Photo: Lorie Shaull/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic
Kase Wickman at Vanity Fair calls it big dad energy. Tim Walz brings “a long military career, recognition in the Midwest, a white male presence…” And how about the image of Walz hugging a piglet at the Minnesota State Fair? And the video of Walz thinking about finding a corn dog…
But Walz’s daughter, Hope, is a vegetarian.
“Turkey, then,” says Walz.
“Turkey’s meat,” answers Hope.
“Not in Minnesota,” is the governor’s rejoinder. Having the upper hand over turkeys must play some kind of role in big dad identity.
But there are also clips of Tim Walz proudly introducing Hope as a Montana State University grad and social worker. And when young Gus Walz wanted to adopt a dog from a rescue group, Tim Walz agreed. And the family encouraged others to do the same.
Yes, Tim Walz has plenty of likeable qualities. Staunch support for public schools. Signed a law to provide breakfasts and lunches to all Minnesota schoolkids for free. Served as faculty adviser to a student Gay-Straight Alliance. No stock portfolio? The smile; that empathetic heart tap.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz has taken criticism over the handling of BLM protests, but also praise—for enabling the prosecution of George Floyd’s murder, and for ushering in substantive reforms dealing with police aggression. Walz has signed laws for paid family and medical leave, and has made Minnesota’s public colleges free for students from households earning less than $80,000 a year. Walz signed reproductive care and choice rights into Minnesota law, legalized recreational pot, and stood up for unions. The governor reportedly speaks Mandarin, and comes off as just the sort of confident, loyal collaborator Kamala Harris needs to steal the populist thunder from the right. USA! USA! Meet our happy warrior who went to college on the GI Bill, and looks so comfortable in camo. Nightmare for MAGA!
The Harris-Walz ticket seeks to paint itself in uplifting hues, in vivid contrast to their dour, insufferable rivals. At the same time, this joyful pair is auditioning for the job of overseeing some of the world’s most elaborate mechanisms of military supremacy.
For generations, candidates have faced questions about their degree of military zeal much like the ones Tim Walz faces today. There’s a pattern in their responses.
* In 1984, Ronald Reagan subtly cast doubt on Walter Mondale with an advertisement featuring a Russian grizzly bear moving over woodlands, and a narrator asking, “Isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?”
* In 2004, George W. Bush’s TV campaign cast Sen. John Kerry as soft on terror by showing ominous footage of wolves gathering in a dark forest while a narrator warned: “Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.”
* In 2015, presidential candidate Ted Cruz created a knock-off of Reagan’s bear advertisement. The new one, called Scorpion, meant to mock Barack Obama for perceived weakness in the face of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda (represented by a scorpion in the desert).
Candidate Kerry went so far as to dress up in camo and stalk geese in a cornfield. Then-VP Dick Cheney explained Kerry’s performance as giving voters “a better sense of John Kerry the guy.” Cheney seemed unimpressed, pointing out that Kerry’s camouflage jacket looked new.
There was that presidential campaign stop in 2008, when Hillary Clinton reminisced about getting up early and shooting a duck “with a bunch of my friends, all men.”
The pattern continues in 2024, as Amy Klobuchar praises Kamala Harris’s VP pick by saying:
“What a fantastic choice, when you look at someone, ‘cause not many VPs have stood in a deer stand in ten-degree weather. Tim Walz has done that. He can handle anything.”
I mean, what?
Intolerable Choices
The PR gestures bring up an unspoken reality. A reality that people who aspire to influential federal posts must telegraph to the people. The nation may objectify, occupy, and kill at a president’s urging, taking taxes from the people to do it. USA! USA! And isn’t the writing always on the wall for the environmentalists, the animal advocates, and the proponents of peace?
When pro-peace candidates step up, it’s always “Don’t be foolish. We’ll talk about substance later. First, we need to win this election.” Even if the substance is about turning off a flow of resources enabling demolition, starvation, and death. So, in which election will we be able to start voting for our values?
For the time being, Biden and Harris will keep progressives on the margins. They’ll continue the grotesque militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. They’ll even undermine the long-established right of persecuted human beings to seek asylum. Will Harris and Walz be different?
The situation in Gaza is intolerable, Walz has said. It is. As I finish writing this article, I read about the Al-Tabin school in Gaza City, where Israeli forces with rockets massacred more than 100 displaced Palestinian refugees—children and adults—getting ready for their morning prayer. Who wouldn’t support a permanent ceasefire? Who wouldn’t support an embargo against shipping weapons to Israel? Who isn’t outraged that billions of dollars annually—dollars taken from the people—fund another nation’s military campaign of genocidal violence? Who wants the representatives we elect to be bought out by a government that perpetuates that violence? And yet, Walz recently backed out of a meeting with Gazan families who wanted to press these same points.
And when activists for Palestine disrupted Kamala Harris’s Detroit speech, the VP retorted, “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that; otherwise, I’m speaking.”
The Harris-Walz craving for uninterrupted momentum is understandable. But to witness the VP of the United States characterize pro-peace protest as a gift to Trump was chilling. The next day, Harris’s national security adviser took to social media to say Harris won’t support an arms embargo. But if Harris and Walz want to keep empathetic, energetic people engaged in current human affairs, squelching a peace movement isn’t the way.
In choosing Walz, Harris appeared to sense that. Harris picked the governor who welcomed universal school meals to Minnesota, not the one who’s compared pro-Palestine advocacy to the KKK and threatened financial penalties for campuses that divest from Israel.
And in a subsequent rally in Glendale, Arizona, Harris paused to acknowledge the voices of protest and the importance of a ceasefire.
There’s every reason to keep up the pressure and insist on real results—for Palestine, for asylees, for the unhoused, for dismantling the carceral state, and, while we’re at it, for state fairs that aren’t celebrations of human dominion over other animal life.
Because Hope’s onto something. Turkeys are made of flesh and blood. And we need to get beyond our camo-clad worldview on every level if we’re really “not going back.”
The post Comfy in Camo: Getting to Know Tim appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lee Hall.
Lee Hall | Radio Free (2024-08-13T05:58:04+00:00) Comfy in Camo: Getting to Know Tim. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/08/13/comfy-in-camo-getting-to-know-tim/
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