Insofar as presidential administrations are meaningful measurements of time in American culture, this newsletter could be called a Biden-Era publication. Whether this Era will continue through 2028 depends on whether Biden succeeds in his reelection campaign, which he kicked off today with an announcement video. Like a trailer for a Netflix docuseries, the video is masked and filtered to look like it was shot on celluloid and other retro formats, presumably in an attempt to present Biden’s age (80) as a source of pride and nostalgia rather than decay. The result is an intentionally anachronistic cross between vertical iPhone video and 16mm film: times and tech may change, but not Joe’s love of Freedom.
Maybe it is fitting for the Biden Era, whatever that will come to mean, that in practice this kind of aesthetic is a hallmark less of history and tradition than of the last 15 years of popular media: digitized “texture” that feels cheap, tired, and adrift from the time it tries to evoke. It illustrates an irony that feels at least thematically close to Biden’s own career: though he has been around forever, he could only be president now.
Is there even a Biden Era? Would it even be worthwhile to summon one? In this newsletter, I have been interested in Biden’s bizarreness, in part because his supporters are reluctant to name it, rightfully anxious about his age and lack of clear succession. But it also feels like the Biden Era doesn’t exist, or at least that it is notably un-theorized, particularly compared to Trump. Perhaps Eras are defined by crises, which Trump seemed to embody in his very person, and Biden’s mumbling appeals to normalcy feel less era-defining than climate chaos, AI, war.
The Trump years were so full of real-time analysis and culture-crit pablum that it made the discourse seem even more trivial and leant even more power to the man himself. Trump Derangement Syndrome, initially a pejorative term used by Trump fans against Trump haters, eventually came to mean the general derangement of all things in his orbit, as if some dark aura had warped the minds of election-deniers and never-Trumpers alike. Though his presidency has generated some moments of deranging incoherence, Biden has no Derangement Syndrome. There is the fact of his feebleness, but none of the palace intrigue and photo-ops and narcissism that came to define the Trump years.
It’s only the start of a thought, but what if the Trump Era and Trump Derangement Syndrome are just mutually constitutive fictions? What if the search for a Biden Era is not useful at all? What if the Biden years seem resistant to meaningful periodization because the very way the Trump Era was periodized—mythologized, really, in real time—has become the dominant model for culture writing at large? Like so much crap written during the Trump years, commentary quickly descends from useful interpretation into a game of who-said-it-cleverest. What if needless neologisms just wall off the past? What if Eras are just clickbait timekeeping, shorthand for a recurring American amnesia?
Like Make America Great Again, which is in fact a slogan from the Reagan Era, Trump Derangement Syndrome comes from an earlier term, this time from the Bush Era: Charles Krauthammer coined Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003. If we’re living in an Era, it began a long time ago.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
from the discourse
☞ The Know Your Enemy podcast takes on the career of Ron DeSantis with the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter:
It’s just cold efficiency and shared enemies. That’s what he’s selling. It’s like getting a moral lecture from a gun.
☞ Harmony Holiday reviews Lonnie Holley’s Oh Me Oh My for 4Columns:
Powering down, the last words on the album, present malfunction and dysfunction as healthy parts of the program, chances for closure and crossover. What Lonnie Holley is constantly building and rebuilding with sound and raw materials is this new approach to nurturing wherein failure is as urgent and uplifting as power and only compounds beauty.
☞ John Ganz outlines some notes on “the politics of national despair” for his Unpopular Front newsletter:
Since at least the end of the Cold War, America has been mired in the politics of national despair. There is no positive vision for the country, no actual hope for improvement or good things: We are caught between resignation and rancor. Politics involves either meekly accepting the conditions of the present, trying to just hold on to what we have—reminders to “always keep a-hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse—the embrace of “the normal” and “the decent” as being better than the alternative. Or, otherwise it involves an extremely dark vision of the national future: the frank acceptance and even the celebration of a zero-sum, Hobbesian world of gangsterism, civil strife, racial conflict, brute domination and the punishment and overthrow of enemies.
from my incoming texts
“Love the blue lady”
“It was a book with a lot of evil in it”
“But I’m going to dinner with strangers”
“C0m3t ($paid$))))))”
weekly wiki
Hurricane Dorian–Alabama controversy
Read back about Biden’s inauguration, folksy political rhetoric, and Biden’s love of poetry. If you’re enjoying the almanac, please subscribe and share with friends!