Ain’t that America

I had the slightly uncanny experience of discovering via this NYT story that Joe Biden had been giving a talk in Sioux Falls SD last night, three miles down the road from where I was in the middle of getting ripped off by a scamming bartender. What was uncanny about this is that neither I nor any of the people I was with, some of whom are also political obsessives, were aware of this circumstance. Sic transit gloria mundi yo:

The room he was speaking in was the size of a small plane hangar. It was in a detached building out back of a sprawling Best Western that was constructed in the 1960s, the hotel’s low-ceiling hallways a maze of worn brown carpeting pungent with the scent of chlorine from the “indoor water park.” Sheets of paper taped to the doors outside the banquet hall in which Mr. Biden spoke read, “Photo ID Required. No Weapons. No Large Bags.” There was little else in the way of security. No magnetometers. No Secret Service agents searching bags or waving wands.

There was no great motorcade out front or a media circus inside. There were almost no reporters there. The former president’s speech was not televised.

This is the thin gruel the Times is ladling out, in an attempt to make some sort of story out of the facts that Jill Biden is currently pitching a memoir and Hunter Biden has suddenly become a thing on Twitter, while Joe — a hard man not to like — is hauling his terminally ill 83-year-old body out to a shabby Best Western on the outskirts of Sioux Falls. (Democrats in potential disarray is the Stairway to Freebird of 21st century elite journalism).

The Hunter Biden thing is genuinely amusing, as good ‘ol Hunter is bringing the fire with very much no fucks to give:

I hung around downtown Sioux Falls yesterday afternoon for a bit — I had never been there before — and I was struck by how we now live in what a friend of my brother the history professor has dubbed “a post-coastal” nation. Sioux Falls is a city of 200,000 people, but it has something of a flourishing arts scene, various sushi and espresso places, and a movie theater where you can take in Art Cinema classics like the 1985 Soviet film Come and See (great date movie). There was also a vinyl record store straight out of High Fidelity, lots of craft brewing etc.

Which is to say that South Dakota may be “redder than Mars” per the Times’ story, but there are plenty of deep blue patches even in the heart of Trumpian darkness, and this is becoming more and more true all the time, as civilization finds its way into the Heartland ™.

As for bad mistakes, Joe Biden made a few, but it’s wholly admirable that he’s out there blasting Trump’s depravity in the twilight of his life:

At times halting and hard to understand, at other times yelling clearly at the top of his voice, he tore into the current occupant of the Oval Office and his “appalling vanity projects.”

“My god,” Mr. Biden scoffed, “tearing down the East Room of the White House to make room for a ballroom more fitting of Versailles?” [I think he meant the Vegas strip but whatever].

The crowd booed.

“Or writing his name on the Kennedy Center,” Mr. Biden said, and they booed some more. He seemed to be enjoying himself now. “Or building an arch that would dwarf the Lincoln Memorial,” he continued, “or turning the Reflecting Pool into something you might see in a theme park!”