Greetings! I wrote a book. Well, I’ve actually been writing it for about 30 years, believe it or not. Introducing Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024, a hefty compendium of my columns, essays, feature profiles and much more over the course of my so-called career!
I’ve written an awful lot of words over the years, but I wanted to put together something that was a little more permanent than a bunch of yellowing newspapers and broken website links. Clippings is, much like many journalism careers, an eclectic mix, from long features to blog posts to deeply personal essays to in-depth pop culture criticism, spanning from Mississippi to California to New York City to New Zealand.
From interviewing governors and rock stars to climbing active volcanos and adjusting to life on the other side of the world, this book is me saying, “Hey, I was here, and this is some of what I did along the way.” Doesn’t everyone want to say that at some point about their life’s work, whatever it is? Throw it all together, and it’s probably as close to a sort of autobiography as I’ll ever get.
It’s got many of my works from long-ago newspapers and magazines, websites and even some fine pieces from this very website in a handsome curated form sure to be adored by your family for generations.
I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99!
When I was a kid I always thought Captain America was a bit dorky. Batman and Spider-Man and Wolverine were hip, man.
It took me a long while to discover the uncomplicated charms of Cap. He’s a good man in a world full of troubles, which for some peculiar reason I can’t quite put my finger on, seems really appropriate as a role model in this battered year of 2025.
Captain America has been slinging his shield since 1939 in comics, and was probably punching Nazis before your grandparents were even born. Brought back in the 1960s as a keystone for the Avengers, he’s been the moral centre of the Marvel comics universe for decades.
Yet I really didn’t read an awful lot of Captain America solo comics until the last few years – I never disliked the character, who soared in a lot of great Avengers comics, but he just seemed rather, well, white bread.
But as usual, I was wrong, and slowly working my way through lots of great Cap stories from the 1960s to 2020s has shown me that you can still make a patriotic American superhero interesting. Like any character, there’s ups and downs to be had, but creators like Lee and Kirby, Steve Englehart, Ed Brubaker, the late Mark Gruenwald and Roger Stern have all done terrific stories over the years.
The challenge for writers has been in making Cap a believer in a higher cause without being a mindless follower to it. An element of doubt is key to making Captain America great.
Evil Captain America has been done far too many times and isn’t that interesting, but Doubtful Captain America is a constant of the character, a man who believes in his country but is fairly often willing to question it, up to engaging in a civil war over his beliefs or even quitting the job several times.
As an example of bad Captain America, Mark Millar’s post-9/11 edgelord Captain America in The Ultimates hasn’t aged well at all, channeling Bush-era belligerence and arrogance into a character who’s the opposite of what Cap should be. And being good isn’t being weak.
There’s a fine line between making Cap frequently question his patriotism and making him a whining bore, of course. Yet I admire the writers who’ve made us realise that uncertainty and kindness isn’t a bad thing, all while telling us stories of a man dressed up in red, white and blue.
There’s nothing worse than a fanatic who thinks he can do no wrong. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
The marvellous performance by Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in the MCU helped seal my Cap fondness, making square-jawed decency seem kinda hot. And of course, there can be more than one Captain America – Anthony Mackie is stepping up as the main man’s successor in a new movie being released this week. Whether or not the movie itself is great, Mackie has done a fine job in his MCU appearances tapping into that fundamental charm and battered optimism Cap needs.
I imagine if Cap was real these days he’d be aghast at a lot of what’s going on under the colours of his flag, but then again he’d probably find it pretty familiar. He punched Hitler, after all.
Again, maybe it’s the tenor of the times. There ain’t a lot of heroes in the real world at the moment. I’ll just keep reading my Captain America comics and hoping for better days ahead.
I published a lengthy piece back in September just before Carter turned 100, by far the longest lived US President in history. (Funnily, I actually first wrote it back in 2023 sometime, thinking it would be as a nice obituary tribute to run somewhere, but old Jimmy just kept on going!)
