As I essayed in this space last time we met, Minnesota governor and vice-presidential Tim “Coach” Walz is boring.
So boring is he, that occasionally I crack myself up envisioning incidents that place him in the most basic of Midwestern White Dude scenarios.
There’s one where he is trying to pay for his Applebee’s meal with a coupon, only to be told the coupon is not valid. He then, in my imagination, says, “Ah well, I guess I gotta get a new prescription for my peepers,” as he points to his glasses, “So I can read the fine print,” before giving a few cursory chuckles and reaching into his pocket for his debit card.
Another scenario that gives me a belly laugh is picturing Walz, late at night, hitting up the fridge in the Minnesota gubernatorial residence for a late-night snack of Kraft singles and Ritz crackers and saying to himself, “Ah, this must be what those Buddhists call ‘true enlightenment’,” as he chuckles to himself in his Midwestern Dad Laugh ™️.
I don’t spend all my day imagining these things about Tim Walz, but I am a writer who enjoys envisioning life stories for people I don’t know, and it’s easy with the VP hopeful’s bland persona. For instance, picture him at a John Mellencamp show, clamoring for “Jack and Diane,” while simultaneously begrudging himself for not having any Rolaids in his pocket to counteract the effects of those four chili dogs and two Miller Lights he wolfed down prior to the show.
Walz, like his Republican opponent, the best-selling author, faux hillbilly and sofa afficionado J.D. Vance, is pretty much a fully formed comedic character, and whomever is appointed to portray him on Saturday Night Live when the show begins its new season will have a definite real-life character to step into.
Poking fun at public figures, especially politicians, is as time-honored an American tradition as yelling at the TV when a referee makes a B.S. call.
What should be off-limits, however, are the children of those politicians, especially if said offspring are differently abled.
One of the big takeaway moments of last week’s Democratic National Convention was Walz’s son, Gus, experiencing a moment of unfettered joy and pride as his dad gave his acceptance speech and spoke about his family. “That’s my dad!” he was shown exclaiming, when the cameras broke away to show the Walz family.
The 17-year-old, who was so proud of his father, whom he obviously loves deeply, was moved to tears, and proved to be a viral moment to an otherwise ho-hum display of politics-as-usual that was the four-day affair in Chicago.
Now a lot of these political shindigs are all about appearances, and presented with as much of a stiff upper lip as the day and age still permits, but even though people are, generally speaking, less inhibited about showing emotions than they were in, say, 1973, most political figures and their families go through great lengths to bottle their emotions in the public eye.
The raw emotion shown by Gus Walz in that moment was special, and the young man’s family has been open about his neurodivergent status. Gus Walz was diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety disorder and a non-verbal learning disability.
According to the CDC, around 15-20% of the United States population is neurodivergent, meaning that their brains process information differently than the neurotypical brain.
As refreshing to some of us as Gus Walz’s unfettered display of love might have been, it also drew some nastiness from trolls, who crawled out from under various bridges onto public platforms to mock the young man.
Ann Coulter, who is looking more and more like a female version of He-Man’s nemesis Skeletor these days, shared the clip of Gus Walz to Twitter with the text “Talk about weird…” as accompaniment. She later deleted the tweet after backlash ensued.
More explicitly, radio host Jay Weber mocked the scene by calling it “embarrassing for both father and son,” and writing “’Meet my son, Gus. He’s a blubbering b---ch boy.”
The term “toxic masculinity” gets tossed about so frequently within the public discourse that who even knows what it means, or even if the term has any meaning left. I can’t define it, but I’d wager that it would include mocking a young man for displaying emotion, especially a young man with a disability.
Ableist discrimination is wrong, period, be it mocking neurodivergent people, or the rampant mockery that has ramped up concerning both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Whether such plumes of sewage come from a man or woman, bullying is toxic. On one hand, the idea that it is not acceptable for a male of the species to show emotions needs to vanish. Add to that the problem with mocking a young person.
All of the morons who have mocked Gus Walz on social media have been put in their place, and rightfully so. By all means, make fun of his dad, but Gus is off limits. The same goes for any political scions, be it Barron Trump or Pete Buttigieg’s twins: it’s hard enough being the sons and daughters of someone in the national spotlight, so let’s let them enjoy as kind and as normal of a childhood as possible.
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