Hillbilly L-Shaped Sectional

I hate it when people over-explain jokes. And I really hate how modern media has so much space and time to fill up with “content” that it’s resulted in a surfeit of professional and amateur pundits generating so many unnecessary essays and opinion pieces and think pieces about every inconsequential thing.1

But this is bugging me. In this Presidential campaign, there’s one scandalous rumor that seems to have spread like crazy and really resonated with people. It’s based on a shitposting tweet from someone claiming that VP candidate JD Vance, in his memoir, describes having sex with a couch.2

There has already been a ton written about this phenomenon, ranging in tone from angry, to humorless, to scolding, to earnestly over-explaining. Some of them, like Charlotte Clymer’s post calling out the hectoring scolds in media for paying attention to the wrong things, are good. Others, like a post on Platformer making a false equivalence between an obvious, harmless lie and deliberately inflammatory misinformation, are so off-base they make me angry. But I have yet to read one that I think gets at the core of it.

The point isn’t to make anybody believe it, since it’s too absurd to believe. And it’s not to trick Vance into having to deny it, since it would be a waste of time. And it’s not really meant to put them on the defensive by humiliating them, since, like saying Trump has small hands, it would be a stupid thing to get defensive about. Even if it were true, it’s harmless. Weird, but harmless. Especially when compared to the dozens of legitimately offensive stuff that we know to be true about him. It’s just a bafflingly dumb insult.3

Which is the whole point, and I think it really is that simple. The reason it feels like a fever has broken in the United States is that people are tired of being angry and worried and miserable all the time, and we’re ready for some happiness and some reckless optimism. This dumb thing lets us show contempt for the contemptible without having to think about how terrible they really are.

I’m tired of news and social media presenting a never-ending succession of unforgivably awful things that Trump has said or done, milking yet another cycle of outrage for everything it’s worth, tricking some of us into believing oh this time, for sure, he’s gone too far! and then going on with no consequences. And seemingly no memory, as they set us up for the next one. It’s more fun to say he has tiny hands than to say he’s a racist, misogynist, narcissistic, incompetent grifter. The “tiny hands” thing isn’t true, but it lets me express my utter contempt without feeling like his virulent hate has infected me.

Vance is a reprehensible person. It’s a good thing he’s such a laughably terrible candidate, because hearing his beliefs from a more competent person would be alarmingly repulsive. I don’t want us all to keep wasting our lives fighting battles of attrition against regressive people who have nothing of value to contribute to society.

In fact, I don’t want to think about that couch-molesting dipshit at all. I’d rather be happy.

1
In my defense: posts on this blog aren’t meant to persuade or really even inform, but are just me trying to sort out how I think about a topic. You get what you pay for!

2
The tweet expertly cites page numbers in the book, and independent of anything else, is just a masterfully-executed shitpost.

3
Completely unlike actual disinformation, and anyone with any sense should be able to tell the difference.

1 In my defense: posts on this blog aren’t meant to persuade or really even inform, but are just me trying to sort out how I think about a topic. You get what you pay for!

2 The tweet expertly cites page numbers in the book, and independent of anything else, is just a masterfully-executed shitpost.

3 Completely unlike actual disinformation, and anyone with any sense should be able to tell the difference.