Anyway, it says all the things I feel about Carter, who was perhaps not the best of presidents if you measure his term, but, as his long life and endless service shows, he was one of the best of men. It’s a kind of life that seems very, very far away at the dawn of this next presidency, but it’s one that I keep hoping that someday perhaps will influence a braver, smarter generation.
To quote that great Blue Mountain song, which I sure hope an awful lot of people will get to hear in the coming days,
“Well he said I’d never lie to you, and what’s more he never did. Though the times grew mighty tough, he never flipped his lid. So shake the hand of the man, with a hand full of love. The one and only Jimmy Carter.”
I haven’t written much of anything about the re-election of You Know Who You Know Where, because, frankly, like an awful lot of people, I’m just (A. exhausted and (B. apathetic about the whole damned thing these days. I’ve said enough about it all the last 8-9 years or so. You do you, Yanks.
I do know one thing for the strange brave new world of 2025, though – I’m gonna keep listening to a lot of punk.
Loud music makes sense when the rest of the world doesn’t and while I’m an increasingly old geezer who doesn’t quite get what the youths are listening to these days, I’ve always got time for something with an echo of that Ramones/Sex Pistols/Bikini Kill vibe of reverb, snarl and rage. Nothing blocks out the crazy like a blast of guitar.
We went and saw Hüsker Dü’s legendary frontman Bob Mould perform a solo show in Auckland the other weekend, and it was a fantastic hurricane of sound – Mould, 64, put to shame kids half his age with his chaotic energy as he ripped apart Dü and his solo songs and put them back together in feedback-drenched blasts. He made a punk band’s worth of noise all by himself.
And meanwhile, I bought a ticket for an up and coming band who weren’t even born when Bob Mould put on a guitar strap, Melbourne’s terrific fun and filthy Amyl & The Sniffers. I know they’ll tear up the joint when they play Auckland in February and while I’m at least 20 years too old for the mosh pit I’ll try to get a good spot to watch the ecstatic release as they blast through their fiercely progressive, f- the Nazis and trolls tunes. Gacked on anger? Baby, we’re all gacked these days:
Punk is old and punk is young and everywhere in between, nearly 50 years after punk broke through.
What even is punk? Back in high school friends of mine wore mohawks and we chanted the chorus of Suicidal Tendencies “Institutionalized” at each other and that was already a good 10 years after punk’s first flames. These days who cares about genre taboos and what’s “proper” and what isn’t, really? “Selling out” is a gone concept in the viral age and if you like the music, good on ya. Sid Vicious is long dead and Johnny Rotten isn’t looking too hot himself. If it feels punk to you, it’s punk.
So for me listening to the Stooges over and over is punk, but hell, so is Nine Inch Nails banging on that downward spiral. Listen to Joy Division live and they were pretty punk even if they were post-punk. I can’t say I think Taylor Swift is punk, but Chappell Roan with her give-no-fucks attitude is definitely a little bit punk.
But that’s just me.
Everyone used to go on and on about the dangers of rock music and punk and metal and Satanists hiding in your backyard back in the day, but it turns out the ones to REALLY be afraid of are the dead-eyed compulsive liars, fascists and grifters and hustlers and un-Christian fundamentalists who just keep on coming back over and over again.
To quote someone most people don’t think of as punk, but whose whole career has been pretty punk as hell, Bob Dylan said it best: “I used to care, but things have changed.”
Stepping back from the situation for a while isn’t giving up forever. There’s still an awful lot of beauty out there away from the doomscrolling and outrage machine, no matter how bad it gets. It’s a pretty frustrating world, but god damn it, we’ll always have music.
I get it. You’re stressed out. This is life in 2024.
But instead of doomscrolling political news all week, how about taking a break with a presidential movie?
The presidency has been the subject of countless movies, good and bad, from lofty biopics to action-packed romps. Here are 15 movies about American presidents and politics that are worth firing up to divert your brain for a few hours as Election Day approaches.
If you want to feel a little bit of optimism:
The American President (1995): A genuinely sweet romantic comedy about a widowed president finding a new love, starring a luminous Michael Douglas and Annette Bening, and written by Aaron Sorkin, who later went on to create The West Wing TV series.
Lincoln (2012): Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar-winning performance takes Abraham Lincoln out of the realm of cliche and makes him a complex human being again, wrestling with how to end slavery in an America torn by the Civil War and trying to do the right thing.
Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939): Jimmy Stewart’s naive young US senator comes up against Washington corruption. The thing that makes Frank Capra’s classic still relevant today is its fierce determination to make politics better.
If you just want to wallow in political intrigue:
Frost/Nixon (2008): There have been a lot of movies about Richard Nixon, but this tightly focused film sticks to one post-presidential interview where the disgraced president tries to redeem himself. Tense dialogue and terrific acting makes the spectacle of two men mostly sitting in chairs talking seem riveting.
All The President’s Men (1976): Nixon never appears in this Oscar-winning Watergate drama, but hovers over it like a malignant ghost as journalists Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman uncover a labyrinthine scandal that led to America’s first and only presidential resignation.
JFK (1991): Oliver Stone’s mammoth three-hour epic is a twisted knot of conspiracy theory, paranoia and grifters, so it’s a perfect vibe for Election 2024. It’s a complicated, indulgent sprawl of a movie that’s still somehow fascinating, with an all-star cast.
If you think politics is ridiculous:
Election (1999): Strictly speaking, not quite about a president, but this classic story of an American high school student election that goes horribly awry sums up how much the desire to win can eat away at a person. With a never-better Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick.
Don’t Look Up (2021): The US hasn’t had a female president – yet – and they’re pretty thin on the ground in movies, too. (Television is a different story, where women presidents have been seen on Veep, Scandal, Homeland and many other shows.) This hit-or-miss satire about panic over a comet destroying Earth has its amusing moments and features Meryl Streep as the president – unfortunately, she’s a shallow, poll-obsessed fool who bungles the end of the world badly.
Mars Attacks! (1996): Love Beetlejuice? Tim Burton’s underrated comic book epic features a rogue’s gallery of oddball Americans battling Martians, and one of the funniest turns is Jack Nicholson as a vaguely sleazy, cocky and utterly unprepared president.
If you’ve given up all hope on America:
Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964): Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire still stings today, with the magnificent Peter Sellers in multiple roles, none quite so indelible as the wishy-washy President Merkin Muffley, who very apologetically starts a nuclear war.
Vice (2018): Christian Bale makes an unlikely Dick Cheney in this biopic of George W. Bush’s vice president, which in a broadly comic way shows just how much ambitious power can be wielded behind the scenes.
Civil War (2024): A movie about a traumatised band of journalists travelling through an America torn by an unspecified civil war, it’s not one to watch if you want to feel cheerful about the possibilities of the USA, with Nick Offerman as a crazed, out-of-his-depth president presiding over the country’s collapse.
If you just want a president to kick butt:
Air Force One (1997): Harrison Ford lives the American dream – that is, the dream of being a take-charge military hero who also happens to be president and fights back against terrorists on his own airplane.
White House Down (2013): Mix Die Hard with Air Force One, shake, stir and settle in for explosions and gunfire at the White House as terrorists attack and only the humble everyday policeman Channing Tatum can save the day.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012): Sure, you’ve seen a president fight terrorists, but how about vampires? This very silly alternate-history horror movie takes itself far too seriously, but does provide some ridiculous, bloody laughs as Honest Abe stakes blood-suckers. Considering how bizarre the 2024 election campaign has been so far, this might just not be the strangest thing about American presidents you see this week.
Kia ora! We moved to New Zealand exactly 18 years ago this weekend, and suddenly my migration is practically an adult in human years. Time doesn’t just fly – sometimes, it leaps.
When we came here in October 2006, with a 2 1/2 year old, we didn’t really know for sure how long we’d stay here. We came to be closer to my wife’s family, to have our son grow up knowing about the Kiwi side of his heritage.
