Don’t worry kittens, the election perhaps precipitating our nation’s topple into total and complete fascism* needn’t be stressful — mommy’s here to explain some memes from three weeks ago.
*from its current standard-issue evil imperialism
A couple months ago it felt like Nobody Really Cared about this election. I work on a comedy news show, so like, we did. But only kinda, and only in the sense of “Whoa, Project 2025 scary” and “what are the ethics of voting vs abstaining in the face of genocide the president is funding.” Otherwise the temperature on the rectal thermometer I occasionally probe Gen Z with read “politics sucks, everyone sucks, Trump sucks but Biden’s doing genocide, Trump and Biden are just summer/winter shades of the same concealer, nobody is abolishing the police and I am making no fucking money either way, idc, Kamala’s a cop, what happened to the government sending me one thousand dollars in the mail.”
And then The Debate happened. That Friday we filmed an episode of the show, then, exhausted and ravenous for merriment, decamped to the pub. We stomped down the backyard stairs lighting cigs and circumscribing the outlines of fujoshi summer when we realized it was Dead Fucking Silent Out There because Oh Shit The Debate’s On. (Can We Have The News Outside Today?) We didn’t pay attention literally at all, because 1) we are pretty obnoxious 2) we just got done making a television show about this 3) what does it fucking matter 4) ooh someone has poppers.
Come to find out it mattered A LITTLE BIT, ACTUALLY! because the next morning my mom and brother called me while I was in the middle of brunch with the winded excitement in their voices of having run to the band room to tell me there’s a fight happening in the cafeteria. THAT WAS SUCH A FUCKING NIGHTMARE HE WAS SUCH A FUCKING NIGHTMARE !!!! Trump? NO BIDEN !!!!!! Ohhhhhh shit.
Yeah, Biden acted his age on The Debate Stage That Makes You Old and also Makes You Not The Nominee Anymore.
And then…….. a coconut grew in Brooklyn.
First of all, I plucked that coconut from near-obscurity for a joke on the show months ago, to Published Groans about how unfunny it quickly became. YOU THOUGHT COCONUT TREE WAS UNFUNNY IN MAY? HOW UNFUNNY IS IT NOW, HUH? LET THE ANNALS OF HISTORY SHOW *I* WAS THE FIRST TO RUN COCONUT TREE INTO THE FUCKING GROUND! I AM THE SHARK THAT COCONUT TREE JUMPED! I AM BRAT!
This is to say — my Twitter suddenly exfuckingploded with riffs on Kamala — the coconut tree thing, the “you exist in the context of all that came before” thing, the Xan Rizz. Fancams proliferated.
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Genuinely every other tweet on my feed for days was some ironic-ish affection for Kamala, to the extent that I quickly wondered if this was a plant from the Dems to whip up enthusiasm for a potential Kamala ascendancy.
Sometimes. Tinfoil. Makes a very good hat.
Let’s briefly rewind the tape and take it to a place of Cats (2019).
Twitter Holidays: Where Were You When Covfefe
The first Cats (2019) trailer dropped on June 18, 2019. I remember because I was at my beloved Appalachian hippie grandparents’ cabin tucked into the side of the rolling Blue Ridge mountains on a visit for my 19th birthday. Treecover mediated the thick Georgia sun’s heat but not too much of its light, which fell in heavy golden rays between big flat leaves with serrated edges that looked cut with craft scissors, and seemed to carbonate the pond it hit, spraying dancing sparkles across the water’s surface. I wasn’t paying attention to any of that picturesque shit, because I was laying in a dark room locked into Twitter’s reaction to the Cats (2019) trailer for three consecutive hours.
This was an all-timer of what I call Twitter Holidays. Let’s all put on Green Day’s “I Had the Time of My Life” and fondly remember the following Twitter Holidays which perhaps once Mr. Beast is President will be federally observed bank holidays:
The day the Cats (2019) trailer came out
The day Trump got COVID
Brat summer
The Olympics (long live The Gold Zone)
For me personally a wired neurological enjoyment of Twitter Holidays was carved into my brain tissue by my prodigal Twitter Holiday: PSAT Day. My Alex Dunphy virgin ass took the PSAT two years in a row, and each year we’d stream out of the testing trailers to the cafeteria (earlier than everyone else, since the PSAT got out before normal class did), collect our rations of TruMoo chocolate milk, grape Uncrustable, and preferred SunChip (my pervert ranking is Garden Salsa, French Onion, Cheddar, Original), cluster around the outside tables (a PSAT day delicacy, since they were unfailingly already spoken for by the time we got to the cafeteria any other day) and rush to Twitter to see what the most Little Shit minds among us thought was dumb as fuck about that passage we just read. Yeah, nobody in my high school had as bad a Newsies fetish as I did, but every kid in the country was riffing on the “crimson leaves, falling” poem or story about putting leashes on dolphins (?).
