Joy, Joy, Joy

Ok, kids, warble this earworm along with me if you remember it!

🎶 Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy. Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy! Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy. Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy, joy! 🎶

Now, your mind may hark back to distant childhood, placing that tune with an inane cartoon with a more inaner name The Ren & Stimpy Show, which was about the trivial exploits of a chihuahua and a… Manx cat? WAIT. Stimpy was a malkin, not an ugly canine? *Quickly ruffles through Wikipedia and reddit pages.* My stars and garters, he’s a dang alley cat. My entire childhood was a lie! *Sobs uncontrollably.*

Anyways, the bouncy bucked song isn’t just briefly featured in one demented episode of a kid’s show—thirty years later, it’s the theme song for a real presidential campaign.

Haven’t you heard? Kamala Harris has brought the joy back to politics. A quick Google search produces the following headlines: “Harris Used to Worry About Laughing. Now Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign” glows the New York Times; “Harris and Walz reintroduce joy to Democrats their first week on the campaign trail” waxes NPR; “Harris and Walz seize on joyful message in contrast to darker Trump themes” insists the Washington Post.

Lest you think the relishing narrative is a media creation, hatched up in so many journalist Slack channels, it’s being incanted by non-newspaper copymen. Alex Soros, heir to globalist impresario George Soros, trills, “We’re the happy team!” (I’d be pleased as punch too if my dad clocked in as a hexa-billionaire.) Harris harpies—a moniker I’m sure her supporters would gladly accept as some women’s lib-totem—are chittering with star-spangled jollity.

Kamala’s an effervescent fount of felicity, don’t you see? As for her Elmer Fudd-esque, fish-story-spinning running mate? Well, Tim Walz is just a chuffed duff, the kind of fun-dad you call when you’re waylaid on the side of the road to remove your flat tire and screw the spare on. And they feed off each other’s infectious glee. “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Walz effused to Harris before a stadium of supporters, which was followed by a predictable, made-for-silver-screen collective swoon.

Donald Trump, for his part, is the antithesis of Wordsworth’s “happy warrior.” His first campaign, and current quest to recrown himself, was formed around an inchoate revolt against the establishment’s malversation: corporate outsourcing, immigrants stealing jobs, foreign firms undercutting domestic production, the working man being a dummy for exploitation, screwing over, and dispossession. Trump is the arch complainer; he’s proven deficient at enacting actual solutions. And the Republican flank, which he leads, naturally excels at loyal opposition.

The Republicans are rarely sunshine and lollipops. But brimming contentment from an avowed leftist like Harris? Such giddiness does not compute. Nowhere in the political philosopher’s wildest dreams and writings does a liberal feel lief. A pleased progressive is like a vegetarian cannibal: a category error, an oxymoron, an ontological impossibility.

A left-wing march over the glories of Edenic existence sounds like an absurdist comedy send-up performed by laid-off Buzzfeed staffers, to tickle the gills of absolutely no one. Comedy, it’s said, is tragedy plus time. But ongoing material scarcity, matched with the incorrigible racism and sexism belched out by claw-toothed bigots, make America a ruinous death land. To generously quote one terminally online shrieker, we apparently live in a “late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w[ith] record wealth inequality, [zero] social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world … [you] have to be delusional to look at life in our country [right now] and have any [amount] of hope or optimism.”

Sounds pretty miserable, no? But how else should a leftie be? Inequality abounds. The banker makes more money than the short-order cook; the movie star is more popular than the oncologist. My neighbor drives a Porsche while I’m stuck in a used Honda. Stephen Curry drains three-pointers as easily as he blinks, but I can’t mow my front yard without sweating through my shirt. Tom Cruise has a lunar-bright smile while my front tooth is partially chipped and the cavity on my back-left molar makes eating Skittles taste like chewing glass.

How is any of that fair? The United States is chock-full of wobbling lumps of lards who daily inhale enough calories to sustain the English army during the Hundred Years’ War, while other countries get by on thin gruel of dirt, stones, and rain water. More egregious, we selfish yanks keep cutting a swath in the ozone layer running our endlessly humming machines like refrigerators, air conditioners, dishwashers, furnaces, TVs, and toasters, while the rest of the world bakes into a sultry sludge. Oh, and everywhere, including in these unaffordable divided states, nobody has enough spare cash to buy a place to live, apartment or house, or even anything to eat. We’re stuffing ourselves to the point of epidemic obesity, yet we’re malnourished and our rib cages poke through our wispy skin. We enjoy so much technical abundance that everyone is a smartphone zombie, yet the non-stop charging of all our batteries is frying the earth. Meanwhile, countless “isms”s haunt our precious souls: racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, lookism, ability-ism, competency-ism, being-good-at-stuff-ism!

As Lionel Shriver wrote, “[t]here’s little to do in a utopian oasis but sip coconut water. So the journey must never be completed.” That’s why caring progressives advocate for the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-All, DEI employment mandates, minimum wage hikes, widening the social-safety net, caloric crackdowns, YIMBY zoning reform, boosting the supply of public housing, stretching the Civil Rights Act to protect all races and sexual proclivities, a guaranteed income benefit, a national tribunal of authorized levellers to grind away at all of our differences. Until all these policies are passed and phased widely in, our “more perfect union” will be a cruel joke, committing endless distress on our fragile self esteem. There’s to be no joy in Mudville, because we’re all perpetually falling short of, to quote Vice President Harris, “everybody ending up in the same place.”

Ah, the supreme joy of forced egalitarianism. You can’t help but cackle along!

🎶 Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy. Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy! Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy. Happy, happy, joy, joy, happy, happy, joy, joy, joy! 🎶

*Smashes cranium between copies of The Communist Manifesto and White Fragility.*