And then 18 years flew by. Our kid is in his final weeks of undergraduate university studies. We both have a lot more grey hair. Three of our four parents have left us, now, and we start talking about our own old age less hypothetically than we once did. Life is not perfect here – is it anywhere? – but this is home, now.
Remarkably, I’ve now lived in Auckland longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life. The place where you grew up will always stick its hooks in you the hardest, and there’s always a piece of me in the rolling hills of Northern California, but at 18 years I’ve now lived here longer than the 14-15 years I spent in the town I grew up in. I lived in Mississippi seven years, Oregon nearly five years, but I guess I am an Aucklander now, even if I’ll always feel a little foreign here. That American accent isn’t going anywhere, still.
I’ve been in Auckland long enough to watch it changing. It’s a city of 1.6 million people that sometimes feels like a small town and at other times I’m learning about whole new parts of it. A melting pot of Māori, Pasifika and Asian cultures squashed up with lingering remnants of the old British Empire, it’s not quite like anywhere else I’d lived.
October 2006.
I’ve been here long enough to have favourite places that are gone, like the old gigantic Real Groovy Records on Queen Street, the jam-packed and sweaty Kings Arms pub where I saw heaps of great bands play, the labyrinthine original home for Hard to Find Books in Onehunga.
I regularly say “mate” and “bloody” in conversations but I still don’t understand cricket. I love fish and chips and no bloody health insurance and Parliamentary politics and Flying Nun Records and tui and kererū birds and the kiwi-pop art of Dick Frizzell and Pineapple Lumps and yes, I own a pair of gumboots.
New Zealand is small, but not tiny, and I kind of like it that way. When we first moved here way back in 2006 I liked to tell Americans that coming to NZ was like going back in time about five years – not a radical shift but enough to notice, a place that felt slightly slower and cozier than wide-open America.
The internet has changed a lot of that, now – when we moved here my prize tech possession was an iPod that held THOUSANDS of songs, and now I carry the entire internet in my pocket. We don’t take quite so long to follow trends or get the latest pop culture. (Back in 2006, you’d still see popular movies and TV shows premiere here months after they did in America, for instance.)
Social media has kind of destroyed polite society in a lot of ways, I think, but it’s also made the world feel smaller and communication easier. Once upon a time we posted letters to our New Zealand family and sent them across the seas. Now, I can video-call my family in the US instantly. It’s made the distance better, especially in the last couple troubled years as the thing that every expatriate dreads happened – your faraway family gets older, sicker, and they leave you.
Some other American couples we knew who came about the same time we did ended up going back to the USA within a couple of years. But while there were ups and downs, somehow, we stuck to it. I actually found my so-called journalism career generally went better here than it did back in the US – higher pay, more variety to the work, even if I couldn’t entirely escape the periodic redundancies that plague the industry everywhere and I still sometimes conflate my British and American English (color? colour?). As my day job I help run one of the biggest news websites in the country and that’s not something I could easily do back home.
But more than that, I found a world so much wider than America alone. These days I often look back at what’s going on in my homeland with confusion and a fair bit of disdain, I admit. I love the place I came from but I don’t really understand a lot of it now, as yet another election season is here and events just don’t make sense to me. We have the same rolling disinformation and post-Covid conspiracies here, too, but again, we’re smaller. Everything is usually a little less dramatic here, I think.
October 2006.
This will most likely be the place I end up, in the 20, 30 or however many more years I get left. There are worse places to be, and my world is so much bigger than it once was.
An immigrant to another country – whatever their status, whatever their background – probably always feels a little uncertain of where home really is.
The thing I’ve learned these past 18 years is, you can have more than one.
Jimmy Carter is the longest-lived American president, and as he turns 100 years old, it turns out he was also pretty much the last of his kind.
Growing up in California, I was just a kid when the former peanut farmer from Georgia became an unlikely president in 1976, aiming to wipe away some of the disillusioned taint of the Nixon years. He’s the first president I have memory of, smiling away from the tiny TV in our kitchen.
