Weirdness and Genealogical Anxiety
Kamala Memewar Rhetoric
I am deep into genealogy mania again so everything is delayed and I am *buried*, heads-down, with EOY and EOM stuff. Nonetheless, I wanted to comment on the rhetoric of the Kamala memewar and use it as a teachable moment related to genealogy.
Recently, the DNC tested the epithet “weird” on vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, a millennial man with anxiety about his upbringing who wrote a book about the Appalachian ordeal of civility.
Before touching upon genealogical anxiety, we should ask how one could respond to the weird adjective of doom, which counts among the most devastating verbal weapons the keepers of western social acceptability – women - deploy against low-status men. Here are a few strategies.
Hypocrisy and Moral Supremacy: dems are the real weirdos
It works and Vance has already used it.
“You host men dressed in clown makeup who call themselves women and expose their fake tits on the White House lawn, and you deign to call someone else weird?”
Decent Human Being Moral supremacy
The force of this one varies with context and audience.
“Being weird is a neurodivergent condition and we have moved on as a society from stigmatizing the weird. Grow up and get serious. The fate of our nation is at stake.”
Irony
When it comes to persuasion and indirect communication, you can never go wrong with irony. This is another form of owning it. Agree and amplify, put on eye-liner and make it a fun sham ritual for everyone to partake in. Make jokes about your DIY hillbilly fleshlight.
Paradiastolic or persuasive redefinition
This is a form of “owning it” but redefining it. Think a first-century Judean pleading that the things you believe the gods detest because of their weakness or ugliness are really loved by God because those things are good.
“The traits you call weird are in reality the hallmarks of a laser-focused great man who has little time to observe the arbitrary and plebeian rituals of normalcy.”
Genealogical-Conspiratorial
This is a form of anxiety-inducing delegitimization. Think a 2018 conspiracy poster saying that everything you believe about politics was invented by RAND/the CIA/Jews etc.
“Everything you believe about weirdness was invented by Goebbles in the big lie factory.” Dig up one of the countless CIA or FBI FOIAs detailing research on psychological manipulation and induce genealogical anxiety in the Dems!
This brings us to genealogical anxiety.
What is genealogical anxiety? I have borrowed the term from a thoughtful article by the philosophy academic Amia Srinivasan.1 “We suffer from genealogical anxiety,” Srinivasan asserts, “when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations.”
Srinivasan hints at the reason for her interest in genealogical anxiety with the following passage