Little did we know, Kamala Harris’s secret weapon is laughter and joy. When Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic nominee for President and Harris stepped up, there was, of course, a great sigh of relief from many people — with every public event, Biden had begun to look less and less capable — but I can’t be the only person who was surprised by the sudden energy Harris brought to the campaign simply by being happy.
She is still the fierce prosecutor she always was, and that is what I expected her to be, with some trepidation, as I’m not a big fan of prosecutors generally. But alongside her fierceness she brings a sense of playfulness and joy. These feelings have been too often missing from politics and, in many ways, from all public life.
As we are seeing now, there is a great hunger for such feelings. It was smart of the campaign to get permission to use Beyoncé’s “Freedom” as their theme song — it’s a powerful, inspiring song that is about not only the liberation but the joy of freedom: “I’m telling these tears, ‘Go and fall away, fall away,’ oh/ May the last one burn into flames.”
Years ago, I read a book on political emotions. I don’t remember which book it was (it’s in a box of research materials for a project abandoned more than 10 years ago), but it made the point that there are two motivating political emotions, emotions any campaign ought to seize on to get people active: anger and enthusiasm.
Anger is ultimately a limiting emotion. It is powerful, it can energize, it can blot all other emotions out, but it is caustic, corrosive, poisonous. Persistent anger eats away at everything it touches. The Republicans are seeing this. Their entire movement is founded on anger and resentment. It is incapable of building anything, it can only destroy. To keep the anger aflame, they must always seek new enemies. Persistent anger, though, is a kind of insanity. It warps all senses. The Harris campaign is not wrong to emphasize how weird and even creepy the Republicans are. A diet of nothing but anger and resentment leads to the kind of batshit weirdness that is the everyday life of the Republican party today.
With Joe Biden, the Democrats had no access either to anger or enthusiasm. Who in their right mind could ever get excited about Joe Biden, even when he was younger and more spry? There’s a good argument to make that government leaders shouldn’t need to be as charismatic as movie stars, that we’re hiring them to run a government not to be the next top model, but that’s not the world we live in. The President of the United States is a celebrity, and a significant part of their ability to get anything done depends on their celebrity power. Joe Biden may be many things, but a celebrity he is not.
I didn’t mean to write here about politics, though. Rather, I meant to write about play, pleasure, joy. We are rediscovering these to be useful emotions for the political realm, but they are also important to all other areas of life — and yet too often we downplay them, we are even embarrassed by them, as if the Protestant work ethic is something that ought to be celebrated rather than condemned.
I have thought for a long time that one of the failures of teachers is to not convey often enough the joy of learning and of knowledge. So often, from elementary school through a Ph.D., learning is framed as work. Serious learning is not seen as pleasurable, it is seen as cramming. Hours of drudgery in a library or lab. The pain of meticulous research. The ache of writing. The mental anguish of working through intellectual problems.
The question I sometimes ask colleagues is: Why did we spend so much time in school, getting all these advanced degrees, if the work is just misery? Maybe some people are total masochists and became academics because they are addicted to the pains and shames of the work, but I think most of us ended up in this life because in some way or another it offered fulfillment and even, at least occasionally, fun.
The joy of learning is a revolutionary joy. We do not celebrate it enough, we do not promote it enough, we do not often enough say, “I have given my life to intellectual pursuits because that is for me a joyful life.”
We are destroying higher education in the United States by conceiving of college as nothing more than vocational training. In that way of thinking about school, the university is a holding pen for potential employees. This hides all the best qualities of education. It muffles and muddles the possibilities for students. The question for new college students should not be, “What job do you want after college?” but “What joys do you seek here?” The jobs will take care of themselves if the students are able to learn how to find joy in learning and then how to direct their life toward such joys.
Is it any wonder that students are wondering about whether college is worth it? “Four more years of drudgery!” is not an appealing message, either in selling a political candidate or a reason to stay in school.
But it’s deeply American. Ours is a society both hedonistic and puritanical. Unfortunately, the push and pull of those cultural impulses mostly finds its expression in hypercapitalism. We allow the obscene wealth hoarding of the billionaire class because their hedonism is tied to money that in some completely delusional way most people seem to think the billionaires earned with their own sweat and blood rather than via inheritance, luck, exploitation, and government subsidies and tax breaks. Meanwhile, those of us who haven’t become billionaires have to put our work ethic to the grindstone and maybe one day we will be allowed some reprieve, some rest, some joy. Maybe after a long day we’ll be allowed to watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and get our little fix of hedonism before we fall asleep.
Imagine what might happen if we began to talk about the joys of thinking and learning…
A friend recently asked how I’d spent my day recently. I told him about working on a chapter on Virginia Woolf for an upcoming book, hard work requiring a lot of research, the deadline looming, but then I realized I was falling into the trap of making it all sound like a terrible burden. Certainly, some of the research is slow and the writing is difficult because there’s a lot of information to convey and ideas to sort through, but I also wanted my friend to know that this is joyful work for me. There is great pleasure in the research and I enjoy spending time with Virginia Woolf’s own writing. To read her sentences and wrestle with her ideas is one of the great joys of my life. Yes, this is hard work and by the end of the day I am mentally exhausted, but it is deeply satisfying and sometimes even thrilling work.
Or the other big project I’ve had this summer. You’ll be the first to hear about it outside a small group of people: I’m editing a selection of Carol Emshwiller’s stories for Third Man Books, due to be released in the fall of 2025. More on that later. (Top secret for now! Though contracts are signed, so I don’t mind mentioning it here.) The work has been often tedious: scanning stories, cleaning up the scans, looking through multiple published versions of stories to check for discrepancies, fixing typos, etc. But getting to spend significant time with Emshwiller’s work, which has meant so much to me throughout my life, selecting among too many great stories to reprint, and then really paying close attention to her diction, syntax, and punctuation … it feels like a privilege as much as it feels like work. It’s given me new ways of appreciating a writer who has given me much pleasure through the years.
One of the things queer politics offers is to decline shame and to find pride in queer joy, queer pleasure. This is a lesson we ought to bring to the world. Queer folks have survived all sorts of oppression and pain not only through stubbornness and anger, but through an absolute commitment to our pleasures and happiness — against all odds!
Let’s take up a credo Ani DiFranco sang quite a few years ago now: “I do it for the joy it brings. Because I am a joyful girl.”
The work we do, the society we live in, the politics we subject ourselves to … it should be for the joy it brings.
Because we all deserve to be joyful girls.
—–
images: Eijiro Kobayashi, “A Pagoda by Moonlight” (via Feuilleton); Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight; cartoon by M. Gray found somewhere on social media; “Flowers in the Window” by Vanessa Bell (via)
