What you might be missing about "weird"

There's one more layer to it

First, quickly:

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And here’s the post:

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After eight years (and so many more than eight) of Democratic Party leadership cowering before bullies who can only be bullies if allowed to be bullies, it feels cathartic to see Democrats finally begin labeling things appropriately: Nasty creeps are nasty creeps.

This month’s “calling Republicans weird” thing caught on after this portion of a CNN article went viral about a month ago:

Harris has considered what it would be like to run against Trump before. In late 2018, over two days of sessions with top aides to decide about running for the Democratic nomination in 2020, among the questions aides pressed her with was what she would do in a town hall-style debate with Trump, similar to the one in 2016 where the Republican infamously stalked around behind Hillary Clinton at times.

Harris’ answer: She’d turn around and say to him, “Why are you being so weird?”

Every time I saw that quote being shared, it was with a caption like FINALLY, SOMEONE SAYS THE OBVIOUS. And then, about a week ago, Minnesota governor Tim Walz delivered the “weird” thing on air, and no one has stopped using it since. (I’d say those attributing the line to Walz, rather than Harris, have the timeline wrong.)

I’ve seen a lot of solid explanations for the instant success of “weird,” the extremely rare item powerful enough to get Democrats to attack someone besides each other — and also the laser-targeted, hit-dog-hollering strike directly into the innermost nerves of the right’s bathroom-calipers wielders, horse-paste injectors, and wearing-ear-bandages-to-worship-a-guy-wearing-his-own-unnecessary-ear-bandage cosplayers.

The gist:

• No matter the era, conservatism is a story about how 50-year-old white guys thought everything was better back when they were 13, before the bad people came along and made it so things couldn’t stay the same forever. (This fetishized past used to be the 1940s or ‘50s. By updated math, civilization’s current peak was 1987.)

• Conservatives also believe themselves to be factory-default humans (with obvious demographic implications) and everyone else to be aberrations, errors, and defects in need of recall.

• Therefore, to flip that around, simply by showing “the Democrats are now the party of Taylor Swift and the NFL and Bud Light; the Republicans are the party of getting banned from regional theater productions of Beetlejuice: The Musical” is to point a mirror at someone who’s currently posting bizarre sex photoshops of political rivals in a backward attempt to prove other people are the actual weirdos. (Yes, that’s happening in the comment section under every “weird” post.)

Hey, do you see yourself posting antagonistic sex photoshops, you alarming freak? Aren’t you aware normal people haven’t ever done that? Why are your most treasured Bible verses the half-dozen ones about mysterious sex crimes, you obsessive pervert? Why are you calling a bomb threat into a library because someone might be wearing a wig, you basement headcase? Why are you trying to appoint the dolphin-erotica guy as the federal uterus conductor, you rabid animal? What made you believe anyone wants to sit near degenerates who do the things you’re doing? And why do you keep voting for a septic eruption whose sexual misconduct Wikipedia page is about as long as The Art of War, you sick fuck?

So yeah. Nobody wants to spend all their time defining themselves as The Most Perfectly Normal Normie Who Ever Normal’d and then … be forced to notice the opposite has long been the case. People who’ve invested all their experience points into Looking Like The Standard can’t stand being laughed at! Makes sense!

But here’s the even more entertaining wrinkle, which you might only know if you’ve spent time within conservatism:

Religious conservatives, particularly including White Evangelicals (plus the many Evangelical-adjacent conservative groups, since denominational distinctions have become both more nuanced and less important), have long devoted a shitload of time to encouraging each other to be thought of as weird. A certain kind of weird, at least.

One example. “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world,” Jesus said in the Gospel of John, referring to his followers as misfits.

• There are many ways to interpret the world. Does the world refer to the current epoch of our cosmos, yearning to be reborn? To the doomed empire whose only pathetic defense against a poor Brown man was to kill merely his body? To the systems of control, political and religious and economic and so on, that have been pitting the first against the last for thousands of years now? To other things as well?

• Yep!

Regardless, within right-wing denominations, the most popular interpretation of such passages is all about being an obnoxious, abrasive, and divisive enough Republican to somehow become the kind of troublemaking Christian who would’ve been martyred as an anarcho-socialist deviant by the Roman Empire, even though our current empire has been controlled by white Christian men for quite some time now. Oh man, the endless fixation on first-century Christians being killed, albeit without much curiosity as to how they organized their communities. Here, look at this:

That’s a 1999 collection of historical stories, published under the name of then-massive Christian rock band DC Talk, about Christians who were murdered because they were Christians. I haven’t read it recently enough to weigh in on the veracity of all its stories, but absolutely, there have been many true accounts of global Christians suffering such persecution. (I more remember Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a much older and gorier version of the same idea. There are lots of others.) Mainly, we’re here to focus on the word “FREAKS,” a title the young Christian is taught to fervently seek.

This book, just one of a thousand examples of “be a weird enough Christian to get killed despite living in America” messaging, arrived at the peak of Christian Contemporary Music crossover culture, as well as a peak of Christian martyrdom fantasies. As I’ve written a few times, when the tragedy of Columbine then morphed into a lie about a Christian being martyred by an atheist, that was not the cause of Christians morbidly seeking backlash. That global Protestant/Catholic myth-making was the result of millions of us having already been programmed to want that kind of death.

As the narrator in my novel (available everywhere, “Sublime. Get it” — Kirkus Reviews, also it’s funny) puts it:

Turning fourteen, I prepared to enter the ultimate astrology-and-condoms warzone: public high school, where men of God had always warned me I’d either get brainwashed by secularism (and go to Hell) or become such a flagrant Christian that I’d get shot just like Columbine’s legendary martyr (and go to Heaven). 

Was there a middle option to just be a nice guy? Nice try. That’s called being lukewarm (and going to Super Turbo Hell).

So millions of children understood this with all our hearts: 🎵 You’re nobody ‘til somebody kills you. 🎵

Facing those options, I spent the last night of summer listening to “Creeping Death” at full volume, amped to win my entire school district for Christ.

But when they were telling us to perform weirdness, they didn’t actually mean that they wanted us to be weird.

The story we told ourselves was that God had refurbished us into factory-default condition, making us strange in the eyes of people who were still fallen.

We were meant to be the outcasts of a world that’d itself cast out Jesus¹, meaning we were to be double negatives, the people viewed as weird by a weird world because we were the only normal ones. The terminology we were to use for everyone else included words like “abomination,” after all.

And that’s the funny punchline of conservatives being so hurt by the left’s embrace of “conservatives are weird.” People like me have spent our entire lives hearing conservatives insist that they want to be considered weird — but as soon as the word can no longer be bound by their contorted definition, then these avowed renegades confirm the only thing they’ve ever wanted is to be considered the status quo.

1. Again, if this refers to emulating the Jesus who was rejected by a colonialist empire that could only prop itself up by destroying the poor, then I completely agree. It usually doesn’t.