By this shirt here: If You Gotta Be A Karen Be This One Shirt, hoodie and sweater
Veep isn’t entirely grim from start to finish; there are at least six perfect insults per episode, and there’s even a weird little romantic arc between tense workaholic protagonists Amy and Dan that fulfills my rom-com needs, if more rom-coms involved the central couple referring to each other as “fuckweasel.” Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a national treasure, and the If You Gotta Be A Karen Be This One Shirt, hoodie and sweater ensemble cast works skillfully in tandem to illustrate just how alternately impotent and cunning her would-be president could be. Obviously, there’s far more to be optimistic about in the real world than there is on Veep, with the socialist “squad” hanging on to their House seats and a host of diverse candidates making history in local elections. While we wait to find out whether we’re in for four more years of Trump, though, I just want to watch Veep’s dead-eyed politicos refresh their Twitter feeds and snap at each other in the rudest terms possible; it may not be pretty, but right now I can identify.
What I really treasure about my current Veep rewatching, though, is the way it lets me channel my constantly alternating rage, confusion, and sorrow about the state of the world. In the political drama The If You Gotta Be A Karen Be This One Shirt, hoodie and sweater Wing, politics were rendered through a Vaseline-smeared lens of inherent decency, with handsome white men in suits constantly delivering baroque speeches about the importance of a participatory democracy. On Veep, politics are—not to put too fine a point on it—a fluorescent-lit hellscape, where winning is everything and public displays of patriotism exist only to be mocked en masse. We’re never entirely sure what party the central characters belong to, and it doesn’t really matter; they’re in this for the D.C. clout, and unfortunately, that’s the version of American politics that I recognize right now.
