Episode 136: Political Fictions
In Episode 136, Flourish and Elizabeth talk about the messy intersections of politics and fandom, and the narratives we create around political figures and actions. Topics discussed include why journalists keep using fandom terms they don’t understand, political RPF vs. fantasy ideas about candidates, and invoking pop culture during political protest. They also, as a podcast, unequivocally endorse Joe Biden.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:04:14] If we shared every example of journalists and political pundits abusing the term “fanfiction” when trying to discuss political narratives, we’d be here all day, but here’s a classic:
[00:05:59] “Adulatory” is totally a word.
[00:08:37] The Carly Fiorina/Hillary Clinton femslash story Flourish loves is “Querencia.” It’s been orphaned.
[00:09:24] Anne Jamison’s great piece about political fanfic in the age of Trump is “Trumped is the New Jossed.”
[00:12:43] We discussed the ARG-conspiracy theory connection when we interviewed Sean Stewart about ARGS in Episode 54, “Is This The Real Life? Is This Just ARG?” Another former Fansplaining guest, Adrian Hon, wrote “What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon.” Finally, if you’re not familiar with the Sherlock conspiracy theory TJLC, “Decoder Ring” covered it very well.
[00:19:41] Pew has done tons of research about the way that different news sources impact people’s understandings of the world. The differences in people’s views of the coronavirus are particularly stark.
[00:21:22] As is often the case, our interstitial music is from Music for Podcasts 2 by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:34:04] The article Elizabeth sent Flourish about Thai politics is “The anti-monarchist professor who became a living meme” by Peter Guest
[00:36:39] Elizabeth is referring to “Umbrellas Up” from This American Life.
[00:46:34]
[00:50:00]
We should add: the co-creator of Parks & Rec says Leslie Knope would have supported Warren over Biden, for what it’s worth.
[00:54:56]
Transcript
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish.
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #136, “Political Fictions.”
FK: We cannot escape these right now. It’s not possible. You, I mean, no. [ELM laughs] We’re stuck with it.
ELM: Didn’t expect things to get so desperate so soon!
FK: [laughs] You don’t feel desperate every minute of every day right now?
ELM: Uh, sometimes I just feel nothing. But… [FK laughs] Uh…OK. So we’re gonna be talking about fandom as politics and politics as fandom, and to situate ourselves, it’s October 10th, 2020. Eight days ago, Donald Trump announced he had coronavirus. I was gonna say “tested positive” but we don’t actually know when that happened.
FK: Nope, we do not!
ELM: And the last seven days have been pure and utter chaos. And I think that by the time this comes out, this will look like a quaint relic of five days prior, and that’s just the world that we’re currently living in.
FK: Yep.
ELM: And probably a lot of our listeners too.
FK: Yep. Yep. It sure is. Ay-yi-yi. And obviously there’s more to the world and politics right now than just American electoral politics. I think we’ll be getting into some of that as well, it’s not that this is limited to that, but it is, I would say, a shaping force in our thinking at the moment.
ELM: Yes.
FK: This particular moment and our location is particularly, particularly present. Not that it’s not always present. But it’s really right here with us.
ELM: Right. I mean, I think that most listeners have figured out by now that we are Americans.
FK: [laughing] Very much.
ELM: We are residents of the United States of America. And in fact bound to the United States of America because I don’t think we’re allowed to go to any other countries.
FK: No. Our passports don’t work. [laughs] They just don’t work right now.
ELM: It’s fine, don’t worry about it. All right. So, this is something that we talked about in 2016, and the reason why I wanted to do this episode is partly because I have been…well, I haven’t been thinking about it that much, because honestly I don’t like to think about 2016, and I don’t just mean the outcome, but I don’t like to think about like, any, any hope or positivity that I ever had about that entire thing. It’s just, it’s just, it’s, it’s—emotionally dead to me in a way that I kind of feel like Harry Potter is, actually, now. Like, I don’t want to even think about the time in my life when I felt any happiness about any political candidate.
I—can I just say, side note, I saw, I watched a supercut of Obama laughing at his own jokes the other day, and I had such a wave of confusion. Like, I—I try not to think about Obama and positive feelings I had about him, because it just feels like, so…it’s so depressing to think about. Right? But I was just like, “Remember when this regularly happened and I felt like, fondness for this man, and…and him laughing at his corny jokes?” You know what I mean? And it was just such a weird moment of dissociation, and it wasn’t even a nostalgic like “Oh, I miss that guy.”
FK: No, no, because in fact—no. It’s just…
ELM: Yeah. So anyway, this is a complicated topic, and it is something that I think that we were thinking about in 2016. We’ve been thinking about since then. Different people in positions of authority and platforms, I think, abuse these topics, these ideas of politics as fandom or fandom as politics, which we should probably define, basically, what we mean by that. And so I think that it—it’s really, I really wanted to, as fan culture experts, actually kind of dig into this a little, because I feel like most of this conversation in the media gets dominated by political journalists, who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
FK: [laughs] Yeah, and I mean, it’s not like—like, a lot of times they’ll be identifying things that they see happening, but then they’ll be like, applying a language of fan culture to it that is inappropriate, or they’ll be seeing things that are happening and they won’t know to apply—you know what I mean?
ELM: Yes.
FK: The problem is that they’re using these terms that don’t—OK. So the first one of these, politics as fandom, I think, is pretty clear. It’s what happens when people start saying, “Trump’s base are his fans. They’re screaming like they’re at a concert, they’re, you know, at his rally like they’re at Comic-Con.” They’re living, often people will talk about this, they’re living in this fantasy world that they’ve constructed around Trump, where Trump is this guy…people have done this also with people who are into Bernie, you know. There’s a lot of different figures. I mean, mostly male figures. But now people do it a little with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, I’ve seen a couple of people talking about that for AOC. Not as much.
So, so this idea that like, anything is fandom. Politics is just fandom. And these people are just fans, following this person.
ELM: Right. Right, exactly. And I think this is where political journalists really do the most damage, in my opinion. One of my most stubborn pet peeves that I call out, which probably everyone who follows me on Twitter somewhat hates me for, is when political journalists use the term “fanfiction” when what they mean is “fiction.”
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So they’ll say, “Oh, you’re just writing, you know, X politician fanfiction right here.” And it’s like, what do you mean? Use your words. They’ll often write “fan-fiction,” or something just—my favorite is like “fan-fic.” It’s like, they heard it was called fanfic, but they were like “I think there probably should be a hyphen in here. That seems right to me.”
FK: When usually all they mean, what they mean is just like, adulatory—is adulatory a word? Adulation is a word. Is adulatory a word? Anyway, whatever it doesn’t matter. You get what I mean. Just like, you know, slavishly obsessively positive stories about this person usually is what they’re talking about, right.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: That’s what they mean by “fan” when they append it to “fiction.”
ELM: You know, and somewhat related to this too is one of the most annoying politics and fandom coverage beats out there—is when a journalist discovers political RPF. Which is intentional, you know? And then they try to draw parallels between supporters of a candidate or extremely partisan hackish types like, spinning up a fantasy narrative about a candidate or whatever, or a politician. And people who are intentionally writing RPF, and trying to directly tie those two together, when often if you—you and I are both friends with political RPF writers, and it’s far more complicated, what they’re doing. And it’s not…
FK: Way more complicated! And it’s not purely like, it’s not purely adulation. I mean, even when it’s about people who people genuinely like, it’s still not that, you know?
ELM: Yeah! I mean, it’s, it’s like—I have, I don’t think I’ve read a single mainstream article about political RPF that actually gets at what I’ve ever heard anyone who writes political RPF say in a substantive way about what they’re doing. You know? And like, it’s just one of the ways where you see these journalists just really fall apart, because they’re so used to seeing supporters. You know? People who would pay a bunch of money to buy the stupid hat and go to the rally. Maybe cosplay as their favorite politician or whatever, or at least imitate them in their behavior. And not be able to understand that you could be compelled to engage in a fannish activity out of hatred, out of curiosity…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: …out of fascination, and all of that is affect, and none of that is necessarily inherently positive.
