I have been following the US presidential campaign avidly. This week Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate. As I have mentioned previously, the thing that gets me excited is the absolute importance of messaging in the political marketing. And Tim Walz’s success is the perfect example. The New Yorker suggested that ‘Tim Walz is surely the only major-party Vice-Presidential nominee whose candidacy was propelled into being by a single word: “weird”’.
I had posted to someone on this platform that the Democrats’ use of “weird” to describe Trump and Vance the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates is quite brilliant messaging. It is a gentle insult with little comeback. Being weird makes them strange, perhaps a little uncomfortably odd or bizarre.
If you are made to start seeing Trump’s as weird it starts you questioning the rationality of his behaviour. And that, of course, is something that doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny at all. The MAGA followers can brush of claims that Trump is misogynistic, narcissistic or egregious but it how can you defend him from accusations of weirdness?
Trump’s response so far appears to be quite ineffectual, even childish: “Well, they’re the weird ones”. Which proves just how effective it is.
The story of weird
Weird (weird) originally meant having the power to control fate, from old English “wyrd”, which literally meant “that which comes”.
The Fates
In Greek mythology a human’s destiny was controlled by the Moirai (and in Roman mythology the Fates). They were three sisters, each had a different task. Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured its allotted length, and Atropos cut it off with her shears. Sometimes, they were linked to time: Atropos to the past; Clotho to the present; and Lachesis to the future.
So having the power to control fate, the Fates and the Moirai became known in English as the Weird Sisters.
The Weird Sisters
As you are probably aware some of the most famous characters Shakespeare are the three witches from Macbeth. Who does not instantly recognise the most famous witches’ potion:
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog …?
And its incantation:
… Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
The three witches are prophets that convince Macbeth of his fate to become king of Scotland (and also give him an ambiguous clue to his ultimate failure).
The three witches of Macbeth are known as the Weird Sisters and they are Shakespeare’s manifestation of the Fates. So now we have the Weird Sisters transformed from divine goddesses to being portrayed as eerie, other-wordly witches. Shakespeare has them described as:
You should be women,
and yet your beards forbid me to interpret
that you are so.
So, in Macbeth, Shakespeare’s personification of the Weird Sisters shifts the meaning of “weird”. It shifts from being controlling fate to that of being strange, uncanny or supernatural.
Tempting fate
And, as no fan of Trump, I can only help that Tim Walz’s accusation of being weird brings him the same fate as Macbeth. That is, thwarted in his quest for power.