• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, July 30, 2024

It’s been a little over a week since Biden stepped down and Kamala stepped up.

In the meantime, both political news and an astronomical number of social media memes -- many for Harris springing from grassroots sources -- have broken at the speed of light.

So, if you’ve been wondering what one of the earliest, the “Kamala is brat” meme means, you can just skip that. It’s already over.

Not so with the whole coconut thing, though. It has rolling power. The latest New York magazine cover, suggesting the energetic graphic sauciness of the magazine’s earliest days, shows the VP in a suit, sitting cross-legged atop a 40-foot coconut, tiny people gathered on the ground around her.

Even here, in this giant joke, she has the big Mo.

The coconut meme was originally created by Republican opponents who used it to label her as “crazy” (a natural go-together with “coconuts.”)

The nut of coco thing actually originated at a White House ceremony, captured on video, where Harris spoke in May 2023. She recounted an expression that she said her mother used.

"Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?"  Harris asked, laughing, directing the thought to young people.  "You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she explained, giving them a more inclusive view of life and history.

It turns out Harris’ ability to laugh at and to flip -- in an ironic and joyous way -- what was intended to hurt her, has been one of the campaign’s superpowers.

And with the energy and fresh relief she brings into politics these days, who can resist a laugh? 

Well, certainly Donald J. Trump can. The nonstop attention he’s gotten used to receiving has been drowned out by news of Harris’ history-making campaign, and the non-crowd-pleasing ditties of his VP pick JD Vance. It’s eating Trump up.

At a Michigan rally, the former president started out with “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” and then proceeded: “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”

That didn’t seem to stick, so he graduated to “She was a bum, three weeks ago, a bum,“ vaguely echoing the “I coulda been a contender” line in “On the Waterfront.”

Others in the world of extreme MAGA have called her a “DEI hire” --  a term they just learned recently.

In a more basic insult for women, they also named her “Jezebel.” Jezebel is not only an ancient Biblical reference, but the actual designation for prostitutes in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Hulu series and dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985.

That novel really speaks JD Vance’s language, since it’s all about suppressing female agency and individuality, and the abolition of women's reproductive rights. In the "Handmaid" world, women are stratified, depending on the fruitfulness of their wombs.

Since the convention, Vance has not been shy about doubling and tripling down on his 2022 off-putting rant referring to Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made.” 

He has repeatedly been offered the opportunity to apologize, but has not.

He even went to the social-media mat with Rachel from “Friends” (Jennifer Aniston) who, like millions of women, was outraged by his statement.

You know that the situation is odd when even former Rep. Trey Gowdy decided to come out in defense of Catholic nuns, whom he correctly maintained are “living their lives in service to others. “

The difference between now for Kamala and 2016 for Hillary is that women have grown steel in their backbones. They are fed up with the old gender cons and the needless suffering that comes with rolling back hard-won gains.

That’s why one of Kamala’s phrases is “We choose freedom.” Women know exactly what she’s talking about.

Freedom is a basic American value.

But Dems have found a simpler, more visceral way to respond to Republican extremism, avoiding the usual schoolyard epithets. It started with possible Harris VP-candidate, Gov. Tim Walz, a plainspoken Minnesotan. “Wanting government to be in your bedroom is weird,” he said, repeating the word “weird,” while listing the many other weird things that Vance stands for.

“Weird” is immediately understood, and lands viscerally, even with a hint of humor. “Weird” works better than talking about the “end of democracy” which makes listeners want to close their ears.

As a would-be policer of women’s wombs, Vance has been taken to task on the Internet for the last two weeks. There have been plenty of memes created about him, but also, weirdly, by him.

In February 2024, Vance posted a video with the headline “Woman gets violated by a dolphin and enjoys it.” This is true. He topped it with his own inscrutable comment, “Maybe the internet was a mistake.” Deeply weird. This led to the online world wondering if Vance were into “dolphin porn.”

As for the couch meme, which gathered so much online steam, that particular train wreck proved to be false.

But people still had a field day with it, because to verify that it was a deepfake, the backstory had to be explained, and that’s a little like answering “When did you stop beating your wife?” 

Once the AP announced that it was not true, everybody wanted to know what the fake line inserted into “Hillbilly Elegy” was.  

The big reveal? In his own words, the line suggested that JD had indulged in inter-cushional relations with a couch.

Perhaps Vance was forward-thinking in suggesting, “Maybe the internet was a mistake. “