FK: Right.
ELM: Or “adulation,” to bring the word in that you are really into right now.
FK: I don’t know why, it just—it just sprang into my mind. But no, yeah, whenever I think about this, I think about my—I don’t know if it’s still my favorite piece of political RPF. I don’t even know if I could read it now without having a major emotional breakdown in certain ways. But there was a story I really liked that was about like, Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton hooking up, like, and having hatesex after a debate…? And it was about like…
ELM: Wait, was Carly Fiorina a—was. I think she’s still around. Is she a Democrat?
FK: No, Republican.
ELM: Oh, so this was a fantasy in which they were debating for some reason?
FK: If I recall correctly, they were not debating. It was like, I think it was the Republican debate and Carly was debating and like, Hillary was there for some reason.
ELM: [laughs] To judge?
FK: I don’t, I don’t remember the exact setup. But it was definitely like, there was a hotel bar, and they were hooking up and talking about being—and it was about being women in this context, and like, hating each other but also having more similar policies than they wanted to admit, and like—you know? And it was like this, and it was like deeply conflicted, and it was definitely not male-gazey, and it was also definitely not actually…you know what I mean? Like, I really liked this fic at the time and I still like it in theory now, although I obviously haven’t read it in like four years, because everything to do with that era is dead to me.
ELM: Sure!
FK: But it was way nothing, it was not like any of these things that are labeled as “fandom” by political journalists, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah, absolutely.
FK: I feel like one of their heads would explode if they read this.
ELM: I, I think that we should include in the show notes just before the 2016 election, Anne Jamison, who’s the author of Fic, and who’s taught a lot of fanfiction classes at the University of Utah where she’s in the English faculty, and also Princeton—she wrote this, I thought an extremely good and interesting piece about political RPF. And it was specifically contextualized in the 2016 election, about how like, how do we even write political RPF when everything, like—they’ve stolen away your ability to do the fantastical and the kind of… Like, they’ve taken our crack abilities away, right? Like, basically. You know?
FK: [laughing] Yeah!
ELM: Because everything’s so stupid!
FK: How can you be more crackfic than what is literally going on right now?
ELM: But there’s an interesting part—
FK: Ah, if only we knew where we would be in 2020.
ELM: I can’t handle—I mean, it’s the kind of thing where you’re like “I’m sure it could get worse,” but you can’t actually articulate how, and then it comes for you.
FK: It did.
ELM: But there’s a section in it where she talks about the very small amount of fanfiction at the time about Trump, and contextualizing it within the like, Access Hollywood tapes, and all the women who were coming out in the month of October that year alleging that they had been assaulted by him, and kind of contextualizing any—the fic that she encountered in her research about him, you know, with the broader idea of women writing…not necessarily rape fantasies, but that sort of, the idea of like, why would you ever write a story in which a woman was in a position of sexual…
FK: Right.
ELM: Of, of being overpowered, essentially. And the idea of that being a, the act of writing that being an element of reclaiming what you can’t actually reclaim in real life, because you know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It’s not something that you or the narrator have control over. And I thought that was really interesting. I mean, I’m probably not doing it justice and people should go read it if they want to. I was just like, “If you wanna engage with that time in history…” Because it’s really, it’s another—that’s an element of, that I think a lot of people outside of these spheres who try, who look at them from the outside, they’re like— “Well, the only reason you’d write that is cause you found that sexy,” or whatever. And it’s like, there’s way more going on in that kind of narrative, right? Than just, like, a woman wants to be ravished or whatever. Like, they can’t see from the externals that there’s an element of reclaiming in there and that it’s not just a flat one-to-one expression of a desire, and I think that’s really good—that was actually a really good summary of like, broader issues with the way people view kind of political RPF. Which is a rabbit hole I think I took us down that isn’t necessarily…
FK: Yeah, but I think that there’s also, I mean, there’s also—it makes me wonder about the other side of it, which is stuff that we would not necessarily identify as RPF. The stuff that is sort of dressing up as a candidate or being devoted to a candidate or whatever. It makes me feel like, what else is going on there too? It’s not the same thing as the fandom that we talk about, but what is it?
ELM: What is that? Let’s dig into that a little bit. Neither of us like the construction of like, all political supporters are fans. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: And then this year has offered an additional annoying element of political journalist rhetoric, saying things like QAnon are—they’re writing fanfiction together. It’s like, first of all, there are words in fandom we can use for what they’re actually doing, like…
FK: Right. Tinhatting.
ELM: Yeah, well, they’re tinhatting—maybe it’s like there are some RPG elements. More likely though, it—the most relevant fannish practice that actually, there are some people who do write about this intelligently, and pulling out the right strands from it, is ARGs. Right?
FK: Yes.
ELM: Which, like, the interesting thing about the way that ARGs have manifested in the last 20 years in fandom spaces, is this kind of idea—the intersection of conspiracies and ARGs. So when you have these ARGs that are clearly authored, and maybe constructed by an entertainment company, right, then people start to feel that everything in their lives is being secretly authored by, by, you know what I mean?
FK: An entertainment company, yes.
ELM: Like, you know, and so it’s that—that kind of thing, this idea that there is some sort of author kind of constructing this game for you, is I think—that definitely is a problem that happens in fandom constantly. Right? Like, people dressing up their conspiracy theories as some sort of game that they’re being given by, say, the management of One Direction or, you know, the producers at the BBC.
FK: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think that there is also like, on a slightly less—that’s the sort of scary side of the coin, right, that’s the side that’s like, what is going—what is even going on here!? Like, what’s fucking with your mind? There’s also the side of the coin which is about parasocial relationships. Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Which I think is really important when we think about—so I really was experiencing this, I actually did watch the first debate.
ELM: Why?
FK: Because I’m a masochist. [ELM laughs] And when I was doing it, I was like, “I’m struggling because there’s—” like, I don’t like most of Joe Biden’s policies. I’m far to his left. But while I’m watching this, I feel like, a sympathy for him, and I feel this sort of parasocial relationship with him, you know what I mean? Even though obviously Joe Biden doesn’t know who I am. And it’s similar to the one that I felt for him, you know, in the past, when he was the vice president, or with Obama or something like that.
And that is something that’s really relevant to fannish experience of celebrities, and it was kinda rough because by the end of it I was like, “Wow! I don’t—I feel, I have positive feelings about Biden, but I also still hate his policies!” You know what I mean? And so I think that’s, that’s one element in which it is—there is something that people are pointing to, right? There’s an element where there is a cult of personality—or not even personality but like, I don’t know. Role in a story or something like that, that people respond to. Which is normal and not actually confined to fandom! But it is, it is something that is shared. Like, there’s an overlap there. You know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah, but it’s so bizarre to me, because this is like, foundational to politics. Right? Like, this is what politics are.
FK: Yeah, right?
ELM: It’s not like, politics is not like a bunch of, like, faceless bureaucrats making laws in a room. Like, we elect these human beings and like, it’s all personality. Right? And in fact it’s too much personality and it always has been that way. You know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And so like, that’s the thing that kind of is bonkers to me about it when people talk about it like this is something new. It’s just like people having a hard time wrapping their heads around the new ways that it can happen, right? Because they’re not used to seeing, I don’t know, people making memes, right? About…but like, you think that the like, the million people who might have like, stood along the route of a whistlestop tour just to catch a glimpse of the guy and wave their handkerchief at him or whatever, like—they wouldn’t make a meme about…?
You know, like, they’re probably, I’m not an expert in this and I’m sure someone listening is, but like, I’m certain there are like, proto-analogue memes about these, about you know.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Beloved presidents or prime ministers or whoever, right? Like…
FK: Yep.
ELM: And like, that’s, it’s—there’re good and bad elements of it, right? The kind of people that run for office are the kind of people also who court this, and who, you know. Like, if none of the—they’re all extroverts. [laughs] You know what I mean? There’s like, I don’t know. There’s this interesting idea of like, the people who would run for office are not the people you actually want making your laws. Right?
