Last Saturday at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Republican Vice-Presidential aspirant JD Vance called Kamala Harris a “card-carrying member of the San Francisco lunatic fringe.”
Vance’s ascription of card-carrying membership to the Democratic presidential candidate intrigued me. Were she and I members of the same organization? Did the “lunatic fringe” in San Francisco actually issue cards to its members?
I frantically looked through my card collection, piles of business cards for museums, restaurants, bookstores, actors, teachers, a card for the William Blake Gallery, one for Bolerium Books, one for Far West Fungus (the San Francisco Mushroom Store). Cards with links to activism and social justice: the American Civil Liberties Union, Bay Area Resistance, the Industrial Workers of the World, Get Out of Jail Free.
The card that came closest to fitting Vance’s genre was given to me by the late, wonderful actress and Pickle Family Circus clown Joan Mankin, also known in the circus ring as Queenie Moon. If you wanted lunacy with emphasis on the lunar aspects of the word, Queenie Moon was the go-to person. She once gave me a small, neatly printed square of cardboard that announces: “I am a card-carrying anarchist,” and includes a blank space for the holder’s signature. I never signed the card, however, I guess I’m too much of anarchist to label myself. I suspect Vice-President Harris never signed such a card either.
Every rally and march in our city is liable to include a few people with unusual views, fringe ideas; but I am wondering why Senator Vance chose to focus on San Francisco and associate its non-conformists with Vice-President Harris. It seems to me she’s firmly grounded in mainstream party politics, far from the lunar (or “radical” to use another favorite Republican insult) Left.
Moreover, Kamala Harris hasn’t lived in San Francisco or near it for many years. She was born in Oakland, educated at the University of California law school in San Francisco, and some years ago served as a San Francisco city attorney. But she’s hardly a city resident at present.
Perhaps on-site residency or San Francisco birth isn’t required of members admitted into Senator Vance’s organization. I’m calling the “San Francisco lunatic fringe” his organization because he seems to know who’s in it. For all I know he’s in charge of admission. He could be its founder, since he once lived in the San Francisco Bay area, where he befriended billionaire Peter Thiel, who gave $10 million to the Vance Senate campaign that got JD elected in Ohio. Since then, Vance has been associated with some extremists and conspiracy theorists himself.
Even though I’m not a card-carrying member of Vance’s group, I have to say that if it’s lunacy to preserve choice for women, speak out about climate catastrophe, reject Trump’s plan to deport ten million immigrants from America, and call for a ceasefire in Gaza, count me in.
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Then again, it is possible that when Vance founded “the San Francisco lunatic fringe,” when he dreamed up its existence and its hard-to-find membership cards, he projected his own fears about being associated with a lunatic fringe onto the Harris campaign. It may be inaccurate to say that the Trump – Vance campaign includes a lunatic fringe, its errant behavior is much larger than a fringe as it spreads lies, distortions and “alternative facts” across the country, with frequent inventions about a stolen national election and a felon who says he’s completely innocent and above the law.
Vance may not know San Francisco well; but he ought to know a lot about lunacy these days, as he spends so much time with Donald Trump.
Joel Schechter is the author of several books on satire.
