Greetings and welcome to this 75th edition of the Carnival of Fools! You do this job long enough, you come to appreciate the occasional week of breathing room, where nothing much happens except for the president demanding Dulles Airport be renamed after him. (Aren’t you going to start bombing Iran soon, Don?)
I am surprisingly copacetic about the Dulles kerfuffle because I grew up in the Maryland suburbs. You D.C. transplants merely adopted the dark; I was born in it. If I’m Chuck Schumer, I immediately return serve by proposing a compromise at Dulles, America’s most god-awful major airport: “The Donald J. Trump Memorial Mobile Lounge” is a solution that will secretly satisfy everyone.
Until then, let’s all pretend we cared about Super Bowl LX.
I Don’t Care About ‘Bad Bunny’ and Neither Do You
Do I have to talk about Sunday night’s football farce? I guess I do. Given that it’s our last remaining near-universal national civic ritual, watching it feels obligatory, sort of like swearing a yearly reaffirmation of my fundamental Americanness. But I could not have given less of a rip about the matchup this year. The Seattle Seahawks versus the New England Patriots, and playing in Silicon Valley, no less: teams from two of the worst and least sympathetic regions of America getting together for a shindig in the third! (In news of the amusing, attendance at Super Bowl week in Santa Clara reportedly helped cost Washington Post publisher Will Lewis his job — word is that owner Jeff Bezos could tolerate the mass layoffs but not Lewis’s subsequent appearance on the NFL red carpet.)
The Seahawks won commandingly and boringly, as predicted by everyone with a pulse. (Congratulations, I guess.) But of course, what America was goaded into discussing all night and the next day was the unprepossessing (and Spanish-language) halftime show, performed by a man who calls himself “Bad Bunny.” He’s a rapper, and he’s Puerto Rican; that’s all I need to know for the purposes of this discussion, and the full extent to which I wish to educate myself about the man.
I switched off the game early because it was so boring, so I didn’t watch the halftime show when it was on. Instead, I “Twitter-watched” it — watched the reactions of others online. And what I saw spill forth was a Rorschach inkblot spreading out in real time: Was it political? Was it mild and inoffensive? Was it an entertaining hoot or a bizarre failure? All I know is that everybody was fighting bitterly about the cultural import of a guy who self-identifies as a vicious hare — which I assume is about as seriously as we should take him — and the angles were almost entirely predictable based on partisan priors. (Notable exception: Commentary’s John Podhoretz, who delightfully zagged where others zigged.)
When I finally checked the thing out myself, I had three takeaways: (1) My conversational Spanish is way rustier than I thought. (2) Golly, Puerto Rican women sure are lovely. (3) Whoever choreographed this should work on the next major stage production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Seriously, hundreds of humans dressed as tall reeds and sugarcane stalks? Watching them exit the field afterward was its own kind of surreal joy. Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane on Sunday night, so if you’re the sort to put stock in witch’s curses, best start contemplating the end of your reign.
With no particular dog in this hunt, I’m ultimately left musing with idle sadness upon how every public event in American life now takes on an obligatory political valence. Bad Bunny isn’t for me. Maybe he is for you. (Though I doubt it, if you’re my typical reader.) Why must this be a topic of specifically political import? For that matter, why were we once upon a time debating the “meaning” of Taylor Swift?
The ugly truth: because cynical actors have realized they can make money off of controversializing entertainment. Mr. Bunny is prime among them: When the Super Bowl gig was announced, our fearsome Lepus leapt into this wholesale with a confrontational initial press conference — and then he played it relatively safe, even as others poured out pre-prepared rants online.
And this is the modern condition. This is who we are now — what our technological addictions have made us into. The clever journalist Ben Jacobs put this well yesterday morning: “It’s something that has been accelerated by Trump but has been happening in the United States for a while. There is the need to make almost everything in popular culture a partisan signifier while, at the same time, it has become ever easier to commoditize outrage.”
Why does this happen? Because people know it works. Because it gets clicks, moves product, maintains buzz — because it sells to the American consumer. The uncomfortable conclusion behind that, of course, is that this implicates you just as much as the supposed morons who provoke you. Who’s the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?
The Virginia Gerrymander Isn’t Quite a Done Deal Yet
A brief note about actually relevant political news. Readers of National Review have, I trust, been paying attention to the ongoing travesty in Virginia, where Abigail Spanberger won the governor’s mansion with a whopping electoral mandate in a purple state and has since proceeded to try to make it as blue as possible. What can I say? We warned you, over and over again.
But the current controversy of course focuses on the state Democratic Party’s vile redistricting proposal. Billed as a “response” to Trump’s (admittedly self-defeating) attempt to goad Texas and other GOP-controlled states into mid-decade redistricting, it is in fact, rather obviously, an attempt for Virginia Democrats to leverage their temporary political advantage. A 6-to-5 Democratic/Republican district — drawn by a nonpartisan committee — will now be turned into a 10-to-1 squid-like monstrosity that simply draws every congressional district into the Democrats’ two regional power centers, Northern Virginia and Richmond. I live in Illinois and hail from Maryland: I have seen this kind of map before, and it is actually far more egregious than even Gavin Newsom’s California gerrymander.
But I still consider it a “proposal,” even though a bill putting the 10-to-1 map to a vote has already been passed by the Democratic-controlled Virginia legislature and signed by Governor Spanberger.
Why? Democrats are spiking the football. MAGA Republicans are bitterly indicting the Indiana State Senate for rejecting their own gerrymandering proposal, in light of the news. (“See what happens when you choose honor and decency?”) Neither party is paying attention to the actual disposition of the Virginia State Supreme Court, which is about to hear this case and which has already shown a historic disposition toward procedural sticklerism.
I therefore remain wholly unconvinced that the new map will ultimately become law. I have no idea why so few commentators have pointed this out, but I do not think Republicans should give up on the cause just yet.
Until next week.