Post-Debate Hot Takes & Hand-Wringing

I see after last week’s debate the Hot-Takes-and-Hand-Wringing-Industrial Complex has throttled up to maximum capacity. To be sure, it wasn’t exactly a high-point in American Presidential politics, and in a “normal” election year, this would have been a profound unforced error on the part of Biden and the Democrats. But it’s not a normal election, and so here’s my hot take: I actually don’t think it’s going to matter one bit.

Here’s my even hotter take: I don’t believe there’s actually a single undecided voter in the country.

American National Politics is built around the semi-mythical character of the “Undecided Voter”. Conventional wisdom says that in a given cycle, each party has an about even 40-something percent of the electorate that will vote for them no matter what, and then you have something between 10 and 20 percent who can be persuaded to one candiate or the other on “the merits”. I’ve never really believed that there were as many undecideds as we like to think. I think there are a lot of people who are performatively undecided, but they’re like the people who claim they tip servers “based on performance” but somehow only ever find reasons to make the tip smaller—they knew when they walked in that they were only going to tip the poor kid 10%, but they needed to make a production out of how it was the server’s fault, not them being an ass. And those people always seem to end up deciding the same way every cycle. (This applies to 3rd party “spoiler” candidates too—I don’t think they matter as much as we sometimes like to pretend. Literally no-one who voted for Jill Stein was ever going to vote for Clinton; Stein was the excuse, not the cause.) But the upshot is that many of the rituals of an American presidential election are built around the idea that there’s this pool of voters who are equally open to voting to either candidate, depending on who makes the better sales pitch.

This time, we’ve got something that hasn’t happened in living memory: both people running have already done the job. This is literally a redo of the election we had four years ago. Despite various outbreaks of magical thinking, everyone knew who was going to be running in this election as of thanksgiving 2020: It’s the sleepy-but-surprisingly-competent corporatist-centrist grandpa vs the racist tv game show host turned convicted felon and aspiring fascist, with the only third choice being a smörgåsbord of excuses providing air-cover for “fuck it, I’ve convinced myself that I have enough privilege that I can sit this one out.”

Nearly everyone already had to decide which of these two guys to vote for. The sales pitch this time isn’t the campaign, it’s their respective terms as president. I don’t believe that anyone is going to change their vote from last time, and I certainly don’t believe that anything this year is going to change anyone’s mind. Instead, the Dems need to realize that the opponent isn’t Trump or the Republicans, the opponent is apathy. Assume the number of “deplorable” votes is fixed. This isn’t a change hearts and minds election, this isn’t even really a competing policy election. This is a harm reduction election. This is a fight apathy and get-out-the-vote election. And you don’t fight apathy by putting a likable old guy with or without a cold and a stutter on stage next to the living manifestation of every mistake ever made by the American Experiment. Nobody changed their vote based on that tire fire that was on CNN, but nobody was ever going to.

And look, please don’t mistake any of the above for “optimism.” It’s not that we’re not in trouble. We’re in bad trouble, we’ve in terrible trouble. We’ve got problems the likes of which we can barely comprehend, but “a good debate performance” was the solution to none of them.

Lightsaber Hot-Take Follow-Up

Following up on last Monday’s Hot Takes on Lightsabers: Last week’s episode of The Bad Batch? That’s how you pivot a story around a lightsaber powering up. A perfect example of “oh snap, it just Got Real.”

(Also, are you watching Bad Batch? You should be watching Bad Batch)

Hot Takes on Lightsabers

This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon¹ and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte² over the weekend.

I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.

Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers

I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”

Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less

A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only³ came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.

This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.

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1. Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!

2. The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?

3. Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…

   1. This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
   2. Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
   3. It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide