I Accidentally Found J. D. Vance's House...

and what had already happened.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to talk about sidewalk chalk.

I accidentally found J. D. Vance’s house in the DC area recently when I suddenly came nose-to-nose with his Secret Service detail. I was looking for parking on a side street back in a neighborhood. They telepathically said to me YOU NO PARK HERE so I parked down the block and tried to look non-suspicious.

• No, I’m not going to tell you where it is. You can figure it out your own damn self. But by the end of this, you won’t feel like you have to bother.

I have NOT wanted to write about Vance because I can’t figure out which planet he’s from and I don’t want to speculate or provoke him into ripping his human skin off and then coming after me.

But if another crazy dumbass in the bushes with a rifle, or another crazed young man on a rooftop with a rifle, or a Venusian intergalactic assassin who’s landed here and walks into a gun store with a Chuck E. Cheese membership card as official identification and says “Please give me one of your projectile weapons that shoots your largest Earth bullet so I might kill your Republican nominee for President and thereby elevate my Venusian comrade to the highest office in the land so that we might harvest your livers” and the gun store guy says “On credit?” and gives him a high caliber Death-26 and a map to Mar-A-Lago because the alien didn’t look like a liberal snowflake then one big Earth bullet later Vance would officially become the GOP nominee and could get elected and therefore as a futurist now I have to think about him.

OK, so… <rubs eyebrows with heels of hands and lets out a long sigh of exasperation through rubbery lips> pblpbpbpbblbpplbbbppppppp… let’s talk about Vance.

Really, though, there’s only two things to say about Vance and the future:

• I don’t know what policy positions Vance would retain if he weren’t beholden to Trump — he’d probably remain as anti-immigrant, though — but Vance would probably embrace a lot of what’s in Project 2025. Project 2025 is more for someone like him than it ever was for Trump. Trump doesn’t believe in any of that stuff — except for the power it would afford him — but Vance is a true believer.

• As a leader it won’t occur to Vance to be kind. Not as a default position or priority. I had been giving him an unreasonable degree of the benefit of the doubt out of over-graciousness and because I am a person of unreasonable hope (I mean, have you met me?) but his doubling-down on his hate speech/admitted lies about Haitian immigrants within the state he represents has revealed some of his character and point of view. He doesn’t think of citizens and immigrants as Americans and Aspiring Americans; he thinks of them as Americans and Nonhuman Threats.

Anyway, given how not-liked Vance is overall, I don’t think that a Vance-Loomer ticket or Vance-Venusian Warlord Grabass ticket or a Vance-Garbage Fire ticket could beat the Harris-Walz ticket. I don’t think they’d have the numbers or the charisma.

Nevertheless, there’s still a few things we can learn from the past few months of Vance on the GOP ticket about ongoing tendencies and patterns and what they mean for the future through the election and beyond.

And they are extremely relevant to couch-fucking and about his house. I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, whenever I hear that someone took a shot at Trump — or hear about a mass shooting (that’s not at a school) — I default-assume that the shooter probably isn’t a liberal. I default-assume this not just because political shootings by liberals are very rare but also because killing people for political reasons isn’t really part of the present-day/recent decades liberals’ schema. That’s not how they express anger. It’s not that they couldn’t; it’s just that it isn’t something that occurs to them to do, generally speaking. They tend to believe that societal problems are the results of bad political or cultural systems, ie. systemic racism or Christian fundamentalism or Christian nationalism rather than the fault of particular individuals. Thus shooting individuals wouldn’t solve a systemic problem. Instead, they believe in changing minds, policies, and laws, and running for office.

• (I talked more about this in my Why We’re Not Going to Have Another Civil War series from this past spring. You can find all of them in the Archive.)

• (Conservatives sometimes scoff at the idea that liberals are less lethal when they’re pissed and that’s because conservatives assume that liberals’ thinking is like theirs. It’s an analytic goof called mirror-imaging: assuming the other thinks and behaves like you do.)

Second, most liberals don’t want Trump dead; they want him (and his whole point of view) repudiated.

Third, sorta because of the first two, it may be that we’ve developed a new rule of thumb (something that’s mostly true most of the time rather than exactly true all the time):

• When livid, conservatives commit mass shootings; liberals commit mass snarkings.

This is why liberals say Vance fucks couches. They know he doesn’t fuck couches. Because he doesn’t. Because really — that’s just absurd. Liberals aren’t saying it because they think it’s true; they’re saying it because it’s hilarious.