(The PSATweet renaissance was so robust that ahead of its second year, the College Board threatened punishment against sharing “confidential test material” and tried to shoot down every tweet it could find.)
Delighting in merriment at a shared experience with @superwholockcatgirl69 and trading the best memes with friends at those picnic tables is what we in the business (of calling things things) call Collective Effervescence. It’s the feeling of connection, melting into the world around you, interconnectedness, that we feel in shared experience: in the pit at concerts; dancing to those club classics, club club classics; Coming to This Place for Magic.
It feels good to be All In This Together. It taps into some collective unconscious, some energy shared or created together. It reminds you that you are embedded into a whole big earth with lots of people and energy and love and laughter. That you are not alone in your experience. And I have to say, in our fucked up, post-iCarly, pre-Wall-E world, I think Twitter Holidays count.
I’m not talking about memes, though there’s a fine line. A meme is something you come across that makes you chuckle (see: See: Bass Pro Shops King); a Twitter Holiday is something you find yourself a fully submerged participant in by virtue of going on the internet, the same way you are an automatic participant of a snow day or whatever Memorial Day is. (don’t tell me) It’s productive in the Foucauldian sense, a moment that rapidly and widely generates memes and discourses. For instance, coconut tree is a meme generated by the Twitter Holiday of Joe’s untimely departure and Kamala’s ascendance.
It’s common to see tweets reminiscing about Twitter Holidays of yore as one would an international vacation or music festival; “the day Trump got covid was the best day on here,” etc. And as I sat in my work bathroom for too long with my phone light reflecting off my face as I scrolled through one, two, three, sixteen-dozen AMERICA NEEDS A XANNED OUT AUNTIE! CONTEXT SUMMER! MISSION COCONUT IS A GO! tweets I recognized the familiar warmth of standing in a crowded Mii Plaza all giggling together: we were having some fucking fun.
Mission Coconut is a Go
Where PSAT day differs from the early stages Xanning of America is that the PSAT memes didn’t spring from and reference an implied starting position that the College Board is a hopeless and wicked institution and any permutation it offers is laughably undesirable.
But coconutposting was far from pure ideological disavowal.
Sure, it relied on understanding and presenting itself as ironic; ie, it’s funny to make fancams of Presidential candidates, because we hate and would never be fans of Presidential candidates. This is a problem for the modern Democratic party; content about how Epic and Cool Obama was wouldn’t have constituted a joke sixteen years ago because young people (pictured) really did feel that tall drink of Progress was Epic and Cool.
But contemporarily we young leftists of Twitter collectively understand American electoral politics to be irredeemable and odious. (And of course we do: one need only learn two to three things about the prison system to see America as a duplex shoving many masses in its dystopian nightmare basement while The Red Zone blares and Vanessa Bayer makes Totinos upstairs)
Thus, teeheehee, isn’t it so funny-because-juxtaposition to tweet about how much Kamala is Slaying and how all this time we just needed a Xanned Out Candidate and to smash cut her speech hits with sparkle effect and “Go To Town” playing? The creator of the fancam I linked up top even captioned the post “why did I make this”.
Because, haha, isn’t it so fucking funny, actually? We quickly had kind of a lot of fun with Kamala’s likeness. We made hailing her ascendancy a Twitter Holiday, which helplessly engenders enjoyment of the wellspring of content, and thus affixes affection to the subject of that wellspring. You made the fancam because everyone is making something, and isn’t that fun, so pull off that chunky knit and get in there, girl!
Crucially, most jokes weren’t about Kamala’s policy, they were about, for instance, how cuntily she talks about carnitas. Kamala was Brat, in that we enjoyed her as a pop cultural event, a fun day on the internet, a moodboard of pills and coconuts and pantsuits and cackles not unlike Brat’s cigs and bumps and clubs and sweat. (or Sabrina’s four-inch heels and espresso or Chappell’s ornate drag and public Pisces indecency)
The context which would have made the jokes jokes was her shitty policy. But that context was behind the curtain of the purely aesthetic posts. In this way those who originated the jokes intuited, felt them as funny by way of the political understanding that predicated them, but the jokes themselves were explicitly apolitical, and thus affixed the pleasantness of collective effervescence to The Idea of Her.
