You Can Start Over, America

Before we can be Great, let's try to be... Good.

Welcome to the Great Job Nat™ Sunday Newsletter! My freebie thinkpiecething I will once again be sending out every week. If you want access to DEAR DIARIES (random thoughts / cartoons / more personal tidbits I send to subscribers a few x a month to really solidify our parasocial friendships), upgrade here. All of you paid subscribers help keep the lights on and I love ya xoxo <3

Okay, so. I think that we all want to be okay, but we disagree on how to be okay and we disagree on who should be okay. Some people want everyone to be okay. And other people don’t want everyone to be okay because they think that if everyone’s okay then they won’t get to be as okay because there aren’t enough okays to go around. And then there’s the people that want to be SO okay that they want to steal your okay from your pocket, you plebeian slime, you are not allowed to be okay because they must be the Kings of Okay.*

(*These people currently run our government.)

Okay? Okay.

And of course: many people think that things used to be more okay than they are now, so they’re reaching backward looking for some false idea of a lost okay that they can hold onto right now. Flailing a sorry hand into the backseat of the car, searching for something that’s not there, other hand on the steering wheel, barreling forward at 8000 miles an hour, unaware of the cliff they’re about to drive off of because (of course) they’re looking through the back window.

Too many metaphors! Nat, tie this shit down to reality…

Here's the story: I uprooted my entire life in Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco to work for a young progressive running against Nancy Pelosi because things are largely not okay right now, and we all know politics needs to be done differently to fix that.

I experience moments of whiplash constantly. I—a very "not political" person with no political pedigree—am currently working as the lead campaign videographer for one of the biggest congressional races right now. I'm not "supposed" to be doing this job because I'm not the kind of person that "does politics," and to be honest, neither is The Candidate* I work for. He thinks about politics differently than the traditional politicians who've smothered our discourse in safe, predictable messaging.

And that's the whole frickin’ point—to do this thing differently.

From inside the machine, I'm learning what actually moves people, cuts through noise, builds momentum. Look, I’m not sure yet (I’m still new!!), but there may be a formula to political insurgency that has nothing to do with traditional campaign wisdom. So, this Sunday. That’s what I’m here to talk to you about.

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*DISCLAIMER: Who am I working for, you ask? I’ll refer to him in my essays as The Candidate. I just don’t need Google searches of his name to end up on these pages, for his sake and mine. SEO is a bitch. You understand xoxo

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Punk Rock Will Save Us All

Step 1: Be Different. Very different.

Obviously, I joined the campaign because it’s not a typical campaign. Why would I do politics the normal (bad) way? I don’t believe in the system, so why work for someone who wants to uphold it? Girl, I’m not.

On a related note, in the book Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed, author Curtis White proposes just what can fix the world: counterculture. I.e. doing things differently. Punk rock, baby. Radical discontent. A refusal to “bend over and take it” (hot). Counterculture will save us all.

He cites the English Romantics as a prime example as to how dropping out of society created a new way of thinking. After the mess that was the French Revolution, the Romantics said “fuck this shit” (an exact quote, ask any historian) and withdrew from society. They didn’t buy into their culture’s “rationalism, its industry, its obsession with business and trade, and, most personally, they dropped out of the English class system and its social hierarchies.” Were they to succumb to society’s stupid stipulations, they felt they would “grow up absurd.”

Grow up absurd. Lol. The more my brain is finger-blasted by the internet onslaught of dank memes mixed with war crimes mixed with puppy videos, the more I’m certain I must eject from the absurd plane that is modern society before it crash lands into the middle of the ocean. But I digress—

White argues it's not about fixing the world as it is. It's about creating your own version of what a fixed world looks like outside the system itself.

I.e. In order to heal our ailing world, you must remove thyself from the body politic—you, one cell, breaking off like a bubble from suds. A separate organism, dividing and expanding into a brand new amoeba of your own personal beliefs and visions and ideas of how the world should be, only to one day re-enter the body from whence you came as a kind of reverse-tumor, spreading healthy cells through the diseased mass.

That's what an insurgent campaign has to do. You can't beat the machine by becoming the machine. You have to become something different, something that makes people stop and say "what was that?

Which leads us to step two in our politically-insurgent campaign formula: SCREAM!!! …strategically.

Becoming a Political Poet

Step 2: Get attention. All press is good press! Right?

If I were forced at gunpoint to teach a course on something, it would be: rhetoric. Defined by Webster as “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.”

In other words, I’d like to think that clicking words into the just the right order to get you to move left or right is my specialty, baby. I’m a pickup line artist but not to get into your pants; I just want to get into your innermost psyche.

What I’m saying is: I’d crush if there were an Olympics in refrigerator magnets. I’d slap those things around into a poem faster than Robert Frost.

