What happened to weird?

Even before Tim Walz was picked by Kamala Harris to be her running mate, he had garnered a bit of fame by calling the MAGAs, “weird”.

Some columnists and Democratic Party consultants got buzzed.

It was such a “mid-western” turn of a phrase, they said. It was simple and the masses could understand it. It wasn’t wonky.

Or substantive.

I wasn’t comfortable with it.

To me it sounded like Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” from her run against Trump in 2016.

That didn’t come off too well, did it?

She sounded like an elitist snot.

Which she is.

After all, the real danger that Trump and the MAGAs represent isn’t that they are weird. In fact the racism, sexism, homophobia and the rest of what they espouse isn’t weird at all. It exists as part of the long tradition of hateful but acceptable American thought. It has become very normalized.

Not weird.

I was just a kid in the Sixties when we were coming out of the dark, homogenized McCarthy era.

Conformity was the watchword.

To be weird was suspect. A beatnik. A homosexual. Or worse, a Communist.

When Marlon Brando was asked in the film, The Wild Ones, what he was rebelling against, he responds, “What do you got?”

I was raised to be weird.

I tell friends that my mother never allowed me to have a coloring book. She didn’t believe a child should color in the lines.

I have noticed that the Democrats seem to have dropped the whole weird thing.

And that’s good.