On Oct. 31st, Lady Gaga tweeted a video of herself dressed in camo, standing by a lifted truck, and “drinking” a beer. In the video she promotes voting Biden and tells her fans she’ll be in her home state of PA, presumably to campaign for Joe.
Upon seeing it I laughed out loud.
The clip is laughably patronizing—but not like the celebrity Imagine video. It’s tone deaf in a way that’s ideologically ignorant.
What she’s attempting to do is obvious. She’s trying to play the part of a typical republican-rural voter: a truck-lovin’, beer-drinkin’, camo-wearin’ rural Pennsylvanian. What she pulls off is a hilarious stereotype, the kind of joke I might make about myself. She thinks this is what gets republicans excited; that we’re so stupid all we need is a truck, beer, and camo to be convinced of their sincerity.
This is the kind of nonsensical thinking that lead Joe Biden to believe playing Despacito to a crowd of Hispanics would win their votes.
Why do they think this about us?
It’s because of the way leftists categorize the world and particularly, people. When everything is viewed through the lens of intersectionality, putting on the surface level trappings of a group is enough to convince them that you are a part of the tribe. Intersectionality demands only mere box checking as a prerequisite to group entry (i.e. all women are feminists because I am a woman and a feminist). By that reasoning, drinking Buds and driving trucks and wearing camo is enough to be a rural/flyover voter.
Gaga isn’t able or is unwilling to see the wholeness of the people she’s attempting to reach out to. Rural groups, like all other groups, are to be categorized by frivolous costuming or preferred beverage. Her intersectionality goggles have blinded her. She is trapped in a world where dressing in homage to Native Americans is tantamount to stealing their culture, to being one of them, regardless of intention. This appropriation is the same, (I ask you to set aside the race issue for a moment and view it from simple costuming), however, instead of wearing Navaho War Dress, she’s put on camo shorts.
The worldview goes something like this:
When a white man dresses as a Navaho Chief for Halloween, he has stolen that culture, he has become a Navaho Chief.
When a white woman puts on camo, leans against a truck, and drinks a beer, she has become a rural voter.
This is why the left thinks playing Despacito or invoking “I’m going to get me a beer” is enough to become something they aren’t. Granted, this is a surface level examination of this bizarre, albeit, hilarious phenomenon.
Personally, I wish Lady Gaga would take her own advice and stop being such a drag, but I suppose she was born this way.
Cultural Revue 