That post certainly aged like milk…
4 minute read
August 16, 2024, 8:12 AM
It’s funny… I know when I write some Journal entries that they will not necessarily age well, but some become dated a lot faster than others. Usually, when it comes to entries about politics and current events, I know that they will become dated more quickly than something else that isn’t related to politics or current events. Multiply that by a zillion when it comes to posts about elections and political candidates that aren’t primarily civics lessons. Those posts tend to become dated fairly quickly, often once the election is over.
However, I don’t think anything has aged worse than a Journal entry that I wrote a few weeks ago called “The Democrats are playing with fire…” talking about the Democratic Party’s circular firing squad, where they have this tendency to devour their own people at the slightest hint of anything, and that they had, at that time, turned their sights on President Biden. In that entry, I suggested that the Democrats not devour the president, with the idea that they needed him in order to win in November, and I made a whole bunch of arguments in favor of sticking with Biden. As it would turn out, the party devoured him, as Biden dropped out of the race a little more than a week after my entry published, which rendered my entire Journal entry moot.
So on one hand, I’m kind of salty about the loss of my entry’s relevance. It now goes down in history as the entry that became irrelevant and/or moot the fastest. This one became moot even more quickly than my “I believe that we have finally reached the other side of this thing…” entry from May 2021 where I was declaring all of the pandemic nonsense over, and then officials reneged on their all-clear and reinstated a lot of the nonsense all over again. At least we got to have the summer on that one before everyone started screaming “delta, delta, delta” and made my entry moot. Even more so than regular datedness that comes with Journal entries about elections, such as “Petty tribalism has no place in the 2020 cycle…” that became dated as soon as the primaries ended. But it at least was relevant for a little while.
When it comes to these sorts of entries that become quite dated, whether it be for current events that have passed, evolving ideas, changing cultural norms, or what have you, I always think about the phrase that people like to use: “It is a product of its time.” Usually, you hear the phrase used as a way of reminding people that content that would be considered offensive today was considered more acceptable in the time period when the work was created. I often see that in older cartoons from the various animation studios, where there will be something blatantly racist in the work, such as the cat in Disney’s The Aristocats that is depicted as an Asian stereotype, and when discussing it, people will typically remark, “Well, it was a product of its time,” in order to avoid defending it. But let’s be real: everything is ultimately a product of its time. Some things just stay relevant longer than others, and some things have a more timeless quality to them that prevents them from showing their age, allowing them to continue to hold up decades after their release. But everything is created within the social and cultural environment that existed at the time. Younger me has made remarks on here referencing things that I no longer recall. A product of its time: it was relevant back when I wrote it, but it no longer makes sense today. Entries about current events and electoral politics will definitely become dated as elections pass and leaders enter and leave office, but they don’t normally age as poorly as that Biden post. That entry was most certainly a product of its time: a very fleeting time.
Meanwhile, I am feeling good about what has developed since I wrote that other entry. President Biden has formally left the race, and sitting vice president Kamala Harris has taken up the mantle in his stead. And from everything that I can tell, she is killing it. I was surprised when she picked Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, as I was expecting either Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania or Mark Kelly from Arizona to get that nod. It also seems like the Trump camp is now on the defensive, which is a good place for them to be, since it means that they view Harris as a real threat. It also means that for the first time since 2012, the Democrats will have a candidate that people can vote for on their own merits, rather than a candidate who becomes the default choice because the Republican candidate is just that terrible. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were both default candidates in their respective elections. The Clinton campaign went the typical way for a default candidate, ending in a loss. Biden’s campaign pulled out a surprising victory, despite his being a default candidate. Of course, the Trump administration was uniquely bad in so many ways, so while he was a blank slate in 2016, he now had a record in office to answer for.
Of course, it still has yet to be seen whether the switcheroo that the Democrats did here will actually work. The election is about two and a half months off, and so I suppose that we’ll all find out together whether we have a Harris administration, or a second Trump administration. Because if this doesn’t work in the Democrats’ favor, we can still point to their dropping Biden as the point where they lost it. But I hope that we don’t have to do that. We’ll see, I suppose.
Categories: National politics, Schumin Web meta