FK: [laughs] Yes.
ELM: So, so it’s just like—I don’t understand this and I also don’t understand the like—I think that people also bring partisanship into this and saying that that is like fandom. You know, you’re just like, it’s like it’s your sports team and you’re just like, blindly following them or whatever. And it’s like, oh my God, that is also completely foundational, right? You know, like, that is literally like, like, in the year 1800 like, we were—not only was everything incredibly hyper-partisan in politics, but like, the entire press was partisan, right? You had papers for each of the parties and they would just print lies about each other and just toss them into the street, you know?
So like… [both laughing] I don’t know. I’m painting such a good picture of history. On the whistlestop tour, tossing newspapers around. So it’s just like, I think that what we’re seeing is, is some anxieties about not really fully understanding modern fan culture and seeing that kind of whizz by you in a way that doesn’t make sense to you, and then trying to kind of apply those things that you’re seeing where you’re like, “I saw people making these memes about Tony Stark, and they’re also making these memes about Bernie Sanders, and so they’re dumb, because they’re not deep.” And it’s just like—OK?
FK: And anxiety I think about the internet more broadly, right? When I think about the way that—I mean, this has been a common complaint recently, which is a lot of people told you back when GamerGate was happening, and even before GamerGate was happening, that all of this stuff was happening online. And people didn’t take it as seriously as perhaps they ought to have, in terms of the way it was going to seep into the larger culture. And now we’ve got QAnon, and now we’ve got, you know, militias organizing in these ways. You know. To overthrow the Michigan state government.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? And I think that some of that is a little bit overstated, I think that there were a lot of people who were very concerned about GamerGate, but I also think it’s true that there’s this level of like, “I didn’t know what was going on back then on the internet, and I don’t know now, but now I have to pay attention to it and what the fuck.”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know what I mean? And I don’t know what to say to that stuff, because it’s been clear for a long time that people are only getting more and more online. And so knowing about what’s happening on the internet is actually knowing about what’s happening in life in a lot of ways.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Not in every situation—far be it from me to say that, that’s obviously not true. The internet is not the same thing as real life, you know, anything, but it is an incredibly important force.
ELM: The internet is real life, Flourish. You know that.
FK: I mean, it is and it isn’t, right? I mean it’s an arena. And there’s lots of other arenas too.
ELM: Sure.
FK: But it’s an important arena, you know?
ELM: Yeah. But there is no, I mean, it’s all real life, man, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah, there’s no—I know what you’re trying to say.
ELM: [stoner voice] It’s all reality.
FK: You’re trying to say something that’s right. [ELM laughs] I’m also trying to say something which I think has some validity.
ELM: Good, that’s the pull quote right there. [both laugh]
FK: Yes!
ELM: Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. I do think though, compared to five years ago, I think that there is, you know, far more widespread internet use than before.
FK: Especially on issues like this.
ELM: This year in particular, because of the like, digital nature of a lot of interactions. I think a lot more, a lot more older people who were not extremely online are joining the online sphere.
FK: And, I think that the impact of the internet on what’s getting talked about in the not-online sphere is huge.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: So you saw that recent Pew poll which talked about like, how people—where people got their news and what they thought about the United States’ response to coronavirus, and the people who think that the U.S. has coronavirus under control in general were people who get their news from talk radio. Well, I don’t know if you’ve listened to talk radio recently, but it’s like, the greatest hits of the internet, you know what I mean? Genuinely, like, all of this stuff is stuff that is getting generated online. It’s getting generated on Reddit, it’s getting generated wherever, right?
Similarly, like, I mean, in the entertainment industry you can certainly see this. There’s conversation that’s happening online, and then it gets picked up and put into all the rest of the press. And it’s, I mean, like, in my job for years I’ve been trying to explain to people: this is why you should pay attention to online, because it’s the canary in the coal mine for all of the stuff that’s going to be happening, you know, the next week. Right? On the press that you think of as “real press,” you know? And I think that that is actually even more significant in the way that things have changed in the past five years. Because those things have gotten even more closely yoked, right?
ELM: Yeah, I think that the biggest thing is the—it’s the, the idea that there is a distinction between these things looks stupider and stupider as the years go on, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know, Trump can tweet something and then the stock market can crash, right? And it’s just like, yeah, OK, social media counts. Like, I mean, whatever. Like, and in a way that like, you could say like, “Oh, well, if Trump did a little address every time he wanted to tweet,” or whatever, but it’s like—he is doing a little address. This is just the medium he’s using, right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You know? So it’s just like, I don’t know. Anyway, OK.
FK: All right, that was one half of this.
ELM: All right, why don’t we take a quick break and then we can talk about this from the other direction.
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, we’re back from our break and that means that as usual, I think it’s time for us to talk a little bit about Patreon!
ELM: [laughs] Yes, it is time for that.
FK: OK. So, as you guys probably know, we are almost entirely, like 99%, supported by listeners and readers like you. And we do that through patreon.com/fansplaining, where you can pledge to support us on a monthly basis and we have lots of gifts for those who have chosen to do so.
ELM: OK, OK! This is the time! We’ve been teasing about it, but in a very vague way, but $10-a-month patrons or more—I mean, I don’t wanna limit you—you get my fandom story in a Tiny Zine, illustrated by Maia Kobabe. It is literally the cutest thing. No offense to yours, or to Maia’s. This is the third part of a little series that Maia has drawn for us.
FK: It is adorable.
ELM: About all of our early fandom—like, OK. There was that little, the little drawing of you looking awkward. [FK laughs] At your, like, Barnes & Noble, like, Harry Potter release party or whatever? In the little cape? That was extremely charming also, like, I’m not gonna lie.
FK: I’m glad that you enjoyed that.
ELM: But I mean, Maia really captured 1999 so vividly in this little Tiny Zine. So I hope I’m selling it hard enough. It’s extremely cute, it’s about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s about Rupert Giles.
FK: It is.
ELM: That’s all I got.
FK: I mean that—anyway—if you don’t have $10 a month, however, there are lots of other prizes you can also get— “Prizes.” That’s how I talk about this.
ELM: [laughing] Prizes!
FK: Prizes. We have Fansplaining pins, that’s incredibly cute little enamel pins, at the $5-a-month level. That also gets your name in the credits. And we’ve got a ton of special episodes. We just did a bunch of them, and that’s at I believe the $3-a-month level, you can get access to all of those. There’s over 20 special episodes you can get that way. So it’s super worth it.
If you don’t have money, that’s OK. You can still support us in other ways, also. We really really love hearing from you. You can call us and leave a voicemail at 1-401-526-FANS, or send us an email at fansplaining at gmail dot com, contact us on social media—we’re “fansplaining” everywhere—and you know, send us your questions, your thoughts, we love incorporating these into episodes and that’s part of why we’ve been able to run for five years!
ELM: It’s true. OK, but go back to Patreon for one second, we should say: you are gonna be sending out batches of these to current $10-a-month patrons within the next few days, right?
FK: Yes! And also if you pledge $10 a month at this point, for the next little while, you know, while we still got some in stock, basically, you can get one of these too. So if you are not yet a patron, you can sign up and I will send you one.
ELM: Just wanted to do those logistics. And of course, like, Patreon—if you’re not familiar with how it works, you can always adjust your pledge, so if you happen to be pledging $5 a month and you have a little more money to spare, you’ll get bumped into that tier and we’ll send it to you. Of course if you have to drop back down, it’s totally flexible. We absolutely understand. Though we always appreciate when people send us messages saying [laughs] that they had to temporarily drop or whatever. It’s absolutely understood, no worries at all, cause we appreciate any and all support.
FK: Yeah, and we are so grateful to everybody.
ELM: All right, I think that’s that. Should we get back to it?