You might say the jokes didn’t fall out of a - [gunshots]
To be clear: I enjoyed our Fun Day on Twitter. We joke about everything! Playing with the internet’s toy of the week is not shilling or psy-opping, it’s just how we respond to These Uncertain Times (see below). And in the same way Olivia Rodrigo should be allowed to sing about her heterosexual fucking despite her underaged fans, we should be able to tweet for the in-group without worrying an impressionable D-Trip will see and get the wrong idea.
But the absolute snowballed onslaught of Kamalaposting — even joke-Kamala, Brat-Kamala — communicated in form, then lent itself to, the genuine collective affect of giddiness. Its effect was “OH DIP: THERE IS A CANDIDATE WE CAN ACTUALLY BE ENDEARED TO.”
In the frenzy, Kamala “shattered fundraising records,” including the fastest time to raise a billion, and jumped 10% in approval ratings.
A la “would you get a beer with her,” coconutposting asked - would you do a little key, have a little line with her? Twitter’s — and voters’ — resounding answer was yes.
The Coconut Just Got Drunk With Hoda and Jenna Bush at 11 A.M.: Shut It Down
This wave crescendoed a few weekends ago when Biden announced his withdraw from the race and endorsed Kamala, inexplicably in a Twitter exclusive. (? will his office call his death a “surprise drop”?)
And it crashed into nothingness quickly thereafter, with a Tweet from Kamala’s co-headliner of the summer:
And thus coconutposting in its even ostensibly ironic form died, and was smoothly coopted by those explicitly, /srs, /notjk excited: Kamala’s official campaign page, DNC pages, youngins in the highest levels of the communication departments of the highest operatives of the federal government. Khaki-donning youngins who, by virtue of the earnest neoliberal Pod Save ideology that led them to their weeds-deep positions, were far from in on any past cynical or critical layer of the joke. Their text (Kamala luv) matched their subtext (Kamala luv), rendering the joke no longer a joke at all, and thus turning coconutposting into the vehicle for the very ideology (the absurdity of stanning a politician) it initially giggled at.
Wrap it up please
TLDR; In my neck of the X, Kamala’s reception was boosted by the warm and fuzzies attached to her by her incorporation as a near-apolitical affective/comic figure into Brat summer festivities. I’ll be interested to see whether her numbers die down among the “amateur DJ” set young people as relief and excitement gives way to the much thornier remembrance that she’s the prosecutor who might be President. Kamala already released an ad on immigration absolutely fucking whiffing it and doing exactly what Genius Rima and I parodied weeks ago for our latest episode, like, it’s kind of uncanny, our Raven moment, etc.
And: heed the affective power of symbolism and collectivity. I wrote an (ahem, award winning) paper in undergrad about the right’s very effective use of pregnancy and abortion symbolism to emotionally manipulate folks, in which I concluded reproductive justice advocates need to fight back with equally emotionally salient symbolic storytelling. How easily young people were whipped up into excitedly posting about a previously-thought-underwhelming candidate is a lesson to Democrats, who have been playing semiotics defense for decades, and to civilians, who are more susceptible than we might think to having our Little Feelings (which, let’s be real, are often taking the wheel from our Little Minds) manipulated (neutral).
Obviously this blog about… dead parents, Olivia Rodrigo, and lesbian girlfriends (?) will have more to say about All This. (Everyone’s really waiting for the girl problems endorsement. If you even care: Ron Paul!) For instance: voting is not your MySpace My Top Ten Policy Prescriptions post, it’s harm reduction. And yet! Dems are relying on the threat of fascism to force you to vote without actually doing anything for you. And yet! Trump is threatening to ban HRT and disembowel the federal government. And yet! Kamala would not end the genocide. But neither would Trump! But-
LATE BREAKING UPDATE:
WALZ NATION. Per my genius friend Noah:
Damn, maybe that carnitas fiend got it in her to win this shindig.
P.S. passing you my iPhone 8 my parents are Geotracking me on to you across the cafeteria table to show you my favorite jokes that exist in the context:
And ofc — the one, the only, Kamala Eileen: