Kamala Harris and the Election of Laughter and Forgetting

Quickly, before it passes us by, let’s reflect on our momentous summer. I’m afraid that if we don’t, the astounding events of the past six weeks will be memed, distorted, and memory-holed into oblivion. 

We began with an 81-year-old president who his advisers, his party, and most of the legacy press insisted was sharp as ever. That line was exposed before the nation and the world at the June 27 debate that revealed a feeble, infirm commander in chief incapable of stringing together two coherent sentences.

When pressure on Biden to drop out came from members of his own party and a suddenly observant media, he vowed to fight on, saying he’d quit only “if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that.”

Then an assassin nearly murdered Donald Trump. And here we are in August, less than 90 days from Election Day. As far as we know, the Almighty never made a visit to Biden’s home in Rehoboth Beach. But we now have a new Democratic nominee who, until three weeks ago, was widely acknowledged as a political lightweight, a poor manager, and the author of incomprehensible word salads like this: “Culture is. . . it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And present culture is the way we express how we are feeling about the moment.”

And while it’s still unclear if the elected president is running the country, the news cycle since the ascendance of Vice President Kamala Harris has been vibes-based. There is Brat Girl Summer, the supposed “weirdness” of Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, and then the veepstakes, won by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who birthed the “weird” meme that mocked the Republicans, and joked that Vance may have once copulated with a sofa. All of this is happening as some outlets stealth edit Walz’s military record to wipe away the falsehood that the Minnesota governor served in Iraq when in fact he was deployed to Italy in 2003.

Yes, it is weird. But not weird in the way the Democrats suggest. It’s weird because the party now asks us to forget what they were saying only a few weeks ago. We are being asked to accept an absurdity: that the president too feeble to run for reelection is fit for the job he currently holds. And that his successor is now the second coming of Barack Obama. 

Neither of those things are true. Biden’s public appearances are more scripted than ever, and he has still yet to address whether he has the stamina and cognitive acuity to be the president 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, Harris is coasting through the first three weeks of her campaign without doing a legitimate interview or bothering to explain, in her own words, why she has abandoned the fringe left positions she took in 2019. 

Being unburdened by what has been demands laughter and forgetting.

The surreal mood reminds me of the novels of Milan Kundera, the Czech dissident who wrote with scathing wit about how the communist regime of his era waged war against memory and history. Kundera’s work traced how public lies beget private ones until a whole society begins to see itself in the funhouse mirror of official distortion.  

In the first section of his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the protagonist, Mirek, seeks to stamp out the memory of a distant affair with the same ruthlessness as the communists who erase photos of politicians that have fallen out of favor. 

Mirek concludes that all political parties “shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.”

That book, along with a few other works by great twentieth-century anti-totalitarian rebels, can help us make sense of this moment in history as the Democratic Party—and Kamala Harris herself—ask us to imagine what will be, unburdened by what she has been.