Another great one, Pablo!... i have been feeling this exact sentence since "weird" became a MAGA descriptor: "So, while I am more hopeful than I have been over the last year or so about the political future of the United States, and have savored the “weird” campaign, I do not subscribe to that diminishing of difference."
The thing about weird is that, for me, it rhymes with a certain type of nerdiness, and ways of experiencing the world that let our imaginations stray from the status quo. I rely on this state for my own hope that change is possible ,and even sometimes likely, in spite of the ecological, social, political, and economic crises of our times. And mostly, because weirdness is about difference, it is also about how we encounter ideas and experiences that are unfamiliar, people who have life experience different from our own, it is, to me, at the core of what I would call multicultural democracy -- negotiating the spaces in between our weirdnesses.
This said, I think MAGA is another kind of weird entirely. And it did need to be named in a colloquial way that could be used as a short-hand. I'm just sad that weird is the moniker that got taken up... And also, words can have several meanings, just like more than one thing can be true simultaneously. So maybe I'll embrace this weird in an effort to support the complexity of weirdness, and the elasticity of my own definitions.
Another great one, Pablo!... i have been feeling this exact sentence since "weird" became a MAGA descriptor: "So, while I am more hopeful than I have been over the last year or so about the political future of the United States, and have savored the “weird” campaign, I do not subscribe to that diminishing of difference."
The thing about weird is that, for me, it rhymes with a certain type of nerdiness, and ways of experiencing the world that let our imaginations stray from the status quo. I rely on this state for my own hope that change is possible ,and even sometimes likely, in spite of the ecological, social, political, and economic crises of our times. And mostly, because weirdness is about difference, it is also about how we encounter ideas and experiences that are unfamiliar, people who have life experience different from our own, it is, to me, at the core of what I would call multicultural democracy -- negotiating the spaces in between our weirdnesses.
This said, I think MAGA is another kind of weird entirely. And it did need to be named in a colloquial way that could be used as a short-hand. I'm just sad that weird is the moniker that got taken up... And also, words can have several meanings, just like more than one thing can be true simultaneously. So maybe I'll embrace this weird in an effort to support the complexity of weirdness, and the elasticity of my own definitions.
Buenísimo!!