The New York Times Critic’s notebook The ‘Weird’ History of Tim Walz’s Political Put-Down -

 The New York Times 

Critic’s notebook

The ‘Weird’ History of Tim Walz’s Political Put-Down

By Jason Farago

Jason Farago is a critic at large who covers culture and its place in the world.

Aug. 7, 2024

Once, the word signified supernatural things. In the mouth of Kamala Harris’s running mate, weirdness is much more earthbound.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota stands at a lectern at a rally with an American flag and Kamala Harris behind him. 

At his introductory rally after being tapped as the running mate of Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said of their opponents, “These guys are creepy, and yes, just weird as hell.”Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Two inauguration days ago, after Donald J. Trump had been sworn in and delivered a raw diagnosis of “American carnage,” his predecessor George W. Bush walked off the Capitol dais and said to Hillary Clinton, as she reported it, “Well, that was some weird shit.”

It was a prescient observation! Strange things have taken place in America lately, and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, whom Vice President Kamala Harris selected as her running mate on Tuesday, has made calling them out a rallying cry. “These guys are just weird,” he told the “Morning Joe” kaffeeklatsch a few weeks ago, the first of many assertions of abnormality that helped propel a once obscure state leader to the national ticket.

May I briefly observe how curious it has been — how weird, if you prefer — to see this pithy term embraced so quickly? As a matter of political communication, weirdness can be a powerful epithet. But as a matter of cultural prestige, weirdness overtook normality long ago.

It is not so much in the eye of the beholder as the believer, and there are good weirds and bad. Are you fonder of the glamorous weird of Björk or Lady Gaga (who performed at President Biden’s inauguration, for crying out loud), or the peculiar weird of Pee-wee Herman or Napoleon Dynamite? Are you, my dear weirdo, more like the bowling-alley oddballs of “The Big Lebowski” or the banana-nosed, chicken-besotted Muppet named Gonzo? Weirdness, as a cultural marker, is a designation of irregularity that is increasingly self-declared and celebrated. To turn it back to an accusation, as Mr. Walz has done, is wondrous strange.

Weirdness has always been formidable, literally so in centuries past. Before it was an insult (flinged or reclaimed), weird actually signified power — and before it was an adjective, “weird” was a proper noun. In Anglo-Saxon Britain, Wyrd was a pre-Christian personification of destiny, who governed the fate of all things. She is invoked early in “Beowulf,” as the title hero prepares for battle with the monster Grendel. “Fares Wyrd as she must,” says Beowulf to Hrothgar, the king of the Danes. Do not mourn me if I die. The weird is the lord of man.

In later centuries, the Anglo-Saxon Wyrd got tripled, in rough analogy with the three Greco-Roman Fates who spin the thread of human destiny. The Weirds (or Weïrds; the New Yorker-style dieresis signals it was two syllables) became a trio of female seers, most famously in “Macbeth,” whose Weird Sisters foresee that the Thane of Glamis will become king of Scotland. The witches on their blasted heath are weird in the original sense: unearthly, uncanny, what Banquo calls “fantastical.” Their warts and rags may make them scary. Their 5G connection to the spirit realm is what makes them weird.

Even by the 19th century, when “weird” took on its contemporary meaning of oddity or abnormality, it still carried supernatural overtones. Percy Bysshe Shelley writes in one poem of a witch’s tricks as being “A tale more fit for the weïrd winter nights —/Than for these garish summer days.” But we disenchanted moderns, even in weird and wild times, do not have such spooky views of snowstorms. Weirdness lost its paranormal character in the 20th century, and became merely a freakish disruption of the natural order. Norman Bates. Rocky Horror. The outlier, stripped of his eldritch energies, became simply the weirdo.

Yet American artists and writers have always had a soft spot for the maladjusted and maladapted, and the same Hollywood studios that have promulgated our view of the American normal have also made us find our reflection in adorable oddballs. From “Harvey” to “Ghost World,” from “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to “Mean Girls,” the weirdo more often than not signifies freedom, dissent, imagination, and their normie antagonists smallness, conformity. For Minnesota’s own Prince, and his fellow Midwesterner Michael Jackson, eccentricity was the proof of their innovation, and weirdness the mark of genius.

And in our own underachieving century, weirdness has gone from a possibly lovable quirk to a near obligation. Keep Portland weird, keep Austin weird; match my freak, as Tinashe demands; above all, do not be anything other than yourself, no matter how odd. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” rode its willful adolescent weirdness to the stage of the Oscars, and even in Greta Gerwig’s blue-state-rules “Barbie,” the living doll you’re supposed to like is not Margot Robbie’s pretty but empty Stereotypical Barbie, but Kate McKinnon’s messed-up, Bowie-wigged Weird Barbie. I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, and I am posting through it.

Mr. Walz offered an inversion of that old Radiohead single at his introductory rally on Tuesday night. “These guys are creepy, and yes, just weird as hell,” he smilingly charged. From his mouth the word comes across as a somewhat spicy Midwestern revision of the coastal freakout, common during the Trump presidency, that almost every day was “not normal.”

But it only lands with force because of a curious — we might say weird — ambiguity in the language. Today, “be normal” and “be weird” have become both antonyms and synonyms: fun house reflections of a dominant American ideology of standing out to fit right in, and self-acceptance as the highest calling. What Mr. Walz is calling “weird” is not atypicality as such, but an up-in-your-business insolence out of step with his American ideal. Fair is foul and foul is fair, as the sisters in “Macbeth” conjured; to be weird is to be normal, and to want orthodoxy is just weird.

Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad. More about Jason Farago