FK: All right. Yes. So that was one half of it. But then there’s also fandom as politics, which is—I mean, I think that we talked about this a million times. In fact, we’ve had episodes that were sort of related to this, people taking things that they are fans of and either like, taking the lessons from that story and then translating them into politics, which is I think something that like, the Harry Potter Alliance historically we’d say that they were doing. Or, using it as sort of symbols to, you know, to have political speech—whatever, the V for Vendetta mask, right? With Anonymous.
ELM: Already your examples—I think that we talk about this a lot, and I think that this gets talked about a lot in the broader cultural media too, and the political media, but like, often we do mean “pop culture” and like kind of collective pop culture. I think we’re using the term “fandom” fairly loosely here, right? Like—
FK: And everybody’s using the term “fandom” loosely here. I mean, even people in fandom use that term very loosely when it comes to this stuff, right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And it’s hard to put your finger on like—if you’re carrying a sign at a protest that says “Frodo has failed, Trump has the Ring,” you can’t tell from that sign whether this person is just using an almost-universally-recognizable story, right. I mean, Lord of the Rings has sold more copies than any other book except for the Bible and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.
ELM: Sure.
FK: So like, that’s basically pretty much universally recognizable, right? Or, how much of it is actually your fandom and your like, you know, emotional feelings about this and about the politics—like, you can’t tell from that sign, right?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: There’s this affect element that is like, really hard, because also—it doesn’t have to have the affect to be effective, right?
ELM: Right. But I think that the biggest—though I hate that we have to talk about this, we do have to talk about it—the biggest one in the last five years that we’ve seen is definitely around Harry Potter.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And, so, anyone [laughing] who…anyone who somehow missed this whole strand of rhetoric, there’s a phrase now “read another book,” which has turned into kind of a, a goofy meme and like an ironic meme in itself. Because particularly around the election, I think there were a lot of Millennials—a generation for whom having read and liked Harry Potter is kind of like, one of the defining features of the [FK laughing] I’m sorry to say, it’s true! Just like, it’s, it seems like actually Gen Z didn’t read Harry Potter to the same degree, and clearly doesn’t care that much. Right?
FK: Yep.
ELM: And then obviously there are people who are older than Millennials who read it and loved Harry Potter, but like, there’s something very like, rote about like—oh, if you’re between the ages of…
FK: Well, it’s also quite different. Like, if you’re older, you have a different relationship, because if you’re a Millennial, you sort of grew up with it. So like, that is—I mean, it’s different. It’s not the same relationship.
ELM: That being said, it’s—it’s not…the idea that like, knowledge of this extremely famous pop culture text is fandom is, is very sloppy, right? And you know, I think that Harry Potter is a complicated one because I think there are a lot of people who have engaged in somewhat casual fannish behaviors around it in a way that they integrated it into their personalities by, like, making their Hogwarts house as important as an astrological sign. Right? Or like, potentially using things in the books as quick frames of reference that are very fannish to me, but are not necessarily people that you or I would recognize as “in the Harry Potter fandom.” But they might say that, so I’m not gonna gatekeep them out of that. But like, the way we define it would be probably having a bit more engagement in actual, like, quote-unquote “fannish practices,” right.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: So all throughout, you know, from like, you know, five years—five years ago, I’m saying, cause I don’t want to just pinpoint this from the last election to now, people using Harry Potter as metaphor, sometimes good, most of the the time incredibly stupidly I would say? Like, extremely basic sort of like, “This bad person is bad! And so they’re like Umbridge!”
FK: Yeah! [laughs]
ELM: And you’re like, “Pinpoint this one a little!” You know? Like, what do you mean? You know. Or there’s the like, person who’s organized, they’re Hermione. And a woman, so they’re Hermione. Or whatever. No one ever does this with Harry, because he’s so generic. Right? Like…
FK: Yeah, there’s no—what do we say about Harry? He’s a hero.
ELM: Not paying attention? [laughs] So you have all these people doing these really basic comparisons or metaphors or whatever, and that led to people saying “read another book,” kind of in a mean way, and then it turned into a bit of a joke, and now it’s kind of this ubiquitous phrase in some spaces that can now—because it memefied itself out into being, like a…a joke all by itself, right?
FK: It’s now less meme than it was when it started, I think.
ELM: Right. Anyway, I thought that was kind of an interesting development to watch. It was kind of annoying, but it’s like, these are these frames of reference, right, that people have. And they’re a bit basic, but actually like—you see a similar sort of thing with like a lot of different pop culture properties, right? And especially when you start getting people of different ages and different genders doing it.
So it’s been very popular amongst men who are older than a certain age to draw somewhat basic—extremely basic!—comparisons between things, machinations in the Trump administration over the last four years, and the action of the Godfather films.
FK: Yes.
ELM: Right? And it’s like, OK, first of all: as an Italian-American, while I know many Italian-Americans are involved with this buffoon, these people are so much less competent than the people in The Godfather that it’s just insulting! It’s insulting to the well-oiled machines that are Italian mafia families. [FK laughing] No. I’m not endorsing organized crime. But it’s just a little bit like—I guess there are some incompetent people involved in The Godfather, but like, these people are just dumb as shit. I’m sorry. Like, pick a different…pick another set of movies, is what I’d say, right?
FK: Yeah, I mean, I think this is all driving at the point which is that like—it’s normal to use, like, stories that we know to make sense of things that are happening in the world. Right? And that’s not an exclusively fannish experience, and it’s also normal to like, use those as propaganda, right?
To, to refer back to something that many fans like to talk about as fanfiction and that you and I, I think don’t always identify as fanfiction—when Virgil’s writing the Aeneid, I mean, you could say “Oh, that’s Iliad or Odyssey fanfiction,” which again, we can debate that. But it’s also being written in order to honor the emperor, right? Like, the whole point of that is to like, draw comparisons and to like, basically create this avatar for the emperor in the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s completely this thing, it’s completely using those stories to make sense of, at the time, the new Roman empire, right?
So, OK. If that’s happening back then, I don’t know that we would wring our hands and say “Oh no, these Odyssey fanboys, these Iliad fanboys! What’s wrong with them that they have to use this to understand the Roman empire?” You know what I mean? It’s anachronistic and it’s also silly, to say that. But it’s pretty much the same thing.
ELM: Yeah, and to bring it forward a couple, you know—a couple centuries. [laughs] Many centuries, another example of texts people probably have encountered in their schooling is like, the plays of Shakespeare, right? Which you know, ostensibly were about—even the ones that are about English history were about the current politics. Right? You know?
FK: Yes!
ELM: And it was just like, how much can you shove in here that’s like, a commentary that’s not directly—it is a way of commenting.
FK: Right.
ELM: Via these avatars. I think that what gives people a lot of anxiety in the modern day, and I don’t think this is unique to the politics side, but I think it’s at the heart of why people get so agitated about like, reboot culture also, is this sort of idea of the corporation being involved in the storytelling. Right?
So like, I think it’s extremely natural for humans to retell stories, and to attach narratives and to shove their own personal circumstances or the circumstances of the world around them, into that story, or to use that story to find guidance in the world. But I think it stresses people out when that story potentially was like, developed by a film studio or has like, you know, a robust line of action figures and a convention. Right? I think that bothers people, and I think that—not all people, obviously. But I think that it’s something that a lot of people have a lot of trouble articulating, but is at the heart of a lot of these complaints. This kind of idea that it feels kind of cheap and soulless because it is a piece of intellectual property. Right? To use the term that we actually might use interchangeably with “story-world,” right, or “narrative,” we might say “franchise” or “IP.” You know?
FK: Yeah, I do know, and it’s interesting because that’s sort of the—this is such a classic tension that people talk about in fan studies all the time, right? This is a classic topic for fans studies to talk about, is like, “can you reclaim this from a corporation, or are you…” You know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But I think that at least, you know, in fan studies, there’s some clarity about that being one of the challenges whereas I think that for a lot of people, just like you’re saying, especially who are commenting on this from outside, they’re like, “But it’s weird!” Like, “Why are you doing the Hunger Games salute? The Hunger Games salute doesn’t belong to you!” And it’s like, you know, you sent me this great article about—I’m pulling this from, about Thai politics.
