shlby

thunder-spiral

Oil on canvas.

debra wilson, 2001.

@shiba0607

Tatler Russia July 2020. Makeup By Kate Mur.

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams

brayden valerie

Again, to really get this you have to put yourself in a pre-Obama administration frame of reference, which is hard enough for those of us who were politically involved during the first decade of this century much less for people who’s entire political memory begins in a world where we always already had a black president and Joe Biden was his VP. If you can make that leap backwards, you’ll reach a place where Joe Biden was the goofball who’s 1988 presidential campaign crashed and burned because he couldn’t stop plagiarizing speeches. His second run, in 2008, didn’t go much better. It was widely seen as a joke, especially given his role in the Iraq War which had reached radioactive levels of unpopularity by the start of the 2008 election cycle (the fact Obama was elected president in 2008 was in no small part due to his consistent opposition to the war compared to his chief rivals in the primary and general). There’s an old joke that every Senator looks in the mirror and sees a president-in-waiting, and Joe Biden was the platonic ideal of that idea; a drip who looked like someone had ordered a day player out of central casting for a bit role as a senator with no more than five lines. He represented a state in the senate that barely had more residents than the average congressional district, and in which getting elected to state wide office depended on cozying up to Delware’s real electorate: the financial services industry. Biden’s close ties to banks and credit card companies were so infamous and so odious that progressive website Daily Kos used to taunt him by putting “D-Mastercard” in parentheses after his name. The idea of Biden, before becoming Obama’s running mate, ever getting “President-Elect” in front of his name was the punchline to an SNL sketch. If you told someone in 2007 that you’re from November 2020 and Joe Biden was just elected president, their response might well be “Oh yeah? And who was president before that? Donald Trump?” That’s how fucking outlandish the idea of Joe Biden ever getting elected president would have been. It really is hard to remember a time when politics was somewhat normal and plagiary constituted a campaign scuttling scandal after four brain melting years of Trump (not to mention 8 years of Obama which is when the political class really figured out they can do whatever without consequences), but once you remember all that, the fact Joe Biden is going to be sworn in as the 46th president of the united states is extremely fucking weird.

Halle Berry by Gilles Bensimon for Elle Magazine January Issue (1999)