies are better for Vance's constituents than the dignity of jobs in the mines and factories that the climate-change lobby wants to close.
To describe the rural, Christian working class as "weird" is to display a kind of contempt that has become increasingly blatant in the Democratic Party after the Bill Clinton era. It is a classist slur, one that suggests the bicoastal elites to whom "weird" is pitched have no idea who lives in flyover country, who built the heartland. "Weird" turns the rural working class into strangers in their own country.
That is why Trump will win their vote: Democrats deserve to lose it.
The story of Noah is familiar; the details, less so.
Noah is often seen as an ambivalent figure. He was righteous -- but only for his generation. What was his deficiency?
One answer suggests itself: knowing that the world was about to be flooded, he built an Ark for the animals and for his own family -- but did not try to save anyone else or to convince them to repent and change their ways (the prophet Jonah, later, would share that reluctance).
Abraham, later, would set himself apart by arguing with God -- with the Lord Himself! -- against the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, saying that they should be saved if there were enough righteous people to be found (there were not).
Still, Noah was good enough -- and sometimes, that really is sufficient to save the world. We don't need heroes every time -- just ordinary decency.
Hi all -- as I noted last month, I'm going to be closing down my Locals page, at least for tips and subscriptions -- I may keep the page up and the posts as well, but I'm no longer going to be accepting any kind of payment.
Look for cancelation in the very near future. Thank you for your support!
An interesting weekend -- one of the last of Daylight Savings Time -- in which there is much to celebrate, much to contemplate, and a bit to worry about.
The Gaza peace deal is shaky, but holding, after the living hostages returned; the shutdown is still going on, with no end in sight; the China trade war is heating up; and the confrontation with Venezuela continues to escalate.
The "No Kings" protest was a dud, despite the media's attempt to inflate it. What I find fascinating is that the Democrats have basically stolen the rhetoric and the imagery of the Tea Party protests, circa 2009. They claim they are defending the Constitution -- just like the Tea Party did.
On the one hand, this is good. How wonderful to have a political system in which both sides, bitterly opposed though they are, articulate differences through the Constitution -- and not, as in so many other countries, outside it.
On the other, this is sheer hypocrisy for the Democrats. Not only did they malign the Tea Party as ...