ELM: Oh yeah, that was really interesting.
FK: Using the Hunger Games salute because it’s something that can be used, that everybody understands is about anti-monarchist sentiment, but that can’t be—the finger can’t be put on it exactly, you know what I mean? Cause even then, that’s also like, not even a—it’s not even a direct one-to-one correlation. You know what I mean? It’s not like the Hunger Games is about a king, it’s about, you know. So you know, it’s like there’s really good reasons to use this, strategically and functionally.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: But at the same time—ugh, it’s not, you know.
ELM: So can I talk about my journey that I had on this, actually? Because I have had a journey in the last, like, year or so.
FK: Tell me your journey.
ELM: Well, so, I definitely had some of these reactions, some of this tension, some of this like, “ehh.” And I love fandom and I’m happy to say that like, I’ve spent hundreds of hours writing serious fanfiction about the X-Men, right? And I can’t even say that without it sounding like, without putting that kind of—the X-Men! These little cartoon characters! They’re not cartoon characters. But you know what I mean, right.
FK: Sometimes they are cartoon characters.
ELM: Sometimes they are! Famously they are. [all laugh] But I got a little weary of it, a little “read another book” of it, and not necessarily just around Harry Potter, but it just felt so fucking basic in this, oh, you’re gonna go to a protest and hold up a Harry Potter themed sign and be like—and OK, great. Like, what are you actually doing? Harry Potter had to actually go, like, kill Voldemort and are you—you know. All you’re doing is drawing a stupid little metaphor and putting it on a sign, right? This is me being very judgmental, but this is some of the thoughts I had in my head about people using fannishness and pop culture in the last—since the 2016 election, when I lost all hope.
FK: Right.
ELM: Basically. So I listened to this episode of This American Life at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, so I’m trying to remember when this would have come out. We can definitely include the episode in the show notes, because it was very interesting. Just a few members of their staff went over to actually talk to some people on the ground who were doing some protesting, and it was great because I had been only encountering that story through very formal news reporting. So like, I understood that protests were happening and I understood what they were upset about, but I didn’t actually—I hadn’t actually, it was the first time that I engaged with humans on the ground and their specific positioning and why they were doing what they were doing.
FK: Right.
ELM: And not to go too far into it, but basically the people that he talks to are—they’re all, like, the same exact age. They’re all in their early 20s. And they were all born at a specific point in the history of Hong Kong, right? Where they’re not so young that they’re now essentially—the youngest people there consider themselves more affiliated with mainland China, older people the other end of the spectrum, and they feel like they’re in the middle and they can see this kind of pivot point.
But they are also all, like, the specific age where they all read Harry Potter when they were like, eight or whatever.
FK: Uh-huh.
ELM: And deeply internalized it. And they all talk about Harry Potter. And they all talk about how—in frankly somewhat generic ways!—that they, how they find strength from this story of resistance and good triumphing over evil.
FK: Right.
ELM: In Harry Potter. And so like, if I just got just that—or I saw it on the sign, or I saw it on a meme on the internet, I’d be like “Basic!” I mean, that’d be judgmental because I don’t know these people. But you know. If it’s, say, contextualized in American politics or whatever. And then they talked about how they took that strength from the story and, like, literally risked their lives going into the streets to do these protests. And it was very—I really had to take a step back and say like, “Wow. I—I feel like I’ve been very presumptive and judgmental about the idea that—” like, even if you’re taking away an extremely basic message from these texts, you may actually be using that as the fuel to do the really scary hard thing, right? And that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be in the streets. There are scary hard things that you can do with your politics, you know, online or with your family or whatever.
And it was a real moment where I had to question myself and my kind of knee-jerk reactions and say, like, “Would I think this was different if they said they were doing this because they were inspired by some religious figure?”
FK: I was just going to bring that in!
ELM: Yeah, yeah!
FK: I was just gonna say that! You know? Because this is one of the areas where I think that—I studied religion in college, and as everybody who listens to this podcast knows, I’m a person of faith, and I think about this a lot, and a lot of times people in my life—because almost everybody who I’m related to and the guy I’m married to, they’re all atheists. I shouldn’t say that. I have a lot of cousins and things. But my direct, my closest family. So we have a lot of conversations about this stuff, and I find that there’s lots of really really bad ways people compare fandom to religion, that are completely non-useful, but when you’re talking about the power of a story to motivate you and to make you reflect on things that are not basic but fundamental, you know what I mean? Like—the mean way of saying it is “basic,” but the nice way of saying it is “fundamental.”
ELM: Yeah, yeah, that’s really good.
FK: And I think about like—when I have been doing some protest-related activity and things like that, and I think about my faith and I think about how that is motivating me to do these things, is that inherently—like, yeah. That’s related to a lot of other stuff in my life. But fundamentally I think that I’m relating to it in ways that are quite similar to that. You know? I think about the stories of the things that people did. And the good and the evil in the stories, and all of that. Right? And like—I’m trying to model myself after these people. Fundamentally. In that space. And obviously there’s a lot of theology and other stuff that comes in on it that is not there for the fannish story, or for the pop culture story, but there is this seed that is—that is basically the same thing. Right?
ELM: Sure.
FK: Stories that give our life meaning and that show us how we should be.
ELM: Yeah. Totally. And I think there’s something too in it that kinda ties back to the first part of this conversation, about the like, the one-to-many element of it too. Right? Like—you could absolutely go protest because you’re inspired by someone in your life, right? You know. Your father or you had a great teacher or something and like, you take their life story, internalized it, and you’re like “I’m fighting for them,” or whatever.
But there’s something different about this idea of—maybe of a somewhat surfacey kind of, like, the use of, your use of “symbol” in this conversation is really helpful for me, right? This sort of like, say it’s Harry Potter or Jesus or something, you know. I could probably think of some other examples, but like, this kind of idea of this, this figure sort of living in the collective. And there is a power to the idea of that, you are connecting to something that you also know that many other people are kind of attaching themselves to as well.
FK: Absolutely. And a sense of solidarity with other people, right? Like—
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Obviously I can feel great solidarity with lots of other people in the protest space, but when I’ve been out there and I’ve run into somebody who is, you know, a leftist catholic, for instance—this actually happened—I was like, I did not know you before this, but now, just because I know that we’re here from some of the same stories…I mean I feel solidarity with everybody, but I feel extra solidarity with you.
And obviously that can be bad. That can be exclusive, that can be all that. But I think that when we’re talking about stories that are accessible to…I don’t know. You know, this is the problem. Any time you have that point of solidarity, there’s also people who are left out.
ELM: Sure.
FK: You can say, “Harry Potter’s a bad story for me to feel solidarity through because,” I don’t know, “I’m Korean and I had to read the name ‘Cho Chang’ ten million times and I hate this.” So there’s, there’s downsides to it too. But you know, there’s—it’s rough. I mean, [laughs] I can say I feel bad about Harry Potter, because I’m not cis and like—now it’s all tainted for me, right. But there is still something that’s…“helpful” is not even the right word. There’s something that’s unifying within that too.
ELM: Yeah, but I mean, I’m also talking about it—I’m not saying that like, the theme of the protest is like, “We all love Harry Potter and we’re gonna go.” That’s the difference here, right? You know?
FK: [laughing] That wouldn’t be right. No no no. That’s not it.
ELM: It’s what—what is externally motivating people to, to do things that are scary and hard and like, pushing their political beliefs or whatever.
FK: Well I would say not even externally motivating, right? What shaped your internal motivations?
ELM: Yeah, but like—that’s external, right?
FK: The things that shaped your internal motivations—where do we draw this line, that’s the point I’m making!