He turns 100 years old today, and despite his single term, he will never quite be the footnote of other presidential one-termers like Benjamin Harrison and Chester Arthur.
Carter is the last living American president from the 1970s and 1980s, the last World War II veteran to take that mantle, and nobody under age 50 now will have any real memories of his term in office. Yet, he was unique among recent American leaders and marked a sea change from the stern likes of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter wore blue jeans and denim shirts and cracked a disarmingly wide grin that quickly became iconic in politics.
He was the last true “dark horse” presidential candidate to win, almost unknown outside of Georgia a mere 18 months before the election. His opponents asked, “Jimmy who?”
In contrast, Barack Obama had already made the keynote speech at the national Democratic convention four years before his own election, and TV host and self-promoter Donald Trump was long a household name.
Other than Trump, there have been few other presidents who have been quite so visible a force in American history after their term ended. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to forge peace agreements and awareness of human rights in 2002, long after he left office humbled by a landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan.
Compare that to, say, George W. Bush, who practically vanished from public life after 2009. Carter kept on being a voice for what he believed in, even when it ticked off the current presidents.
His post-presidency has lasted an astonishing 43+ years, the longest ever by more than a decade. That in large part accounts for his historical redemption. You outlive your enemies.
Carter’s humility is part of his brand – he continues to live in the house in Plains, Georgia he moved into in 1961, and until his health deteriorated, taught at the local Sunday School for years.
Even back in the 1990s, Carter’s reputation was gradually recovering, as his work for Habitat for Humanity and diplomatic efforts became more widely known, and Reagan-mania receded into the past.
I was living then in Oxford, Mississippi, and was friends with one of the best local bands, Blue Mountain, led by Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt, who were delivering great alt-country rock at the local bars on a regular basis.
One of Blue Mountain’s best barnstormers was the anthem ‘Jimmy Carter,’ a twangy country-rock romp that instantly makes you want to stomp up and down with glee. It’s hard to imagine a cheery, apolitical ode to any US President as a hit pop single in this seething era of angry hot takes, but ‘Jimmy Carter’ has a gleeful optimism that recasts the dark horse’s presidential victory in 1976 as the ultimate American small town boy makes good story.
“In the bicentennial summer of our faded glory land a bright new face appeared upon the scene. Of an honest peanut farmer by the name of Jimmy Carter. His eyes were set on every schoolboy’s dream.”
I must have heard Blue Mountain play ‘Jimmy Carter’ a hundred times in the 1990s. It always brought the house down, in the Deep South where a crowd full of Republicans and Democrats alike bounced around singing that catchy chorus saluting a Democrat – “Shake the hand of the man with a hand full of love” – and its hopeful promise of a politician who actually cared – “Well he said I’d never lie to you, and what’s more he never did.”
Bombastic myth-making? True. A great song? Also true.
An excellent biography a few years back, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter – A Life by Jonathan Alter, makes a compelling case that Carter’s presidency mattered more than we thought. He brought the language of environmentalism into the mainstream and spoke up for human rights. He worked to end nuclear proliferation – a policy followed up by Reagan – and pushed for more diversity and equality in government positions.
Yet he was far more of a micro-manager than a leader, a quality which ultimately sealed his defeat in 1980. The fumbled attempts to solve the Iran hostage crisis ensured his fate. Carter couldn’t match Reagan’s inspiring if often insubstantial rhetoric and seemed small compared to the ex-Hollywood star’s breezy confidence.
Optimistic Reagan was memorably described by historian Rick Perlstein as an “athlete of the imagination,” while Carter is recalled by Alter as “a visionary who was not a natural leader.” While Carter, more than 10 years younger than Nixon or Gerald Ford, was arguably the first “modern” President, in the end he was replaced by the first “Hollywood” President.
Carter was hardly a perfect president – he could be abrupt and too pious and faltered dealing with some of the crises in his administration. That famous grin could drop quickly and reveal a cold, frosty side.
