Venkatesh Rao

Forgot perhaps the biggest piece of the shame/regret/forgiveness layer of the OS, which Biden is reinstalling: a proper place in public life for death and mourning, which occasion perhaps the most sincere displays of shame/regret/guilt/etc. Biden’s brought that back in a big way.

Some people suspected the constant presence of the late Beau Biden in the narrative was more than a little staged. But there has been a core of sincere emotion there. The sense of this inauguration also being the first public mourning for 400k dead from Covid also feels real.

Stuff like this Arlington ceremony... they just didn’t seem meaningful when Trump did them. He seemed puzzled like a blind person at a silent movie. At some level he didn’t seem to get why people were doing somber ceremonies. I suspect he thought funerals are just extreme PC.

There’s a sense of narrative claustrophobia being lifted. There’s a lot more room in the grand narrative for a spectrum of narratives that don’t need to all cohere. This pluralism is ironically what the trumpist narrative monoculture demonized as a monolith. Pure projection.

It’s not that their story wasn’t being heard. They seemed to think it was the only one that had a right to be heard. When you’re used to a narrative monopoly, pluralism feels like censorship.

Jeez he’s walking the last block jogging over to barriers to shake hands. The instinct for humanizing optics on display here is the polar opposite of trump’s instinct for imperial grandiosity. I can’t recall how Trump did it, but I would guess limo to the footsteps.

Which is ironic, since Biden represents continuation of an imperial mode of US government but looks like Amtrak Joe, while Trump ran the show like a petty small town council but acted like an emperor