ELM: Yeah yeah, that’s true. All right, fine. OK, like, there’s a lot here, right? So like, we could talk about both of these angles and the way they intersect for like another five hours. But I do wanna spend some time talking about the upcoming American presidential election, and the election in general, you know. There are many other very important races happening. But I wanna try to kind of—maybe we can talk a little bit about Joe Biden, because we devoted a fair amount of time in the fall of 2016 to talking about Hillary Clinton. Because this is our podcast, and we wanted people to vote for her. [FK laughing]
And we want people to vote for Joe Biden, and we have different feelings about him, but I think we have these kind of—the intersections that we’re talking about here in terms of fandom and affect and symbols and constructing characters and supporters of whatever, stories…I’m just gonna name some more words…fictions! Fictions! Political fictions! I’m tying it all together. Like, I think that’s really relevant to how both you and I feel about Joe Biden.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: So I kind of wanted to do this episode partly to talk about this topic, because it’s just been such a—stupidly covered in the media in the last few years, but also because I, I don’t want to put out some sort of like, defeated apathetic stance towards this election as a podcast. Like, I need people to vote for Joe Biden. Like…if you can vote in the United States of America…
FK: Yes.
ELM: I need you to do that. And I also need you to vote for the Democrats who are running for the Senate. I need it. [FK laughing] Please.
FK: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that—you know, it’s funny because one of the things that I think has become incredibly clear right now is the degree to which our government and the functioning of our society is kind of a giant fiction that is propped up by everybody sort of agreeing to it. Maybe “fiction” is the wrong word. It’s like a giant consensual…
ELM: Flourish.
FK: …thing that’s happening, you know.
ELM: I’m sure that somewhere a bunch of like, political scientists and like, philosophers…
FK: Are like, angry.
ELM: …are just like, no! They’re just like, “DUH!” They’re like…
FK: I mean…
ELM: Yes!
FK: Obviously this is true, but it’s like—that’s not something that I think the average person, certainly I didn’t like—I knew it on some level in my head, but you know, from like, reading books…
ELM: Yeah, sure.
FK: [laughing] But you know, not actually seeing it in…seeing that in action in this massive way. And also I don’t think that I fully had processed how much—how much you’d miss it if it was gone, right?
ELM: [laughs] Sure.
FK: That’s sort of depressing, because I don’t generally, I don’t feel super bullish about, like, the way the U.S. government works overall. I don’t think it’s the greatest thing in the universe, but I think that I’ve maybe come around to the idea that well, it’s really shitty, but maybe it’s slightly less shitty than other options? I don’t know. [laughing]
ELM: Man. All right. I didn’t expect you to go full-on, like, you realized that like, societies are like, constructs that we collectively—
FK: Well I knew they were constructs, I just didn’t know know, you know what I mean?!
ELM: Wow, wow. Wow. This is really something.
FK: I don’t know! I don’t think that’s a weird thing to say. I think lots of people have this experience.
ELM: No, I think I’m just being snobby because—whatever! You studied religion, you should know about social constructs! Like…
FK: I know perfectly well! There’s a difference between knowing about something intellectually and like, seeing it happening around you, you know what I mean? And seeing people not consenting to do the things that like, you know. Like, seeing norms break down in those ways. It’s just—it’s a different, it’s a different thing!
ELM: Well, I can say I’ve not loved what I’ve watched in the last four years. I do think it—studying history probably did prime me a little bit to not be as, as floored by the like, the diminishment of the…like, there are definitely—my moments are like, sometimes I’ll be like, walking down the street listening to NPR, as you do. As one does. And one of them will just say something absurd and I’ll go, like, just like—what the fuck. Like, you know? [FK laughs] Like that, you know that like, the reaction, the Veep nervous laughter, “what the fuck” reaction gif? That’s me, and I’ll just be like—I’ll be doing reaction, reactions to the camera that’s not there. Like…
FK: Yes!
ELM: Just out in the world.
FK: This happened to me last night when I found out that Donald Trump like, called into a news, you know, program, and told Iran—
ELM: FOX Business, right? Wait, oh, which one are you gonna say?
FK: Was it FOX Business?
ELM: You tell me!
FK: Him telling Iran that like, if they fucked with us he would do things that had never been done in history before to them?
ELM: Oh. No. I didn’t hear that one.
FK: I was just like, “Oh!” Nick literally walked in and told me about it and I was like “Oh! This is…that happened. OK.”
ELM: I can only hope after four years of him not actually—whatever. I thought you were gonna say—
FK: It’s not even about the actual situation, it’s just about the fact that that was a thing that was said and that this is just like a, you know, whatever.
ELM: Yeah, don’t worry about it. No, I thought you were gonna mention how he called in—sorry, I don’t wanna talk about Donald Trump—but he, [laughs] did you hear how he, in his drug-addled ramblings the other day, how he called in…I believe it was to FOX Business. To FOX something. And went on a little tangent about how California was in a drought because they are pouring all of their water into the sea to help the fish.
FK: [laughing] I didn’t hear about that. That…I just, I mean, I just…I don’t know what to say! At this point, like, if you are—yeah, it’s…sure! Like, I don’t know. Your vote is not going to get you like, the police defunded, unfortunately, I wish that it did, but you know what? Your vote is at least going to stop this guy from—
ELM: Are you passing the buck, are you not willing to address your home state, what they’ve been doing? They’ve claimed that you—you have like, a natural drought—
FK: We’re just pouring the water—
ELM: But in fact you’ve been donating all of your water to the sea for the fish!
FK: I can tell you that all of the farmers in the Central Valley are like…
ELM: They didn’t know about this! Not a lot of people know about this.
FK: This is brand new information.
ELM: It’s up there, it’s the second California greatest hit, where the other one is you would have fewer forest fires if—
FK: Yes.
ELM: If you raked the leaves.
FK: Just raked the leaves. Yeah. That was, that was also a classic. I felt like that was really, he really understand the ecology of Northern California—and Southern California for that matter.
ELM: Stop dumping the water in the sea. Rake the leaves. Then pour it on the hill. And you’ll be fine. No fires. Anyway, I wanna talk about Joe Biden, not how absurd this is. So you’re talking about the structures, I actually want to talk about Joe Biden because I think that while I’m approaching this election as a vote against Trump, I would also like to actually address my feelings about voting for Joe Biden, because that is what I am doing.
And the thing that I’ve been having a really hard time with, I think, connects back to also that like, feeling of dissociation watching an old clip of Obama, where I couldn’t even remember a time when I felt affection for these, these people, and I—I love Obama a lot more than I love Joe Biden, I’ll tell you that, right? Like…he’s obviously not without his problems.
I was mad at Joe Biden through most of this election, and I was rewatching Parks & Rec recently, as one does, and of the many things on that show that haven’t aged beautifully… [laughter] Leslie Knope has a serious sexual interest in Joe Biden. You know, in her—oh, you’ve never seen Parks & Rec. But in her way that I think, I do appreciate, where she’ll be like, she has a crush on him, but she’ll make it clear: it’s a sexual crush. Right? Like, she’ll be like, “Yeah.” You know? [FK laughs] And you’re like, “Good, I appreciate that, that it’s not just a surfacey sort of ‘oh, Joe Biden!’ But it’s like, ‘Just lettin’ you know.’”
And it’s a running gag throughout that she’s got this interest in Joe Biden and that he’s the one guy that she’s allowed to cheat on her husband with and all of this stuff, right? And he is in an episode and he does his, like, a whole bunch of senators are in it, and they do like, extremely wooden acting and you’re like, “good for all of you for giving that a shot, none of you are good at this.”
FK: [laughing] “You tried!”
ELM: And he came on the screen and I was just like, “Ugh! Fuck this guy!” Right? And then I—I thought back to like, the version of me like, five years ago, where I found Joe Biden charming. And I was just like, “What—who was that?!” I, like, the fuckin’ Onion articles where he was like, this like, your dirty uncle or whatever. I was like, “Ha ha! Funny!” You know? Like…I don’t understand what was going on back then. How did I feel that way?