Yet his own ego always seemed a little less in the service of raw greed and power-mongering like certain recent presidents we could mention, and more a driving fundamental core of his character fuelled by a deep religious faith. Carter wanted a perfect world.
Did he succeed? Well, no, but Carter speaks more to the good side of much-mythologised American can-do spirit – and his unwavering dedication to seeing that better world through the next 40-plus years of his life tells us it wasn’t just an act.
Jimmy Carter was neither the best nor worst of American presidents, but he had a quality that feels rare in an America torn apart by division, outrage merchants and an entire generation of politicians that now seems to be competing to see who can be the biggest jerk.
The presidency has been full of con men, before and after Carter. There have been elements of Carter in his successors – Clinton’s boundless energetic attempts to sow his own charitable legacy; Obama’s cool intellectual approach to governing; George W. Bush’s down-home mannerism, Biden’s soft-spoken optimism.
Yet in the past century, there has never been another president quite like the unique combination of humble Southern charm and faith-filled confidence that animates all the long years of Carter’s life.
“Today almost every politician wants to be seen as an outsider,” Alter writes. “Carter was the real thing.”
Actual photo from actual college apartment circa 1991. Note awesome Elvis Costello poster and Blue Velvet poster, as well as rarely-used bicycles, mandatory beanbag, pile of Rolling Stone magazines.
Once you hit (cough cough) a certain age, you start to wonder about the things you’ve carried around with you for years.
This old mailing tube of posters has somehow made it from Mississippi to California to Oregon to New Zealand in the past 25+ years or so, carrying with it a rolled-up album of things I used to stick on my walls.
Once upon a time, I wallpapered my rooms with posters, a bright-eyed college student out on his own and determined to announce his personal style to the world, or at least anyone who visited his apartment or dorm. Status update: Look at my cool tastes, man!
But you do reach a point in life where you probably aren’t hanging posters quite so much, where thumbtacked personal statements on the wall seem a little gauche.
Yet I still have my tube of posters, tucked away in a corner of a closet. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it, even as the cardboard tube turns slowly grey with age.
Posters were a cheap way to advertise yourself. I still remember many of the ones I no longer own – a gigantic poster of The Beatles in their super-groovy late hippie splendour circa 1969 that hung in my high school bedroom; an extremely creepy poster advertising The Cure’s “Love Cats” single; an amazing, huge poster advertising Elvis Costello’s album Trust that I wish I still owned.
The tube still holds some posters dating back more than 30 years now. A shiny poster advertising Peter Gabriel’s “So” as I dove deep into my Gabriel fandom for the first time. I’ve got a Salvador Dali print that I bought my freshman year in college, consumed with how cool and ecclectic I was going to be. It hung around for years in a cheap plastic frame and somehow still endures, a bit tatty, in a corner of my office.
Movie posters of Blue Velvet and Fear In Loathing In Las Vegas that probably date back to my late 1990s time working in a video store (remember those?). Museum exhibition posters from Melbourne and Oregon. A concert poster from Guided By Voices’ not-so “final” tour in 2004 in Portland. Battered prints from an artist friend in Mississippi, perpetually curved from years in that cardboard tube. Most of these haven’t hung on a wall for years, but I still keep them around.
There’s a poster of Monty Python’s John Cleese as the Minister of Silly Walks that hung around my first apartment in Oxford, Mississippi, and one day ended up on my university-age son’s own bedroom walls in New Zealand. After 30+ years it’s bent, torn and tattered and probably near retiring to a recycling bin, but somehow I just can’t let old Minister Cleese go yet.
Long before Instagram profiles and TikToks, a cheap poster was a way to broadcast who you are, or who you wanted to be, as you assembled the pieces of your future self. These are the movies I like, these are the musicians I listen to. Appreciate me!
I’m not a college student any more but I figure I can still give one or two of these posters a chance to air out in an inconspicuous spot in the house now and again. I’m sure I can find a corner of my office for that Blue Velvet poster, I reckon.
Hey, remember when we all thought the 2024 presidential race would be a dire, dull rematch?