Mass snarkings by liberals is rooted in two things:

• To demonstrate what it is to still be sane in a world gone mad. Jon Stewart’s entire shtick is that of the last sane, good man in an insane world. Stephen Colbert’s entire shtick is that of the last gentle, kind man in a world gone cruel. That’s the spirit from which 95% of the online memes liberals make and spread comes from: To laugh and think from those positions pushes back the dark. That and…

• To illustrate something C. S. Lewis figured out while he was writing his novel The Screwtape Letters: that is if you mock the Devil he will flee from thee. The conceit of The Screwtape Letters —the content of the novel — is that of a senior demon writing letters to a junior demon on how to corrupt the hearts of man. Lewis posited that people should know how the Devil works so well that people might not just be (1) inoculated against evil but to be able to (2) outwit the Devil and outplay him at his own game. Liberals use snark to deflate the fearsomeness of evil, to inoculate, and to fight back. If you remember what the Red Scare of the 1950s was, and Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts were, one of the single retorts that broke McCarthy’s momentum — and broke his witch hunt — was during a televised Senate hearing in which McCarthy accused a clearly innocent person of being a secret Communist agent hiding inside the Army and the Army’s Chief Counsel Joseph Welch, out of exasperation, replied “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” And last week when Trump blurted out “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats,” Kamala laughed. And that’s snarking to change minds. That’s snarking to fight back against cruelty and meanness.

Which brings me back to Vance’s house in the DC area. First, some caveats:

• Members of the Legislative Branch who are wealthy (a few are but not nearly as many as you might think) buy houses in Washington, DC or in Northern Virginia or Maryland as second residences (rather than rent apartments) because they’re in the area to, you know, legislate so much of the calendar year. Merely having a second residence of some sort in the DC area is reasonable; it’s normal. It has to be done. It shouldn’t be judged. You’d do it, too.

• Locals in the DC area who happen to live nearby know where these houses are. It’s a fact of life in the DC area: you can’t throw a rock in any direction in the DC area without hitting the house of a famous person or government official. They usually don’t — not even the very famous — live very ostentatiously. We see them at the grocery store. Nobody bothers them. We just let them mow their lawn in peace. And even if you don’t like them, their kids are nice and their dogs want you to pet them on the sidewalk.

• But holy shit, DC locals don’t tolerate an abject asshole. Locals will make a political asshole’s own assholery known back unto them in no uncertain terms. If only because each local knows they are each acting as the point person for hundreds of thousands of other Americans who suffer from that asshole’s assholery but who ain’t local.

The United States Secret Service and local police have barricaded the entire block in front of Vance’s house and the pocket park that butts riiiiiight up against the side of his house. (This is standard Secret Service practice — nobody give them crap about it, please. And the agents on site are actually nice guys.) It’s a security necessity and the locals understand and respect that. The locals are still a bit peeved because they use that park a lot. That’s where the local dogs gossip: Did you hear that they’re eating dogs in Springfield? No, that’s not true…

So.

What did Vance’s neighbors do? Did they organize big ol’ protests with lots of protesters to stand outside the jersey wall barricade to protest their asses off and yell at the house? No. No, they did not.

Instead, they bought a metric ton of Harris-Walz campaign signs and gay pride flags and have put them in almost all of their yards. I haven’t seen that density of campaign signs inside a campaign sign store. Even his neighbors inside the barricade have them. Just outside his property line Vance’s house is surrounded by First Amendment exercise and no Second Amendment.

And right outside the jersey wall barricade someone simply left a big box of sidewalk chalk.

And apparently graffiti ensued. A lot of hilarious graffiti ensued.

Local liberals got their mass-snark on.

I didn’t see any of it (and I didn’t contribute). When I got there someone had painted over the entire barricade to cover up the graffiti. Very recently. At least once.

What did the Secret Service and local police do? I’m not sure they did anything. Locals armed with chalk and the First Amendment and dogs on leashes and kids in strollers do not pose a security threat.

Will more graffiti ensue over the new white paint? I don’t know. It’s possible that the locals may conclude they’ve made their point. Or it may be that they’ve simply gone to get more chalk and reload their snark.

But, because I am psychic, I suspect I know what the locals would say in case you’re of a mind to find Vance’s house and come here and represent your own democracy:

Baby, don’t you come here at all. You just turn your own car back home and you go vote your ass off when the time comes. That’s your biggest job. That’s what you gotta do.

This here? We got this, baby. This is our thing.

We got this.