FK: Well, I think there’s a big difference for an old white man with somewhat more conservative viewpoints than yourself supporting a Black man to the presidency as a vice president, and like, bringing along a chunk of voters with him, as opposed to that same dude running for president himself. I think that there’s a big difference in my mind about that.
ELM: That’s true. Yeah. So what you’re saying is, it’s like when you thought you knew Luke Skywalker in the first few movies and then you found out—no. I’m kidding.
FK: I was going to strangle you.
ELM: I liked Old Luke.
FK: You saw my face—unfortunately it’s a podcast so none of you could see my face, but my face was like… [strangled noise]
ELM: [laughing] I mean, it’s not—it’s not a ridiculous point, in the sense of like, what happens though? When we construct narratives around a person, but they’re partly based, they’re partly contextualized.
FK: Completely.
ELM: The Joe Biden of the Obama administration was a very different politician, because he was playing an extremely supportive role and an important one—and a very good one, right? Like, there are a lot of politicians who wouldn’t…not like it’s some great sacrifice to be the freakin’ Vice President or whatever, you know.
FK: I agree and I also feel like there was a point at which—and maybe this is what some people who are really excited about Biden winning the nomination thought he would bring—but there was a point where I felt like, in the Obama administration, he represented—he did represent sort of this sort of, normalcy…I mean, I mean that in both the bad and the good way. You know. He represented this sort of like, very longtime politician, he’s always been around, all of that long history, all of that stuff, right? That was the role he was playing vis-a-vis Obama. As far as like, Obama being young and Obama being Black and all this stuff that—ahh! You know. He was sort of the like, good ol’ Joe, you know. Good ol’ Uncle Joe.
And now I feel like that’s also sort of what—if you see the emotional narrative that the campaign, and I imagine the Democratic Party, would like people to feel, that’s the emotional narrative that they’re trying to push again, right? “Actually, wasn’t it better?”
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You know? “When we had this older guard. Don’t we want to go back to that?” I don’t know that I actually do want to go back to that, but as I was saying before, it might be better than whatever Hell we’re in now. In fact, I’m sure it’s better.
ELM: What do you mean it “might be”? Don’t even use language like that! That’s absurd. I don’t care—if there was a vote right now to say “Could we just like erase the last five years and like, try again,” I’d be like “Yes!” And this is kind of—this isn’t even gonna be that, right? This is like, can this dude like, keeping stable while people try to clean shit up.
FK: Right.
ELM: You know? And like, while the Republicans can fucking decide what they actually want in the world. Just naked power—
FK: Apart from the Democrats to lose.
ELM: Yeah, right? That’s not a position on which, that’s not a stable position that’s gonna last for more than another decade, right? And like, I don’t—this, these are all politics things. All right. Once again, these are bigger structural things, and like, they’re more of the reasons why I’m voting against Donald Trump, right? And I would have voted for fucking Pete Buttigieg. I would’ve been annoyed and I would’ve done it…I would’ve voted for Bernie! You know I’m not a fan of Bernie Sanders.
FK: I certainly do.
ELM: A fan! I’m not an enthusiast.
FK: Nope!
ELM: And I would have voted for him, happily, right? I, I—literally any of them.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I would happily have voted for Cory Booker, just gonna name the 50 people who ran for the Democratic—
FK: [laughing] Let me just name all of them.
ELM: Sure. Who was the one who—Jay Inslee. Would’ve loved to vote for that guy.
FK: I would have cast my vote for Kamala in the main thing.
ELM: OK, here’s the one: what about Michael Bloomberg. Remember? In 2020, this year?
FK: Oh man. I would…
ELM: When he ran for president?
FK: I don’t know that there…I mean, I think I would’ve done it, but I don’t know if there would have been enough, like, clothespins to hold my nose closed while I did it.
ELM: I would’ve. He was my mayor. Fine. Whatever. I don’t have to make that choice! So.
FK: Thank God.
ELM: Whatever.
FK: What is—we gotta, we gotta bring this in. We gotta bring this in. We gotta reel this in. OK.
ELM: I watched a video the other day and I sent it to you. It was a TikTok. TikTok? I don’t know if it was. It was from a couple years ago. It must’ve been a very early TikTok. It was this teenage boy in a car and they were like, “Oh! I think it is! It’s him! It’s—I think it is!”
FK: Yeah!
ELM: And then it like, whips over, the phone camera whips over, and it’s Joe Biden holding a bundle of balloons. And he just looks over—
FK: He just went to pick up some balloons for some reason.
ELM: Yeah. And he just looks over and just like, smiles. It’s a real cool smile. And then it’s just like they just react very dramatically in the way that like…and I watched it and I was like, “Oh no. I feel—the feeling that I used to feel about Joe Biden. And I was not, I didn’t want that.” Right? And I know lots of people that I am friends with that I share politics with will all say this. “I used to feel something positive about this man.” And they’re like “I never did.” And I don’t actually know if I believe them or not.
Like, I think it’s like—I think that I’m a little ambivalent about my claiming of my old positive feelings for him, right? Because like, does that mean that I was stupid then? To think that like, he was—he was kinda a fun guy, you know? Because he was always this man! Like, and I always knew about his problematic stuff! And I always knew he was kinda handsy! You know? Like…and I didn’t like that, and…it’s the same way I feel about Bill Clinton, to be honest, you know? Bill Clinton as a figure. I, I don’t know.
I really, I really loved, I feel like, the John Mulaney Bill Clinton segment was really clarifying for me. You still haven’t watched John Mulaney, because you’re the worst Millennial. He’s got an incredible segment that ends his second comedy special about the Clintons, who went to college with—Bill Clinton went to college with John Mulaney’s parents. And his dad hated him then, and his mom like, had a crush on him, right? So like…and this carried on into their adulthood. And there’s a bit where he talks about, they go to this fundraiser in 1992, his mom and him, and he’s 10, and he was describing what Bill Clinton was like to a 10-year-old. Like, the coolest guy in the world. And I was just like, God. Like, how much of my opinion of Bill Clinton was shaped by the fact that like, I was 10, and he played the fucking saxophone! Right? That’s like—you know?
FK: Right!
ELM: Like, and then that just like, stays with me. And so then I think about Joe Biden and I’m like, well, I was like—you know. I was whatever age and like, you know, he wore some sunglasses and smiled and you were like “cool,” right? But then, I feel like you have to be a little more generous to yourself and say like, I don’t know.
FK: You do have to be more generous to yourself and you have to recognize—I feel like I keep going back to this, but stories are the way that we make sense of the world. And understanding other people as characters in that way is the way that we make sense of everything, right? We don’t know them personally, and I’m not—I don’t have enough, I don’t have insight into them as people. But I can see them as symbols, I can see them as characters, I can see them as that, and like, yeah, sure, I cast them in my mind in these roles, in the past. Right? And those roles don’t necessarily—I mean, the map is not the territory, right? They don’t, that doesn’t correspond to the real world. We can just try and we can hope that our maps are good enough for where we wanna go.
But I don’t think that we can blame ourselves for having those conceptions, because ultimately that’s the way that we make sense of any—like, there’s so much in the world to know, and so much of the world to keep in mind, that we can’t have nuance about everything all the time. And the best we can do is sort of to pick, pick a direction. And then we have feelings about that, you know what I mean? Like it’s just—this is just a human—it’s the way that human minds work.
So I will say, I don’t feel regret. Like, I, you know, when I look back on my feelings for instance when Obama got elected, like, I was way over-the-top excited about that. I’m embarrassed. But—
ELM: Well, come on! That was a big deal.
FK: But I also want to give myself some credit for it, right? By credit I don’t mean that, I just mean, I also wanna give myself some generosity and be like—at the time it was a huge deal, and it still is a huge deal. And it doesn’t matter that like, you know, I don’t know, I’ve become further left and he didn’t fulfill all of the promises that he made and all this. You know what I mean?
ELM: Well, and also this is the kind of thing that we were talking about earlier—the politician versus the policymaker, too, element of it, right? To me, sometimes I separate the, Obama’s election from Obama’s presidency.
FK: Completely.