What I’m saying is: I’m like Hemingway if he were a used car salesman. And a girl.

What I’m saying is: I’m working as a videographer for a political campaign because it’s up to me to Google Translate politicspeak into peoplespeak, and that has perhaps never been such a vital ingredient to a campaign as it is now. I am honored/chuffed/terrified/excited to have the privilege of giving a campaign’s voice a voice-ier voice.

I am Nat, the political poet. Or political… screenwriter? Because these days, video is king. It’s the primary mode in which we get our information, for better or for worse (it’s worse) (TikTok is a major news source haha RIP) (we knew the end was here when Instagram ripped off TikTok with Reels).

Substacker Kyla Scanlon wrote an insightful breakdown about the nature of the attention economy in politics in her post “Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely.”

She breaks down something I've been seeing firsthand on the campaign trail through three recent examples:

1. Trump bombing Iran and announcing it on Truth Social

2. Zohran Mamdani winning NYC's mayoral primary with a deeply online campaign of fresh and new messaging

3. Some startup called Cluely raising $15 million through Jake Paul / brainrot-style marketing tactics —to show how power actually works now.

She makes the point that everything is upside-down: attention used to help create value. Now attention is the value. Scanlon calls it a new supply chain: Attention → Speculation → Allocation.

Basically: attention becomes infrastructure (it decides what gets funded, elected, built), narrative becomes capital (it moves money and sentiment), and speculation is how belief gets converted into actual outcomes before institutions even catch up.

To really hit home the point: Information flows used to serve resource allocation. Now, resource allocation serves attention flows. Trump makes foreign policy via posts. Mamdani wins through "narrative discipline and command of the digital." A startup gets funded because they're good at capturing attention, not because their product necessarily works.

Campaign videos and strategic storytelling build the infrastructure that determines whether we get the resources (votes! donations! coverage!) to win. In many ways, videos don't just support the campaign; they are the campaign—and they only work if they’re authentically different.

(I’m exhausted.) (But it’s fine.) (I love it.) (Not sarcasm.)

Make America, Not Again

Step 3: Never look back. The past is your ex, bitch. Move on.

The Candidate and I are brainstorming slogans for the campaign. Our first take: “Let’s Get Out of this Mess.” Hmm. Close, but feels too… negative. We can’t make the same mistakes our felled politicians made before us. No more running campaigns on “Orange Man Bad.”

You know what I’m talking about. The past 800 years of anti-Trump campaigns (that’s how long he’s been in office, right?) have all been 100% about how much he sucks and 0% about his opponent’s actual platform. It’s annoying. It’s ineffective. Stop talking about the Orange Man in general. Stop singing the same sad problems and start talking about whatever the better future is going to be, GODDAMN IT.

Sorry. I get heated about this sometimes.

We land on: “We Can Fix This.”

We’re not sure yet. But, I like it. It’s positive. It’s forward looking.

It’s not Make America Great Like It Used to Be Or Whatever Even Though It Really Wasn’t As Great As We’re Claiming It Was But Shh Shut Up Just Listen to Us And Don’t Think About How This Entire Presidential Regime Is Just a Drug Front Disguised As a Coffee Shop.

Sigh. The dangers of false nostalgia. Reminds me — in Trisha Lowe’s Socialist Realism, she cites:

"The danger of nostalgia," Svetlana Boym writes, "is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill". For Boym, the nostalgic desire to return to an imaginary and untainted homeland is the foundation upon which nationalist movements-from xenophobic fascism to white supremacy—are built.”

She goes further by saying (and yes, I did think about cutting down the quote but it’s just too good):

Svetlana Boym sees nostalgia as the by product of a capitalist world in which progress is fetishized. According to Boym, humans were once allowed a "space of experience" - a span of psychic time that allowed us to assimilate the recent past into the present, and to reconcile it with the unknown horizon of the future, But capitalism's centralized, often nationalistic ideal of a better future is inextricably tied with rapid spatial expansion, colonization, and renewal. Speed becomes essential. In order to survive, we can no longer live in the present. We are forced to dwell in a compulsive and never-ending race toward the future. And in this new normal, there is no longer any psychic space for synthesizing our experiences. We suffer a sense of constant displacement. Exhausted, we desire a place to rest. We mourn the comfort of the vanished past, made all the more glamorous by our inability to wholly assimilate it into our present, our inability to process its flaws. We begin to long for home. Nostalgia, therefore, is a symptom of our ever-encroaching capitalist future. A future that promises us everything but the solace for which we long.

We Can Fix This implies a tomorrow, not a yesterday.

Ah, the vision of a Fixed World.

Orange Man who?

Til Next Week!

Against my better judgment, we’re going to try for one of these Newsletters next Sunday. I keep trying to make them shorter. I can’t. I love you.

Back to the campaign I go!!!

xx Nat