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.