ELM: I think that like, I definitely feel like there’s diversity of opinion amongst Black friends and Black people that I follow, but most of them still retain the kind of, the element of like, Obama as symbol being extremely important, even if they’re not happy with his policy decisions, right? And that moment—
FK: Well, I think you and I felt that way to some degree about Hillary as a candidate, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I mean, I liked more of her policies than many people I know, but I also certainly didn’t like a lot of them! You know? And I, I still feel like I separate that out. You know what I mean? Like, anyway.
ELM: Right. Whereas I—I feel like right now we’re so mired in the like, actual “well, what does this person have to do? What are these problems that they have to fix?” And I feel like we’re not even, like, it’s absurd to even be—I mean obviously you need to make plans, but like, it’s absurd to put the cart before the horse in that way, because you need to like, not have these people be in charge anymore. Right? To actually implement anything whatsoever. Right? Like, you know. I don’t know.
It does make me think a lot about, to kind of tie this all back to where we started, there’s definitely a disdain amongst political journalists in particular for—and the kind of media folks that follow politics—have for the sort of memefication of certain political candidates. It’s very, uh, selective, I’ve noticed, with some people I follow. The, the “read another book” folks often never met a, like, “Bernie is the cool—” you know, the split-screen one where like, whoever Bernie runs against is the least cool person and Bernie is super cool, right? Like—
FK: Yes.
ELM: They haven’t met one of those they don’t love, right? You know? And that hypocrisy has frustrated me a great deal, and I don’t wanna pin this on all supporters of Bernie, obviously, but I have just had a lot of this in my life. Of, of jumping on any meme about him and being extremely disdainful of any other politician getting memed, basically.
But it’s interesting, because I feel like a lot of political journalists and political types will be extremely critical of the, like, surfacey nature of that memefication, or that like—pop-culturalization, or fandomification—fandomi—you know what I’m trying to say? [FK makes a blithering noise] —of these candidates, when it comes to people that I think that they overall share politics with, and then they go out to the—wherever, to learn about Real America…I just did a little eyeroll. Because it’s all the real America! And people will just, just talk out of their asses about just things that are completely, like, have literally nothing to do with these candidates and why they’re voting for them. They’re just like, “I think that he’s like this! And I hate that! So…”
And this is not just about Trump. Like, you’ve heard this about all sorts of candidates and you’re like, “This is nonsensical and this is completely about you and it has literally nothing to do with these people who are running, and that’s what humans are, they’re just gonna,” you know? Like, I don’t—like, there’s a, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a trope in sitcoms with focus groups. I’ve seen this in multiple sitcoms. Where there’s always the one guy who’s like “I just don’t like it.” You know?
And humans are like that! They’re not logical, they’re not rational, they’re very emotional, they, you know. They may be like “I was gonna vote for that woman but I once knew, I had like a stupid ex-girlfriend who had her name, so I could never,” and you’re like… [FK laughs] “OK.” You know? Like, that’s fine, right? There’s so many stupid human reasons why people will vote for a candidate or not bother to vote or whatever.
And so I wonder if what’s going on with these political journalists who get mad at this pop-culture-ification, is it because they see that element in themselves and wanting to do that and think that they’re above that? And when they go out into the real world and talk to people and get their random arbitrary opinions they just like, nod solemnly and go “Well, that’s the electorate here in Erie, Pennsylvania,” and you’re like “OK!” This tension is like—I don’t know. It bothers me, and it just feels like people are picking and choosing when you get to make extremely rational policy-based decisions and when you get to just like, feel a feeling and do a vote.
FK: Right.
ELM: You know what I mean?
FK: Right, and the reality is that political journalists are not exempt from feeling feelings or from having narratives about—
ELM: No, in fact—
FK: —politics, or their lives, or anything else. In fact, maybe they’re worse than normal.
ELM: —they often do. Yeah. So I don’t wanna pin this all on political journalists, but I do feel like they shape a lot of the rhetoric in which—they’ve shaped the rhetorical fields in which we have these conversations often, so…
FK: And then that’s what—just to bring it back around to fandom too, if you feel uncomfortable with just feeling a feeling and loving a thing, because you love it, then you’re gonna feel real uncomfortable with fandom, right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Because like—you know, fundamentally that’s the thing that, even though a lot of these things that we’re talking about are not directly relatable to fandom, I think that the reason why people try and make it be about fandom is because they are freaked out about that. They are freaked out about the fact that like—and, and to some degree, about the earnestness or the, you know, the genuineness of these totally about-you, totally, you know? You know, not related to the real world feelings. Like—not related to rational things that are happening. Like, those feelings are real. And they shape our world. And if that’s scary, because they don’t have a rational background to you, then fandom’s the thing that you’re gonna be like “Oh, and that too.”
ELM: Yeah. Yeah.
FK: Just like that. So.
ELM: I think that’s a, that’s a really good observation. All right, well, you know, I’m feeling a lot of feelings that are like, “You should just vote for Joe Biden.”
FK: Yep! Hold your nose if you need to hold it, but hold it.
ELM: I don’t even like that construction. I feel like that’s just really overused. Just do it. Like, put your hands on the ground. Actually, don’t touch your nose, cause you’re wearing a fucking mask. Right?
FK: You’re right, that’s a bad idea. Don’t touch your nose.
ELM: Wear your mask and vote for Joe Biden, I don’t care, like, whatever. I don’t like it either! I don’t know what to tell you. Like, if you’re not—if you’re not scared of what will happen in a second term of Donald Trump with literally no accountability because he won’t be thinking about reelection…
FK: And if you’re not—yeah. And if you’re not scared about what could happen if the outcome is not incredibly clear…
ELM: I, I don’t understand in what world that these folks live in, that they’re…
FK: Just go vote. Make your plan right now. And then go vote,
ELM: Wow, you sound like a PSA. “Make your plan.”
FK: “Make your plan.” Dude! That’s because that is actually rational and it’s based on genuine studies! Anyway yeah—
ELM: It’s true.
FK: So make your plan and go vote. And Elizabeth, I’m going to actually literally I need to make my plan, because I need to decide where—
ELM: Wait, do you not have a plan?
FK: I need to decide what—
ELM: Let’s talk about it! Let’s talk about our plans. What’s your plan? Are you gonna vote on Election Day or are you gonna vote early? You’re gonna vote IRL, right?
FK: I’m going to vote in-person, but early.
ELM: OK.
FK: And I need to decide which day I’m gonna do it, which is the plan that I need to make.
ELM: So I was going to vote on Election Day, because I always do that, because in the middle of the day there’s never anyone there at my polling place.
FK: Great!
ELM: I don’t know if it’s gonna be different this year, but I also—I’m at a pandemic level where I feel comfortable, like, riding a train wearing a mask.
FK: Yep, same.
ELM: I went to the Met.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: And everyone was wearing a mask. So it’s like, I’m not in this zone of like, “I won’t leave my house,” and you know, I would say though—if you are nervous about that kind of stuff, but you are physically able to vote IRL…especially if there’s early voting…consider it. Cause like, you can be in and out of there faster than you’d be going to the grocery store, you know?
FK: Completely.
ELM: I voted in the primary IRL in June and it was super clear and easy and you just go in, out, use some hand sanitizer, done. I understand that not everyone is immunologically able to do this.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: But if you are—consider saving the resources of the postal service for people who really can’t leave the house at all, is what I say.
FK: All right.
ELM: So that’s the extremely PSA element, and that’s only for Americans. Everyone else in the world, good luck to all of you.
FK: We’ll try not to screw it up.
ELM: Just remember—we know. You know who we’re voting for. So don’t, don’t blame us if anything happens. Also, [laughing] vote for the Senate!
FK: OK. All right. We’re done with PSAs now. People know, Elizabeth.
ELM: Senate!
FK: I’m gonna talk to you later.
ELM: Joe Biden.
FK: Bye.
ELM: Bye, Flourish! [both laugh]
[Outro music, thank yous and credits]