Goin' Coconuts
A few words about Kamala
Last night, spurred by Joe Biden’s announcement that he would be dropping out of the 2024 U.S. presidential race and the subsequent flood of endorsements for Kamala Harris as the new Democratic Party nominee, I decided to watch a movie starring Donny and Marie Osmond.
People who aren’t as addicted to social media might be unaware of the coconut memes that have been flying around for a few weeks now, since Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump. It all originated in a clip from a speech Harris had given in May of last year.
“Everything is in context. My mother would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?!’” she said, laughing deliriously at her mother’s wise words.
”You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
The clip had originally been shared by Republicans trying to make Harris—and the Biden administration more broadly—look bad, or at least silly. Some on the left who oppose Harris’s politics had also shared it for similar reasons. Suddenly, though, with the real possibility of Biden dropping out beginning to emerge, and Harris’s potential candidacy becoming a big point of conversation, the clip once again started circulating, but now with people admiring its combination of goofiness and wisdom. Soon you started seeing diehard online Marxists referring to themselves as “coconut-pilled,” coconut emojis began to proliferate and the memes flew fast.
So, of course, being the idiot that I am, on Sunday evening with all the mishigas of contemporary American politics reaching fever pitch, I did the only logical thing: I googled “movies about coconuts” and discovered Goin’ Coconuts, the 1978 film starring Donny and Marie.
I found a VHS rip on YouTube and started watching. I made it about 30 minutes in before deciding I’d gotten the idea. There’s really nothing to the movie. In the vein of other pop star movies, from Hard Day’s Night to Spice World, it’s mostly an excuse to put its musical acts on-screen, with a “plot” to surround the endeavour. In this case, Donny and Marie Osmond are in Hawai’i to perform and manage to get themselves caught in the middle of a tiff between rival gangs trying to steal a necklace. Truly there is nothing more to it than that. It’s about as 1978 as a film can get, in that it feels like television. It’s even directed by TV actor and director Howard Morris, and its most recognizable non-Osmond stars are TV actors Herb Edelman and Ted Cassidy. It does also feature Kenneth Mars, most famous for playing the Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind in The Producers. You do not need to watch this movie.
I can’t really say I gained any insight from the 30 minutes I watched, beyond a) taking a joke too far really does have its limits, especially when it’s a joke for nobody but yourself, and b) YouTube is an under appreciated venue for film preservation and distribution. None of this told me anything about Kamala Harris.
There’s likely a lot to be said about Harris’s specific politics—her history as a relatively tough-on-crime prosecutor, her often haphazard ideological malleability in seeking Democratic Party stature, her generationally-informed centrism, real questions about Israel policy positions, etc.—but nobody needs a Canadian living in Toronto weighing in on that with any kind of authority. It’s bad enough that I do it on Twitter. But there is something happening here that I think is instructive beyond the scope of American politics, and speaks to a path centre-left politics has rarely taken in the decades I’ve been alive.
Why did I watch even a little bit of Goin’ Coconuts? The memes, sure, but in truth it was the excitement (channelled in a strange direction). In the hours after Biden stepped aside, Democratic leaders and representatives began falling over each other to endorse Harris. On social media, people were in full celebration mode. Reports started pouring in about potentially record-breaking donations. That is excitement. And part of it had to do with Harris herself. Something about her affability and her relative youth (a Gen X president, finally!), plus the knowledge of her time as a prosecutor and her ability to use those skills to target Trump and unsettle his whole campaign. Yeah, Harris really is a strong pick under the current circumstances, and there’s a good shot she’d be a good president (to the degree any president can be “good”). To my eye, though, that wasn’t the true source of excitement. Rather, it was the fact that Biden dropped out at all.
For so many decades now, the electorate broadly, and people who find themselves somewhere on the liberal/left side of the spectrum, have been trained out of the belief that their voices actually matter. This has been true in Canada, where successive Liberal governments, particularly these years under Justin Trudeau, have felt feckless and do-nothing, even as they haven’t necessarily been outright terrible on pure policy terms. Not great by any stretch, but sowing the seeds of political resentment through inaction. In an ever changing world, inaction is death. It creates both perceived and actual decline, and it would not be unreasonable to look at Canada under Trudeau and see a nation in decline, a sad product of political neglect. And worse still is the fact that he rode in on a big wave of so-called change after the Harper years. By my reckoning, the only thing that truly changed for the “better” is every other corner’s got a weed shop now. What that represents is a betrayal of a public that voted, using its political voice to demand something new, only to discover that voice would, as ever, be ignored by those in power.
The same has been true in American politics, especially in the Democratic Party. Barack Obama, the great hope, was elected to great elation. Euphoria, even. The hopes were dashed quickly and over time, as he and his party systematically dismantled its grassroots organizing capacity, centralizing authority within an executive and set of key elites, most of whom were old then and have only gotten older since as they’ve held onto power. Any excitement Democrats could muster, whether it was for Hillary Clinton, baggage and all, as the possible First Woman President, or surprising mid-term landslides in the wake of Roe being overturned, had a tenor of resignation. This was, as everyone had come to understand, the best anyone could expect. More of the same, in a theoretically more positive direction than the fascistic trends of the Republican Party, but also a capitulation to those very same trends. More than that was the sense that despite lengthy primaries, and some electoral victories, the people themselves were still not being listened to, not being respected.
On Sunday, though, for the first time in a long time, those voices were heard. There are those (particularly on the left, but also on the right), who will make the claim that Biden stepping aside and nominating Harris was nothing more than the result of donors and party elites exerting their power, that the public had nothing to do with it. This is silly and wrong. Poll after poll, for several years now, have shown that Democratic voters were, charitably speaking, not exactly thrilled with the idea of Biden running for a second term of office, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which his apparent age-related decline. If anything, it was the elites and donors who stood against the will of the people on this issue for far longer than they should have. But on Sunday, after everyone had witnessed pure proof during that debate of Biden’s inability to campaign effectively against Trump, the tide began to turn. Those party bigwigs and moneymen themselves had their views changed, finally brought in line with what almost everyone else had been telling them. And yes, they made the behind-the-scenes move to actually push Biden out the door, but unfortunately that’s what politics often requires in our imperfect systems of power. The important thing, though, is that for once, despite not having the actual mechanisms of an election process to turn their voices into direct action, the voters were listened to. The people were taken seriously, and their will became reality.
The energy that will be unleashed by that fact should not be underestimated. Harris as the standard-bearer is a lucky stroke in many ways, but it could well have happened with any reasonable Democrat. What’s happening now—all the excitement, all the people coming out in droves to volunteer for the campaign, all the visions of a possible Harris presidency, all the memes—is the product of a politics that is actually responsive to the people. It’s what politics in a democracy should aspire to, and it’s not surprising then that everyone is goin’ coconuts over it. How could you not?