The New Yorker:

The memes, riffs, and fancams represent a vaguely hallucinatory near-consensus that the Vice-President’s time is now.

By Jessica Winter

Among the many videos of Kamala Harris that have recirculated heavily on social media in the past, momentous week, one has defined the conversation above the rest. In the clip, the Vice-President quotes her mother, the late cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan Harris. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Harris asks, surrendering to one of her famous belly laughs. (Harris’s laugh often intimates that something almost incapacitating in its delightfulness and absurdity has just occurred, and that she may or may not get around to explaining what it is.) Then Harris returns to her—and her mother’s—point: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” In other words, your substance is dependent on your surroundings and on your place in a time line, and is therefore mutable. Your meaning, to yourself and others, is never fixed, always contingent.

“Coconut tree” is perhaps the best-known entry in the Kamala Harris meme treasury not least because the phrase is inveterately funny—it’s Harry Nilsson doing goofy voices after too much rum and a bonk on the head. Elsewhere in the trove, you can find Harris gushing about her love of Venn diagrams or pantomiming how to season a Thanksgiving turkey or even doing a goofy voice of her own. At times, the Vice-President’s orations hover between mantra and filibuster: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.” At other junctures, she attains an Oprah-fied astral plane of abstract inspiration: “We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible actually happen.” This last maxim has proved to be a remarkably flexible rhetorical flourish, popping up in Harris’s prepared remarks, with only mild variations, at events that have included a forum on clean transit, a roundtable on semiconductors, and celebrations of National Hispanic Heritage Month and Women’s History Month; she most recently dropped it about a week ago, at a campaign fund-raiser at Rob Reiner’s house. The Republican National Committee put together a four-minute supercut of Harris repeating the line, which, over time, begins to take on an incantatory quality.

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