The last two months or so of US politics has been a head-spinning whirl, and watching Kamala Harris take to the stage and deliver a confident, concise acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination this week has capped off the frenzy nicely.
I’ve been an American political convention tragic for far too many years, dating back to the Reagan era. They’re bombastic commercials and insanely wasteful propaganda, but they also do sometimes provide unforgettable moments. They’re a snapshot of where the country stands every four years, and how it’s looking ahead.
The Republican convention with its Hulk Hogans and the Democratic convention with its Oprah Winfreys set the stage for November’s battle between Harris and Donald Trump. They also had very different vibes. For my day job I ended up exhaustively live blogging both convention speeches, and while some years people say the candidates are all the same, you couldn’t get much different than Harris and Trump in both approach and message.
Even the speech lengths were a contrast – about 40 minutes for Harris vs more than 92 minutes for Trump (the longest convention acceptance speech of all time, apparently).
I admit my biases: I found the Democrat convention more hopeful, and more representative of the multicoloured, freedom loving America I want to believe in. There was simply a sense of joy, a word everyone from Tim Walz to Bill Clinton has attached to the Democratic campaign this year. I’ve watched lots of those endless state roll call of delegate votes at conventions, where dull guys stand up and say things like “From the great state of Idaho, home of the nation’s finest potatoes and the world’s biggest ball of twine, we proudly cast our 27 votes for….”
But I have never, ever seen something at a convention as effortlessly silly and cool as Lil Jon introducing Georgia’s roll call at Chicago this week:
I have to admit I’ve watched this clip a good dozen times because there’s something so overblown and yet quintessentially American about it all. A bit irreverent? A bit egocentric? Sure. But also, it was fun as hell. “Fun” is a vibe that seems sorely lacking in American politics the last eight years.
In my political lifetime, the candidate who was more optimistic and, for lack of a better word, cheerful, has typically won. It’s not even a party thing – Reagan’s sunny demeanour overwhelmed Jimmy Carter, as George W. Bush’s down home aw-shucks vibe took down Al Gore and John Kerry’s patrician sternness. Bill Clinton’s good cheer beat the first President Bush while Joe Biden’s warmth edged past Trump in 2020. Joe Biden, for all his merits, was a shaky deliverer for the joy vibe these days, while his vice president seems to have easily stepped up to the task.
I mean, I’m in a bubble. We’re all in bubbles, really, so the world I’m seeing maybe isn’t what a Trump supporter in Mississippi is. But, it’s hard to envision the Republican nominee smiling so easily, playing baseball, petting a dog, embracing his children, all those everyday things that make up most American lives away from the echo chambers.
— 🪷 Madam Auntie VP Kamala Harris for PRESIDENT! (@flywithkamala) August 18, 2024
I have lost a lot of faith in my home country these last few years, to be honest. Perhaps it’s being an American who’s lived abroad nearly 20 years now, but I often felt like I didn’t recognise it anymore. The whitewashing spin of what happened January 6, 2021 and the ensuing forgiveness and rehabilitation of Trump by too many people who should know better was the final straw for me. I felt baffled.
I don’t make firm predictions about US politics anymore, because it’s too easy to get your heart broken. I know what I would like to see happen in November, but I’m very aware that it could go either way still. I don’t think America would simply die if Trump was re-elected, after everything we’ve seen, but what a big bloody wound that would be.
I saw a lot of optimism this week that I’d like to believe in myself. A sense of hope might go a long way in this election, particularly when the other side seems mired in conflicting messages and a consistent willingness to bemoan everything, blame everything on other factors and make apocalyptic prophecies.
I sure would like to see something to chip away at the endless tension and anger infecting so much of America these days, although you might only get there by deleting the internet and the algorithm-fuelled outrage machine of social media, to be honest.
In the end, what sways things might be this – do you want a smile or do you want a glower? I just want my country of birth to be a place again that looks forward, rather than backward, one where a sense of fair-minded kindness drowns out the endless hate. Will we get there? Stay tuned.
Nik Dirga 