I don’t care who Harris picks as VP.
I may be alone in this, though it’s hard to tell from the front pages of the usual suspects of “major” media. They’re rife with headlines on the subject. I simply don’t care whom she picks. At best, the differences are like citing the differences in the best rosé wines from Provence, all of which boil down to the different effects, infinitesimally nuanced and subtle, brought about through terroir and craft. It’s the minute differences that determine that superiority. The perception of ascendancy ultimately resides in the senses and preferences of the taster.
What is clear is at least with rosé you should get a passably good drink, which you need never consume again. Plus it’s a pleasure to try it. The ultimate successful choice for Ms. Harris is who will fit that ideal of a balanced paradigm: repelling the fewest voters, while bolstering the number of votes where they are needed most – geo-electorally speaking. And there will not be another tasting. The avidity of the process of conjecture and analysis, some of it astute, all of it focused in its specificity, and deceptively thorough numbs the skeptic from perceiving other objectives. The object of conjecture is nowhere nearly as engaging as the exercise itself.
Inevitably, it will be a white man and he will not be significantly at odds politically with the core of what Harris herself declares as her agenda and values.
And I’ve already said more than I might otherwise care to on the subject, I’ll stop, vexed with myself for the time spent before getting to the buried lede. I also chastise myself if I spend too much time—too often reading more than the headline—reading the deep thoughts, though no more than a 1 on the Jack Handey scale, of the self-defined sachems of opinion. Their declarations and cocksure judgments (always cloaked as mere “opinion”) as to the wisest course of action clog the pages, virtual and pulp-based alike, this week and into next, until the matter wastes away, withered by the vaporizing power of public disinterest. Or, in this case, after Harris has made her choice—doomed to be a resounding anti-climax.
At which time, those words of wisdom will be as worthless, disposable and yet burdensome as a plastic water bottle. And the wordsmith will move on to the next subject. And the words will still be out there, with the enduring potential for causing trouble later. Too many times, and of course it will happen on this story cycle, the commentariat will take up the next story that shows any sign of trending (in the sense that word has today) as the next contextual frame for holding readers rapt by the news, and seeking only to be led to it with minimal effort.
The Buried Lede
Quite simply, what keeps my already overworked aging brain in full-time aerobics mode is not what is the answer to the “who for VP?” question, but the larger encompassing venerable question, “cui bono?”
The tricky bit is understanding that the investigatory energy applies not to who benefits from the final choice of candidate. It’s who benefits from the fuss—I mean the current fuss about this specific point to ponder—and the answer seems obvious. From the sheer volume of coverage, the beneficiaries are the usual suspects en masse, usually referred to these days in a perpetuation of intentional misdirection as, simply, “the media.”
And it ain’t what Marshall McLuhan meant by the term. Specifically it’s, if I may be permitted a now hackneyed usage, “Big Media.” Which is to say, it’s the swollen conglomerates that now encompass not only the major news media—not just the newsprint behemoths—the hoary “papers of record”—which have by now morphed into multi-media outlets of streaming information, but it’s the entire apparatus—even larger, way larger, in economic scope than the news media per se—that is subsumed by social media and its ancillary technical service providers: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Not only do they feed us “news,” that is matters of currency in politics, governance, economics, and the international order, but pretty much everything else from recipes to sports coverage of every athletic endeavour however tenuous its qualification, to what is more broadly called “culture,” with the magnanimity of designating any and all creative expression as art.
And why do they operate at full tilt? Not because there is any true desire to define the verities of existence, from mortality to the eternal—all of what defines philosophically and esthetically for each of us mindful of the need to define what makes life worth living. It’s because of the indiscriminate appetite we have collectively for anything, any bit of information (still called “news” but more accurately defined as mere text—when it isn’t images of every sort, from still to video to animation—resonant with the full sardonic sting of Capote’s alleged assessment of the work of Jack Kerouac: “that’s not writing, that’s typing.”). A current article in Scientific American describes us consumers of social media as a nation of “information foragers.” Incredibly, as an outlying datum, a June 2024 report by Pew Research Center states, “75% of users say they see information about breaking news in real time [on X];” the percentages are significantly less on the other major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, though significant shares of users of these sources report regularly getting news on them).
One must infer a convoluted relationship with actual publishers or broadcasters or webcasters of anything remotely resembling hard news of social media, who persist in repudiating any role, or responsibility, as actual disseminators of what the public perceives as news. Indeed, major players, like The New York Times and the Washington Post, as publishers of content costly to produce have long since entered a world of perpetual litigation concerning the use of that content by social media—if by provision to “subscribers” or “members” of de facto executive proxy—without emolument in any form to the originators. And that only applies to news, but increasingly news with a twist, and a tug, and a pull, and a push, anything to hold attention. Generally, in the course of the last 50 years (out of, let’s say, the two millennia of the current era), what used to be gospel (literally “good news,” generally of uplift for humanity, when not specifically of individual salvation) is now just bits, literally and figuratively, for which we have an insatiable hunger.